Inside out: Indian self-portraits

A portrait, and especially a self-portrait, demands something more penetrating than a mere likeness, something that's more creative with style, media and psychology. All those come into play in "Hokah!," a lively and insightful show of contemporary self-portraits by more than 25 American Indian artists at Ancient Traders Gallery in south Minneapolis.

"Hokah!" is a popular greeting at powwows and other multitribal gatherings, said gallery manager Heid Erdrich. Here, it welcomes visitors to a celebration of the gallery's 10th anniversary. The exhibit is something of a reunion for the featured artists, all of whom have participated in previous Ancient Traders shows. Most live in Minnesota or surrounding states, although there are contributions from as far away as Santa Fe, N.M., and Guatemala.

Supported in part by McKnight, General Mills and the Two Feathers Fund of the St. Paul Foundation, the event is also a valediction for the gallery, which plans to move soon from its quarters in an office building run by the Great Neighborhoods! Development Corp. to a new site in the neighborhood. Details are still being finalized, Erdrich said.

Portraits from the inside

American Indians are sensitive about portraits because their public image has so often been shaped by outsiders who tend to stereotype, romanticize, historicize, idealize or barbarize them.

"Self-portraiture gives American Indian people the power to reflect back what we see in ourselves, and to put ourselves within a context that the general public is not used to seeing, thereby overcoming these stereotypes," guest curator Carolyn Lee Anderson explains in an introduction to the show.

While the "Hokah!" portraits include some trappings of traditional Indian life -- canoes, horses, mountain landscapes -- they're noteworthy for their contemporary edge. There are more black hats and sunglasses than feathered headgear and beaded necklaces. This is now, not then.

Minneapolis painter Robert Two Bulls, an Oglala Lakota Oyate who is an Episcopal minister, addresses the stereotyping directly in "Chief What-They-Want-Me-To-Be," a Pop-style caricature of a grizzled, blanket-wrapped Indian wearing a feathered headdress and staring at the sky. Three puffy clouds, floating overhead like empty speech bubbles, amplify the point that such images are cartoon simplifications of Indian identity today.

Many portraits incorporate native symbols associated with nature, legends and the spirit world. Gordon Coons' yellow silhouette is garnished with bear, bird and turtle designs. Stars embellish the flaring hair of Catherine Whipple, a Standing Rock Sioux, and Oneida painter Lisa Fifield shows her face emerging from a turtle shell. Star Wallowing Bull sketches a star-studded Art Deco-style hood ornament that subtly updates such early 20th-century designs as the silhouette of Chief Pontiac that once graced cars.

Other artists allude to tribal and personal history. In the digital photo "Between," Dakota artist Mona Smith shows a sadly distorted Indian face pressed between two rocks and the date 2012, the 150th anniversary of the Dakota wars that signaled the end of her people's autonomy. Guatemala-born Peter Morales painted a sweet, postcard-sized "ex voto," thanking his guardian angel for saving him from a disastrous 1961 storm in which a tree fell through the roof of his childhood home and trapped him, apparently unharmed, in his crib. Doug Limon, a Leech Lake Oneida, created a little beadwork shield in homage to his deceased brother.

In "Sustenance," Jim Denomie, a Lac Courte Orielles Ojibwe, alludes to the endemic poverty associated with life on the reservation by depicting a sickly looking fellow whose greenish pallor may be attributable to his "yummy" diet of white bread and Kraft macaroni and cheese. Food is also a metaphor for cultural dislocation in "The Half Bred Supper," by Julie Buffalohead, an Oklahoma Ponca who depicts a woman in a coyote mask perched on a table eating a mouse while a blanket-wrapped raccoon gnaws a fish, and a rabbit in a turtleneck sweater licks a Popsicle.

Two seasoned artists depict themselves at different stages in life. Ojibwe painter Carl Gawboy shows a child, a man and an elder paddling across a northern Minnesota lake. David Bradley, a Minnesota Chippewa who lives in Santa Fe, stacks his three selves (skull, young man, bearded elder) inside each other like Russian dolls and poses them between the geographic poles of his life -- Minnesota's northern wilderness and New Mexico's tawny cliffs.

Like most Americans, Indians are often of mixed heritage and conflicted about the competing claims on their identities. Dyani Reynolds-Whitehawk suggests the tensions by suspending a little rawhide silhouette over a drawing garnished with expressions of ambivalence and denial. In another drawing, curator Anderson depicts herself between two landscapes, urban Minneapolis and the Southwestern mesas of her Navajo ancestry.

The pain of mixed-race identity is sharp in Kevin Pourier's exquisitely crafted buffalo horn spoon, which shows him -- in sunglasses and black fedora -- between pointing fingers, one red and one white. Writing on the white fingers says, "You don't belong here," and "Get back to the rez." The red ones are equally dismissive, calling him a "white guy" and saying "you don't belong here."

Mary Abbe • 612-673-4431