At the center of every territory is another border; at the heart of every identity is an assemblage of other identities. —Alan Gilbert
Over the course of working with Gerald McMaster to develop Remix: New Modernities in a Post Indian World, my interpretation of the goals in presenting this group of artists and their art has expanded and coalesced into irregular shapes, personal moments of recognition, fear, elation, frustration, or joy. Given my artist’s background, my understanding of the role of a curator may be somewhat different than my contemporaries’. A curator is asked to build bridges between artists and institutions, between art and its audience. A curator is someone who brings representations together, knowing that there may well be conflicts among them. No bridge stands without tension. That said, I do not try to position myself in front of the artists’ work, but to stand to the side, as a facilitator alert to the artists’ voices and to their complex engagements with their imagination and the world. I would never presume to use an artist’s work to illustrate a concept or idea. I’m interested instead in constructing a new platform for indigenous artists—a resistance model for how their art is presented, discussed, and contextualized. With Remix, as I’ve listened and observed, seeking to feel the mood or temperature of this artists’ collective, old stories have emerged, re-invented themselves, and become relevant once again.
The year is 1957, the place a small town named Dewey in the state of Oklahoma. I am 11 years old. Excavation has begun on North Creek Street, a block from my childhood home. That 1907 bungalow, a white clapboard structure with a sagging front porch and creaky pinewood floors, appears heavy on the landscape, weighed down by family secrets, whispered stories shared around Saturday-night pitch games with relatives, gatherings lasting sometimes until first light.
Perhaps the events unfolding then were some kind of rite of passage, an inevitable coming of age played out during the cold war period following World War II. Or perhaps creativity was being unlocked in me, propelling me toward an attraction for the original that still moves me today. Whatever the case, mediocrity no longer held my attention. During the months ahead, my interest would be focused on North Creek Street, as cranes set into place massive beams defining the pitched triangular roof of the C. A. Comer residence, designed by the architect Bruce Goff. Tethered to ground by cables, the structure hovered over the lawn like a space ship. Diagonal slices of glass cut through the brick exterior creating transparent portals to interior spaces. The roof floated above the exterior walls like a low-hovering cloud. I was transfixed.
I was not the only one who noticed the strange new house on Creek Street. Cars lined up on Sunday afternoons, slowly cruising the construction site. There were incidents of vandalism, and letters to the editor of the local newspaper referring to the residence as a monstrosity, an eyesore. The Comers themselves were rumored to be Communists, Progressives, individuals to watch out for.
How could something so original, fresh, forward-looking, exciting be so maligned? How could contemporary architecture illicit such angry responses of disgust, outrage, suspicion?
Fast forward to 2006 and the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, where Artspeak, a series of solo and group exhibitions by indigenous artists, was then in its third season. The range of work included video, new media, and installation art, as well as the more familiar forms of sculpture, painting and drawing, and photography. Artspeak exhibitions were noticed by the larger arts community, with reviews appearing in Art in America, Art Papers, and other journals, and art museums from New York to Paris expressing interest in the series. A home run! But wait: Letters to the museum director employed declarative language to say, “Shame on the Heard!” Rumors questioned the authenticity of the artists and the squandering of valuable museum resources on “claptrap.” Accusations that the curators supported political propaganda were common. I took to wondering whether I might be accused of espionage.
As I thought about the larger issue behind such mean-spirited words, the reactions to Artspeak felt strangely familiar—like 1957. Why are indigenous artists not allowed to celebrate the present as other artists do? Why do we require of Native artists a myth or fantasy, an iconography? What became of the celebrated ideal of multiculturalism, a world composed of ever-changing blends and mixtures?
