Perhaps the most significant impact of contemporary Native American artists is that their output affirms that their respective Indigenous cultures and people will always be here and the media in which they create their art, by reflecting upon their experiences in contemporary society, means they are always breathing life into their cultures.
A multidisciplinary photographer and artist, Russel Albert Daniels, based in Salt Lake City, exemplifies what each individual Native American artist is making of this artistic objective. In a 2013 Fuse magazine article, David Garneau summed it nicely:
40×60 archival aluminum print Year: 2021
Art is the site of intolerable research, the laboratory of odd ideas, of sensual and intuitive study, and of production that exceeds the boundaries of conventional disciplines, protocols and imaginaries. Art is a display of surplus, of skill, ingenuity, knowledge, discipline, time, labor and wealth. It embroiders status, disguises corruption and celebrates power. But art is also the stage where other surplus finds expression. It can be a way for the marginalized, refused, and repressed to return.
Born of mixed Native American and Mormon-European settler heritage, Daniels’s work as a photojournalist and documentary photographer and artist has precisely served the artistic purpose in carving a “way for the marginalized, refused, and repressed to return.” Daniels’ work as a photojournalist has documented many of the most important Native American stories in the region during recent decades: Bears Ears National Monument, Standing Rock protests, two-spirit individuals in Native communities, climate crisis impacts on Indigenous lands and the legacy of colonial-era Indigenous captivity and enslavement in the American Southwest.
24×36 archival aluminum print Year: 2022
A finely curated sampling of the artist’s photographs as well as ink drawings is on exhibition at the Material Art Gallery (2970 South West Temple). The exhibition — Russel Albert Daniels: Wild Roses — continues through Nov. 8.
The spectacular aluminum photographic prints chronicle a legacy that informs our enlightened understanding of the place and the context of what cultural decolonization actually means. His work invites us to immerse ourselves in the differences and consequently the appreciation of it while subconsciously encouraging us to contemplate the struggle that still exists between Indigenous and settler peoples. Representing in part a therapeutic response to his work as a photographer, another section of the exhibition features a series of astonishing ink drawings — created either in the size of 9×12 inches or 5×7 inches — that are like petroglyphs as a personal memory of the deep research and background work he has done in his projects.
In an interview with The Utah Review, Daniels said that as an elementary school student in Salt Lake City, the history lessons he heard in class “told us about our ancestry.” But, by the time he was in high school, “I realized that it was not lining up with what I was being told,” Daniels recalled, adding, “I still did not quite understand it then but the epiphany of it has steadily revealed itself over the last 30 years.”
9” x 12” ink drawing on 300 gram paper
What he learned has become a major artistic undertaking. On the Diné (Navajo) family side of his father, Rose, an ancestor, was captured when she was a child during a slave raid by White River Ute in the middle 1800s. Later, in the land that would become the Utah Territory, Rose was sold to Aaron Daniels, a polygamist Mormon settler. After marrying Aaron and having four children, in 1889, Rose enrolled with the Uintah & Ouray Reservation in northeast Utah in 1889. On his mother’s side of the family, Daniels and his siblings are Ho-Chunk (Winnebago). They were the first family generation in five to be born outside of the Ute reservation.
Discovering the background of his family’s story has propelled Daniels’ most significant photo project to date: La Cautiva. He is chronicling the story of capture and enslavement of Indigenous peoples by Spanish colonial and Mormon settlers in the southwest borderlands region of America. The project encompasses portraiture, landscape photography and documentation of cultural performance practices.
It has attracted a great deal of attention. The Genízaro Pueblo of Abiquiú, the first chapter, was presented by the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian and exhibited in New York City as well as the Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis. Earlier this year. the Tacoma Art Museum selected a dozen images from La Cautiva for The Abiquiúeños and The Artist, which were show with original Georgia O’Keeffe paintings, as highlighting the artistic and historical legacy of northern New Mexico.
21” x 25” ink drawing on 300 gram paper
The image of portals is prominent in the photographs selected for the Material exhibition. “My idea of a portal in a place allows me to center myself, ask questions and get in touch with my intuition,” he explained. This is also how he sees his drawing practice — as a portal. “I can process and absorb clearly all of the data — the digital RAM [random access memory] I have accumulated in my head. I have filled my sketchbooks with these shapes and figures, and they have taught me important things and have helped me dust off the dark cobwebs in my subconscious.” Working in multiple art media and taking advantage of cross-pollination from his long career as a photojournalist and documentarian, Daniels is creating a new narrative that ties the relationship of Indigenous art and heritage to its essential function of preserving and forming cultural practices and defining identity within the settler colonial society. As liberating it is for him creatively, the results are tremendously informative for the viewer, achieved without a sense of being overwhelming yet unmistakably clarifying and elucidating.
Daniels will attend the closing reception for the exhibition on Nov. 8, beginning at. 6 p.m. For mover information, see the Material art gallery website.