Contemporary Native Art in Minnesota: Starr Big Bear, Julie Buffalohead, and Jim Denomie

Starr Big Bear, Julie Buffalohead, and Jim Denomie are artists whose work is as diverse as their life experiences and cultural identity. These emerging artists, all of whom are from the Twin Cities, employ distinct styles, techniques, and media to express their personal identity as well as an array of issues and concerns facing Native people today. Contemporary Native Art in Minnesota, which features about 20 paintings and drawings, complements Listening with the Heart. Together these exhibitions invite the viewer to consider the question posed by Julie Buffalohead: "Can a person of Indian ancestry be accepted as an individual with a creative path of his or her own to follow?" The exhibition is on view at the Weisman from September 9 through December 31, 2000.

Starr Big Bear is a 25 -year old Ojibwe artist who was raised on the White Earth Reservation and in Minneapolis. Big Bear creates vibrant, tightly executed drawings with Prisma color pencil, the medium also preferred by his father Frank Big Bear. By using bold color, line, and form to create highly stylized compositions of subjects and elements often borrowed from the historic past, Big Bear gives a contemporary focus and cultural perspective to his narratives and figures.

Julie Buffalohead, age 28, began her art studies at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and is now an M.F.A. student at Cornell University. Of Ponca heritage, Buffalohead believes that art is rooted first in oneself and second in the culture in which one lives. In her aggressively painted canvases she mixes images from tribal legends, Western stories, and popular culture to question, evaluate, and dispel outmoded, homogenized stereotypes about gender and cultural identity.

Jim Denomie, who lives and works in St. Paul, was born in 1955 on the Lac Courte Orielles reservation in Northern Wisconsin and studies painting at the University of Minnesota. "As an Ojibwe artist," Denomie writes, "I use canvas to tell stories in a conceptually abstract way, combining symbolism, metaphor, and popular imagery to speak about the realities of today's world." Strongly rooted in storytelling, his paintings of imaginary mesa-top landscapes combine historical narrative with clichZs from popular culture and serve as commentaries, even satires, on critical issues pertaining to the status of contemporary Indian people, including cultural enstrangement, the casino business, and evolving Native identities.