In fact, as society has moved from the industrial age to the new global economy, the desire to define the “exotic” the “other” has intensified. In The Culture Game, the Nigerian-born, London-educated art historian Olu Oguibe states: “For those who come to it from backgrounds outside Europe (the ‘ethnics,’ ‘postcolonials,’ ‘minorities,’ all those who have ancestry, connections, or affiliations ‘elsewhere’), the arena of mainstream cultural practice in the West, at least in the visual arts, is a doubly predictable space— first, because it is a game space and you have to know the rules of the game, and second, because [as in] any other game, such aspirants have a little chance of success because it is predetermined they should fail. Though they may know the rules—and most who have the patience to understudy it do, bitterly so—the game is nevertheless inherently stacked against them because their presence, and worse still their success, causes a fault through an outwardly solid wall of history that ought to bar them as serious contenders. Of course, the understanding is that they belong in a different space, should create work of a particular flavor, deal with a certain set of themes, exhibit in particular avenues in particular locations outside the mainstream, or be prepared to offer work of a particular nature to earn momentary mainstream acknowledgment, after which they are quietly returned to obscurity.”
Most indigenous artists understand this treacherous reality: The presentation of contemporary non-European art cannot be separated from historical convention, from the “genuinely European tradition of the ‘collecting of cultures’ that involves scientific, artistic and institutional practices. Examples include: curiosity cabinets, museums, universities, world’s fairs, encyclopedias, orientalism, exoticism, travel writing, cartography, adventure novels, ethnography and documentary films.” This 500-year legacy of theory and custom still informs museum work. What is “open storage,” much favored today as a mechanism for making permanent collections accessible to viewers, but the refashioning of curiosity cabinets? Or “first-person voice,” highly touted in museums of culture and art, other than another lens of interpretation carefully chosen by an organizing institution? Art books and exhibitions featuring the first person-voice are as likely as any other sort to be composed of vast arrays of disparate objects detached from their social and community histories, brought together to be gazed upon and perhaps admired by the dominant culture; just as likely to be highly controlled presentations focusing on religious practice, ritual, trade and exchange, social and domestic interaction, and a mythical timelessness reinforcing the primal and natural, clichéd and thoroughly scripted. This colonial yoke of cultural interpretation forces artists into the position of “cultural representatives.” This, as described by Oguibe, is the current “call for identity.”
This legacy is particularly burdensome for contemporary indigenous artists who seek to explore, through their artistic skill and intellectual courage, a rich and diverse reservoir of past and present inspirations. Can the artist truly be free to pursue the dictates of his or her own desires and resist “the exoticist demands of the West?” Remix seeks to examine current ideas surrounding this question. In their work, fifteen artists from across the Western Hemisphere explore the very edges of our human experience. Collectively, these artists probe the global movement of ideas, search for a new language of artistic practice, and push the boundaries of the expected. Heirs to rich traditions, they define their moment by dismantling and rebuilding, like DJs borrowing and building new sounds, beats, actions, engagements. Many of the artists whose works are represented here examine the terrain of their worlds while paying careful attention to how their lives play out in the broader American experience. Perhaps they relate to Fab Five Freddy’s fabulous summation of postmodernism and the hip-hop aesthetic: to “take a bit from here and a bit from there and bring them all together . . . yet not forgetting history.”
Bernard Williams’s Charting America provides a clear and direct example. Art historian and critic Kathryn Kramer observes, “These cultural charts evoke a nonlinear historical consciousness at odds with the notion of a progressive evolution from past through present to future that marks the historical consciousness of Western nations.” Black cutouts resembling silhouettes—art for the common people in colonial New England—arranged in horizontal bands against a white background provide cultural clues to Western expansion and the societies that have inhabited North America. The cutouts move across the visual field like streaming text messages in Times Square, creating a new language of postcolonial cultural mixtures. Williams has researched the myth of the American west, combing archives, museums, and historical societies throughout the United States. His studio, on Chicago’s Westside, is itself a vast archive of references, books, and publications. Charting America, embedded with narrative symbols of a collision of American Indians, Hispanics, Africans, and Europeans rewrites American history. The viewer is reminded of a story unfolding, with all the tropes of colonial exclusivity giving way to a more complex tale of past and present.
