Steven Yazzie
dal 26/1/2007 al 1/8/2007
Segnalato da
26/1/2007
Steven Yazzie
Heard Museum, Phoenix
Draw Me a Picture. For decades, Monument Valley was used as a backdrop in Hollywood Westerns that depicted American Indians in racist terms. The show shatters outmoded thinking about Indians by offering a new representation of this well-known American landscape.
Draw Me a Picture
Curated by Joe Baker
Venture on a wild ride through the isolated landscape of Monument Valley in the
exhibition “Draw Me a Picture" by Navajo artist Steven Yazzie, opening January 27,
and on view through August 2, 2007.
For decades, Monument Valley was used as a backdrop in Hollywood Westerns that
depicted American Indians in racist terms. These films fed into a mythology of the
American West in which Indians were either stoic noblemen or fierce savages. In
“Draw Me a Picture," Yazzie challenges these stereotypes of Indian identity by
re-envisioning this landscape from a fresh, alert vantage point.
From the driver’s seat of a self-styled art car, Yazzie winds along a red dirt road
into Monument Valley while simultaneously creating drawings-in-motion of the
dramatic red rock formations passing by. Powered only by gravity, the art car is
“part sculpture, part rolling studio" according to curator Joe Baker. “Fitted with
an attached easel, [the car] allows the artist to be in motion while drawing the
advancing landscape." The entire process is captured on film.
“Draw Me a Picture" shatters outmoded thinking about Indians by offering a new
representation of this well-known American landscape. According to Baker, “through
his actions and urgent drawings of Monument Valley, [Yazzie] reclaims this picture,
making it his own by creating images that are free of expectations and stereotypical
gestures of ‘Indianess.’ The final result is drawing that is alert to self, place,
and time."
Filmed on a three-day trip to the Navajo Reservation in northern Arizona, “Draw Me a
Picture" is the latest work in Yazzie’s “Drawing and Driving" series. This series,
which investigates the artist’s relationship to landscape, evolved during a 2006
summer artist residency at the renowned Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture
in Maine.
The art car, along with original drawings and paintings and a large scale video
projection of the 1925 silent film, The Vanishing American, will be included in the
exhibition.
Opening: January 27, 2007
Heard Museum of Native Cultures and Art
2301 North Central Avenue - Phoenix