Enter, center stage, Sylvia Gallagher, during one of those white-hot moments of transition as I struggle to re-invent my art, myself, after the Vietnam War. She at fifty has abandoned Francis I sterling and ormolu candelabras for meditation, The Joy of Sex, jade, and vodka; blue work shirts, the ceramic art of Karen Karns, M. C. Richards, Paul Soldner, and Paulus Berensohn, and “dancing” clay bowls she fires in a backyard kiln. Sylvia introduces me to balsamic vinaigrette and simple green salads—instructing me how to properly prepare and slice green onions on the diagonal. To crayfish and boiled shrimp, chicory-flavored coffee, and scotch before noon. To the Louisiana custom of lagniappe, the little extra thing a storekeeper adds to a customer’s purchase—the unexpected gift, which made its way to Creole, via Spanish, from the Quechua word yapay, “to give more.”
Sylvia rescued me from a tree one day when I drunkenly admitted that I no longer knew who I was, and drove me in a Datsun station wagon on a highway south, gathering red wildflowers along the way. At Caddo Lake she stopped, inquiring after a man named Lomax at shadowy fish shacks along the sloughs of dark red waters. In good time she passed me on to Lomax and his canoe, with the promise to return at eight that night . Lomax hoisted onboard a cooler of Miller Lite, a guitar, a bag of sandwiches, and said, “Get in.” Low to the water, we silently moved in a yellowish light among narrow passages of giant cypress. “You can call me Dave”, he finally spoke. “What name do you go by?”
“I used to sell insurance in Dallas, but came back here to the lake where I grew up. I know these waters inside and out, I can take you into places you’ll never find on a map. . . . Wanna beer?”“I met my first wife when I was stationed in San Diego in the Navy, that didn’t last long, she went out with her girlfriends one night and never came back.” “Are you married?” “I’ve been work’n on a new song, how about if I sing it for you?” “Are you an artist?” “I’ve gotta take a piss.” The canoe rocking side to side he let go a yellow arc into the lake. “I’ve always said, you shake it more than twice you’re playing with it.”
Lomax never stopped talking once he started. Blue heron watched, and the lotus fields opened up yielding to the canoe while I occupied myself with thoughts about the Caddo people. The canoe slid up and onto the soft mud bank just ahead of 8 p.m. There above the rise I could see Sylvia’s headlights waiting. “You take care of yourself, let me know when you get back down this way again.” “You tell ’em back home that Lomax took you to places nobody’s ever seen.” Sylvia and I drove on the back roads toward Shreveport as I continued to think about the Caddo people in Anadarko, all they once had, all that was lost.
Nadia Myre’s Portrait in Motion presents the artist in a sculpture—a canoe— constructed one half of birch bark, the other half, aluminum. In this four-minute video, the artist is paddling toward the viewer. Bird sounds and breaking water can be heard. The viewer is forced to make certain decisions regarding the work’s interpretation. Some audiences might find a perverse fulfillment in watching the Native seemingly at one with the natural environment. Critic James Martin understands the artist’s actions as “subtly riffing on the well-worn film image of ‘spotting an Indian amidst the beauty of the wilderness.’” First Nations artist Robert Houle suggests that the video “celebrates Myre’s original culture and provides a vehicle for addressing a repressed history and culture that lurks beneath the tourism industry’s representations of the Canadian wilderness as uninhabited. . . . It serves notice that the social and economic development of our nation state began with the adoption of the birchbark canoe by fur traders, coureurs de bois, voyageurs, and white settlers. Constructing a life-sized canoe of two distinct halves (birch bark and aluminum) makes us beautifully visible. Her object becomes more than cottage country, recreational equipment; it becomes something representing our contribution to society.”
Playing on the voyeuristic tendency of how Native people are perceived by the art establishment, Kent Monkman’s installation Shooting Geronimo doesn’t hold back. The painted tipi, perhaps a stand-in for an adult video booth, features sexually charged cowboys and Indians acting out in a highly eroticized scene, complete with a Monument Valley backdrop. The cast, including Thosh Collins, Quetzal Guerrero, and Alex Meraz, masterfully fulfills the dominant culture’s every fleshly desire of the exotic “other.” Caramel to cinnamon and buff, they subvert and dislodge society’s appetite for the sensationalized Native. By repositioning video in a three-dimensional space, Monkman has freed the medium from the conventional screen, or monitor, claiming a place on the gallery floor. According to Liz Kotz, such actions “offer rich possibilities for rethinking and restructuring these core relationships—between viewing subject, moving or still image, architectural space, and time— that are so fundamental to modern visual culture.” We expect nothing less from Monkman. His earlier series of paintings, The Moral Landscape—appropriations of the romantic landscapes by 19th-century American painters Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Cole, George Catlin, and Paul Kane—have challenged Christian ideologies and the notion of Manifest Destiny. According to Monkman, the paintings “investigate the relationship of sexuality to conquest, xenophobia and imperialism. In my versions, the familiar players in North American history (Indians, explorers, and cowboys) are reconfigured in provocative and humorous sexual vignettes set against sublime landscapes. Emulating the context of the original paintings as ethnological documentation, or pictures from a travelogue, my paintings play with power dynamics within sexuality to challenge historical assumptions of sovereignty, art, commerce, and colonialism.”
It is Ash Wednesday, and seeing the marks on practicing Catholics has placed me on the edge of some childhood memory, a memory that doesn’t present itself until near dusk. Late that day, I call Maxine, my 89-year-old cousin. “Do you remember anything about ash marks on the face from back home?”
“Yes”, she replied in that slow and deliberate way when you know the memory is there if you give it time. “Betty and I when we were kids would go and stay with Grandmother Katie Whiteturkey, northwest of Bartlesville. If we were to go out at night —like a Stomp Dance or something—she’d take a little ash and mark our faces. Your mother probably did the same for you. That’s to protect you from a manitu, the blood spirits. Or, if we were playing out back near the woods toward evening, Katie would always call us in. When I’d ask her why we couldn’t stay out and play, she’d tell us about the ‘rolling black ball’ [blood spirits] that come out at night and roll through the woods. If you’re out there it could strike you at the knees and you’d go lame, or it might take you to a place and you’d be disorientated and couldn’t find your way home. That’s what you’re remembering, the blood spirits, from back home.”
Photography has a problematic history for indigenous people. In the hands of ethnographers, photography has often been used to make voyeuristic incursions into traditional rituals and practices. The travel and tourism industry, too, has placed at our disposal likenesses of powwows, hoop contests, ever-colorful parades of “dancing Indians” in resplendent attire. As both journalistic or ethnographic instrument, the camera has helped perpetuate certain stereotypes of culture.
Occasionally, however—more and more often, recently—indigenous artists have claimed ownership of photography as an artistic medium of engagement. In a photographic series chronicling the events along an empty road in New Hampshire in the fall of 2001, Brian Miller tells a haunting tale entitled Black North. Far from being symbols or icons of the “other,” Miller’s exquisite black-and-white windows to stories may well have more in common with Hank Williams’s Lost Highway, or AC/DC’s Highway to Hell. According to Miller, “Looking over the negatives and some proofs I saw a record of a trip, a descent into a psychologically dark place. The experience made me into something else. Certain images began to remind me of Dante’s Inferno, his own descent into hell. I began to see the old dirt roads and abandoned places of New Hampshire as a modern analogue for hell. My old Ford pickup and Sarah Ophelia were my guides.”
Anna Tsouhlarakis’s video Let’s Dance was created during a residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, where, over the course of thirty days, she danced thirty dances with people from diverse cultures. The multiplicity of traditional dances, including the hora, Indian two-step, Harlem shake, and Irish jig, allows the artist entry into “other” space, while placing the “other” into the artist’s space. Through this out-of-joint participation, Tsouhlarakis constructs a kind of pictorial grammar, creating a certain time-out from cultural identity. She creates a radically neutral time.
Two Chevrolet Bel Airs are parked two spaces apart on Main Street. My mother’s two sisters are distanced by a forty-year silence taken since to death. As different as alike, they hold tight some long-ago family secret.
Aunt Pearl had certain “Methodist ways.” She wore only brown and married but one time, her hair pulled back in a tightly held bun. She was forever shading her eyes with her hand. She was polite, but cool. Her white husband was a veteran of World War II and worked the lease on her allotment lands; together they had one son. They lived in a small unpainted lease house on the eastern edge of the allotment. Her lands wrapped around Mother’s to the north and west. Her wells were pumping; ours were not. One late afternoon we drove out to the land, something Mother liked to do. It was tornado season.
Soon, a greenish-yellow cloud fell over us as the winds kicked up the trees along the river. Mother looked to the east and said, “Get into the car, now!” My sister and I clamored into the back seat, watching the sky through the back windshield as the car lurched and churned through earthen ruts toward the gravel section line. No words were spoken as Mother gripped the steering wheel and turned the car into the driveway at Pearl’s place, under the tall locust trees. My sister and I saw the cellar doors just north of the garage. “Wait here,” Mother directed as she got out of the car and moved purposefully toward the back door. Pearl stepped into the yard, shielding her eyes with her hand, looking toward the car and up at the sky. Suddenly, Mother turned and bolted toward the car. In one quick motion we were in reverse heading fast toward town. The dust behind shielding the sky. No words spoken.
Aunt Betty wore only color, had one son, and married five times. She wore Chanel perfume and couture fashions purchased in Kansas City. Her beauty was unchallenged, seductive, and misleading. She fought furiously for love, stabbing those who deceived her with the broken ends of beer bottles. Her white husband was a veteran of World War II and worked at various jobs. Her allotment lands were gone. She never spoke of Pearl.
We walk on Main Street, our silence shaped by unspoken actions long ago. Refugees of U.S. policy, the Allotment Act, pious Christian thought, greed. Our lives are lived always spaces apart, in worlds split by silence. We walk.
Paulo Herkenhoff, in his essay "Brazil: The Paradoxes of an Alternative Baroque," speaks to the “historical forging of bodies during the making of the Americas—by violence, by sexual encounters, by gender politics, by the anatomy lessons of science, by religion, and by art.” Franco Mondini Ruiz brings this reference to mind. Born in San Antonio, Texas, for an Italian father to a Mexican mother, Mondini Ruiz’s life and art play out as an endless range of marvelous choices. Abandoning a career in law to commit his energies to full-time art-making, Mondini Ruiz is an example of a passionate artist pushing both buttons and boundaries, mixing tastes and cultures in a contemporary moment of performance. He pushes the envelope of art as commodity, combining a quixotic idealism—making art accessible to all people—with a keen business acumen, the modernist legacy of Donald Judd with the over-the-top visual excess of borderlands lingua franca.
I first met Mondini Ruiz in the summer of 2006 at the Liberty Bar, a crooked structure put up in 1890 as the Liberty Schooner Saloon, on the corner of Josephine and Avenue A, near downtown San Antonio. Notorious for its bitter greens and diverse clientele, the Liberty served as the starting gate for a whirlwind encounter with Mondini Ruiz’s “social sculpture.” Just returned from a six-year living experience in Manhattan, he was rediscovering his hometown. We visited artists’ studios, mainstream museums and galleries, the last tiny section of the San Antonio River in its natural state before being diverted to underground concrete channels, and his grandmother’s house on the Westside, now converted into his studio and living space. Would his coming home to San Antonio signal a return to the Infinito Botanica—a process work from the 1990s, the work that launched his career? As Elizabeth Armstrong and Victor Zamudio-Taylor explain,
"In the mid-1990s Mondini Ruiz purchased a botanica on South Flores, in an old Mexican-American barrio . . . that catered to adherents of folk-healing practices such as curanderismo and santeria. Renaming the storefront ‘Infinito Botanica and Gift Shop,’ he continued to offer objects and advice that blend different spiritual trends with Catholic religiosity. At the same time he transformed the space into a boutique, art gallery, and salon. Alongside an array of products used for spiritual cleansing and folk medicine— incense, talismans, special soaps and waters, images of santos and virgenes, herbs, oils, devotional candles, milagros, and fetishes—he offered a cornucopia of objects for sale, ranging from folk and hobo art, to readymades and art from Texan and Mexican artists."
Phoenix artist Hector Ruiz grew up in border towns in Texas, crossing to the Mexican town of Piedras Negras to visit family. Ruiz brings an intense activism to the woodcarvings and linoprints he creates, using hecho a mano—the handmade—to expose the “blind materialism, overconsumption, and self-interest of the American way.” Shunning mechanization to create his provocative wood sculptures, the artist carves away the façade of rhetoric and language and cuts to the core of inequity and divisiveness in the human race. Revealing hidden histories in which racist acts today are linked to those of the past, Ruiz underscores the reality of racial oppression as a clash between Western thought (power/superiority) and indigenous culture. For Ruiz, identity is symbolically played out on the streets, in the museums and cultural institutions, and in the bedrooms of Phoenix every day. Art critic Lara Taubman notes, “Ruiz’s work encompasses the broad, complex, and often painful world particular to the Arizona and neighboring Mexican landscape. United States and Mexican border issues, immigration, conflicts of gender and sexuality, and urban development oblivious to the needs of the individual and the landscape create a combinative world that is seen through Ruiz’s own emotionally critical lens instead of through a universal one.”
Fausto Fernandez’s collaged and painted surfaces seem to turn inward into a self-reflective space, exploring the complexities of intimate relationships. Like blueprints, sewing patterns, maps, his works appear as guides to complex journeys or skills. One begins to understand that, for this artist, life is a board game. What is not clearly stated here is that the rules of the game are set, and not always fair.
For Luis Gutierrez, art is a companion, a fact he realized while studying at Richmond University in London, when he began to miss brown-skinned people, Chicano culture, the familiar. Later in life, when Gutierrez was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, art became for him a language to process issues around health and well-being. Loaded with references to popular culture, his imagery details a very personal and highly charged reality, the urban Chicano experience close to home and cut down to the bone.
The loud song of the locust drones in the mid-afternoon heat. A pickup pulls alongside the curb out front, my uncle shouting, “Come on, take a ride with me out to the lease. I’ll have you back here before your mother gets off work.” Happy for any diversion, I climb into the seat of the truck. It smells of sweat, oil, and cigarettes; a crumpled pack of Viceroys rolls back and forth along the floorboard.
“Your dad gone again?” My uncle knew our life well. Another binge that would probably last for several days, then a few days of quiet before the loud arguments would start in the kitchen and play out throughout the house, sometimes spilling into the night as Mother frantically loaded us into the car and we drove to my aunt’s house.
Climbing out of the truck at the familiar pump house, a mile north and west of Dewey, my uncle turned and said, “This won’t take but a minute, then we’ll head on up to the river on the four mile road.” I knew exactly our destination. The fork of the Little Caney is the site of the first camps after we were moved from the Kansas Reserve one hundred years before. The Delaware cemetery is near. I felt strange about going there. I waited as he checked gauges, fixing his attention on the whirling machinery. Dust particles floating trancelike in the heat inside the cab of the truck occupied my interest.
“All done,” as he climbed into the truck setting a course toward the river. Turning onto a narrow dirt road winding closer to the trees along the river, I could smell the damp sweet breath of the slow-moving green water. Giant cottonwoods clattered above. “Come on, we’re going for a swim,” my uncle reaching behind the seat of the truck for a towel. I froze at that moment knowing I could not swim, knowing also I couldn’t turn back. I watched him disappear into an opening of trees. Anxious, I followed the shady path to the river’s bank. Dark shadows cut across the slow-moving water, as my Uncle’s naked body dove into the river, making a loud plop of a sound. He disappeared, surfaced, floating easily.
The psychology of a river cannot be confined to its banks. I learned to be vulnerable, naked, fearful with the knowledge I could get through to the other side. I
learned to trust an adult male to keep me afloat, something my father could not do.
However, I did not learn to swim.
Two artists, Steven Yazzie and Kade Twist, are partners in an American Indian artist collective named Postcommodity. This multidisciplinary, intertribal collective probes the conceptual space of global societies and has realized projects as far afield as Prague. With all the tropes of the contemporary art industry, the collective is pushing hard into the mainstream with an ambitious agenda. It’s stretching the reach of a contemporary aesthetic in much the same way as the postcolonial exhibition Magiciens de la terre in Paris in 1989. But the real experiment is whether the collective will subsume individual expression. Both artists exhibit distinct works in this exhibition.
The Way the Sun Rises over Rivers Is No Different than the Way the Sun Sets over Oceans, a new media installation by Twist, is an exploration through video, sound, and text of the Cherokee diaspora and urban Indian experience. Critiquing himself, Twist has written, “Poetry and noise address urban Indian experiences of isolation, familial and clan displacement, economic and political disenfranchisement, substance abuse, and the pervasive hope of returning ‘home.’ [my work] embeds American Indian geopolitical narratives within a contemporary landscape of American popular culture and consumerism.”
In 2006, prompted by a residency at Skowhegan, Steven Yazzie walked out on figurative painting temporarily and began a personal exploration of installation and new-media work. Sleeping with Jefferson takes place in present-day Phoenix. The Phoenix metro area is dominated by cars and asphalt and concrete roadways that slice up the landscape. Alongside these “asphalt veins” are ethnic population clusters, “empty lots, mismanaged urban development, and a broken social fabric.” The shimmering chrome surface of Yazzie’s installation, alive with projected light, masks the impact of homelessness, displacement, and loss of a collective sense of place.
The airplane banks to the left, shivers a moment in hesitation, drops toward the ascending winter-grey earth of the Oklahoma landscape. Southwest flight 3659 on its final approach to the Tulsa International airport. I think of the wool topcoat I could not find at home in Phoenix. The airplane seems suddenly colder. I think of the long-ago distant past of a life lived in Oklahoma. I move closer into myself, thinking of the morning light and the highway that will carry me north to home. Trying to come home—it’s not an easy thing.
A grey landscape swirled around me. The rental car moved roughly over the broken concrete of Choctaw Avenue and the parking lot of Forest Manor Nursing Home. I looked down at the fragile roses, white with a faint pinkish rim. They seemed cold in the winter landscape. I wanted color. Goddamn small town. There is nothing here except everything that we were. Everything we could remember. I took a deep breath of fresh air and punched in the security code that would open the exterior doors. Disinfectant smells rushed outward in the morning air. Low cries of aged souls moved upward into the trees. I kept my eyes level and moved quickly down the hallways toward her room.
She lay in her bed looking down into herself, suspended in some timeless space, waiting for her own journey home. “Aunt Betty, it’s Joe Baker.” Stirred by a voice, her eyes lifted upward into mine. “Why Joe, why didn’t you send me a Christmas card? I’ve been so worried about you. I didn’t know what might have happened.” I saw my Aunt as I have always known her, animated. I apologized, thinking myself a selfish shit to have been too absorbed in my own life to send a card.
“Why have you come home, Joe?” I didn’t want to tell her of the interview with the Philbrook. I dodged, making some lame excuse about just wanting to be home. “Joe, that’s not why you are here.” Her eyes narrowed with interest as I told her of the upcoming interview. Her hand reached out for mine, “Oh Joe, I sure hope this works out, but don’t be too disappointed if it doesn’t. Just remember, you’re not one of them.”
Marsha stood in the doorway of her office. My eyes slowly recognized her after twenty years, she as slowly recognized me. Her white suit seemed out of scale for her small frame. She was weighted to the ground, held in place by the palatial walls of her self-created kingdom. Executive director, she reigned. I responded with the finesse born of a six-year rehearsal, remembering all the answers to all the questions hurled at me from the halls of academe. I knew the drill. High atop the Philtower Building in downtown Tulsa, we dined at the Summit Club. Nothing had changed, yet nothing was the same. Marsha ordered and reordered and sent back and tasted and fussed and complained about the limited wine selection as five members of the search committee fired off questions. She stared at me as I stared back at her, a moment of recognition. Two separate worlds never to cross over.
It is my hope that Remix will serve as a new working space for imaginative formations—a laboratory for discoveries in indigenous contemporary art that spark new artistic interventions. A place of unexpected encounters. A space in-between the expected. My mind on beginnings, then, I am lost in the search for a conclusion. Perhaps the appropriate thought has already been expressed by the artist Walter Anderson: “Life, you know, is like light. It is continuous. It is our eyes that seek beginnings and endings. I was trying to find an ending with my pencil, but all I found was that there was no ending.”
-reprinted from Remix: New Modernities in a Post-Indian World, edited by Joe Baker and Gerald McMaster, with the kind permission of the Heard Museum.
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