(upbeat music) - [Announcer] This is a production of South Dakota Public Broadcasting.

(serene music) - I think it's just the love of painting.

There's just something there of like, if you've never painted, maybe you have to actually attempt to paint to understand this, is that there's just something like an extension of yourself that goes into how you're pushing the paint onto the canvas.

There's just something there when you start to have a little bit of control over the quality and property, the appearance of the paint.

You see something there, how the light's reflecting off of it or how these colors are blending together.

You know, there's just a lot of discovery to be made in painting that I feel really satisfies me, makes me just love it more and more each time I do it.

So that's why I always say that that's my heart and I will continue to do that no matter what.

(serene music continues) I love painting more than any other art form or media.

That's really, really where my heart is at.

If I can, I will always be painting and a lot of my work usually involves a figure.

So I would call myself a figurative artist.

Painting is always evolving for me.

It's never something where it's like clear cut of like, "Hey, you're gonna go about it here.

Here's step one, step two, step three, all the way down the line."

It's like when I begin, I have an idea of what I want to do, but I allow myself the time to kind of let it grow.

If there's something of an idea that changes, I'll pursue that.

I'll let it be something where I'm not gonna feel defeated and say, "Oh, my first idea wasn't the best idea."

You know, I'll allow myself to go back and rework it or change things up as well, too.

But it's also something that can be so time consuming and that's what I really always have to speak about is that people don't realize that painting is one of the art media that takes the longest, a good painting, in my opinion.

It takes a long time because you want to continue to like develop that layer, that buildup.

You want it to say that to you as a painter, I'm finished.

Instead of just, you know, forcing your authority over it to say you're finished when I say you are.

That's also the hard part about being a painter as well, too, is that you never can really tell when is it finished.

And for most painters, they will, if you allow them to, they'll work on a painting forever, you know?

So it's kind of good sometimes to have deadlines and cutoff moments where you have to submit your work to an exhibition.

For me, painting starts with the idea.

There has to be a concept, something that you wanna paint.

For me, I do create preliminaries.

I might draw a sketch, I might work from a note that I scribbled down somewhere, or sometimes, and most often what I do is I just go into the studio and I just start painting the canvas, and I follow certain techniques that I've learned in my education of painting.

I'm really drawn to the Renaissance painters, the traditional style of painting and oil paint, and that you start with a process called imprimatura, where you tone your canvas.

And while I'm doing that, for me, I'm kind of like thinking already about what is it that I wanna paint or I'm committing to an idea, 'cause I have so many ideas that just live in my brain and I'm kind of seeing like the scale of the canvas, I'm getting a feel for it while I'm bringing some of that first layer of paint down and I'm thinking like, "Hmm, I can already start to see an image here."

Even when I start to use water to thin out the paint and to spread it across the canvas a little bit more, I'm already thinking like, "Hey, this is like a story that's being told to me.

I'm hearing it speak to me in that way."

So then when it's dry, I'm ready to go, you know, and I can start to already envision exactly what I wanna create in it.

(playful music) Most of the time I see a figure, and that's because I feel like a lot of the time, what I want to do with a painting is tell a story.

There has to be some sort of narrative quality to my work.

It's sharing a story either that comes from my culture, comes from the world at large, or comes from myself.

Usually though, I'm relying upon something that's relevant to today in my time.

That's why I call myself a contemporary artist.

I wanna share stories that may be from the past, but I wanna involve people of today.

I want to involve the context of our life today.

Yeah, when it comes to figurative elements in your paintings or your artworks, there's a lot of ways you can go about that.

For me, I do all of 'em.

You know, I can come up with my own interpretation of a figure.

I do have arts education, so I know how to construct the figure to make it proportionally correct, but I can also exaggerate it and make it elongated.

You know, just have fun with it and make it the way that you like to make it.

I think that's something that's a part of who we are as children.

When you look back to the drawings you did as a little kid in kindergarten, you probably had these really giant beings that were your parents or maybe these little short beings that were your siblings, I don't know, or yourself.

So you can go back to that and have fun with it later on in life.

There are no rules in art.

(gentle music) It's really because of my grandmother on my mom's side, she was the one who gave me these crayons and she's encouraging me to tell a story.

Every time I went to visit her, she was like, "Tell me a story.

What did you do today?"

Or, you know, whatever it may be that's interesting to you.

But she said, "Don't tell me it verbally; draw it for me."

So it might be something as simple as like, "Well I went to see "Batman," the movie, and I was so fascinated with that."

So I was drawing up what happened in that film with the crayons for her.

So she was an educator, you know, now that I think back really about it, I think that it was important to have her, you know, to start to set me on that path.

So then later on in life, when I would go to grade school and have that opportunity to draw, they weren't often, but they would happen, I would kind of be a little bit more aware of what I was doing and saying, "Hey, I have fun doing this."

So that's definitely one of those early moments.

I mean, I can remember back to grade school, you know, just doing a little art competition when I was maybe like in second grade and it was just a picture of like the Ninja Turtles, but seeing it their on the wall and then kind of going to view it myself and then hearing people kind of like responding and talking about it, not knowing I was standing next to them, kind of is a memory that stays in my mind that I say, "Hey, somebody at least liked my drawing enough to talk about it."

And then it kind of continued on throughout grade school and I think it really picked up more when I was like in middle school, around sixth grade, where I had students that were in my class with me and my friends starting to like really kind of give me the encouragement, saying, you know, "Can you draw this for me?"

I remember doing a drawing one time and not thinking too much about it, to the point where I was gonna throw it into the trash.

And some of my classmates actually saved it and wanted to like write their name on it, you know, and it led all the way into high school as well too.

So I think those are the moments that kind of remind me that, you know, there was something that was appealing to others.

You know, then again, it changes up when you get into college and then actually pursuing like a career in art where people do wanna purchase your work or exhibit your work.

So there's all these different little milestones that occurred.

There's not a specific art teacher that had that impact, but I know that there's many different teachers who had a lot of like compassion and generosity, a lot of humanity.

And that's something that I believe is equally as important as if I had an a specific art teacher that was in that mentorship role.

But I had teachers who were just encouraging, who I think saw the surroundings that I was living within.

You know, coming to the reservation and seeing a lot of like the, I guess, marginalized kind of systems, you know, maybe oppressions, you know, just things that are kind of limited for certain peoples, meaning that we don't have a really strong art program.

There's not an art curriculum in our grade school.

There was great teachers who were sharing their resources, giving us good quality art supplies, but there was never like really deep, hands-on, fundamental instruction.

(gentle music) The second came when I graduated high school and I went to the Oscar Howe Summer Art Institute at the University of South Dakota.

It's like a two-week art camp.

And while I was there, I kind of like, you know, throughout my youth, you know, from kindergarten up to high school, I had kind of lost a little bit about, you know, what art could be about.

And so whenever I encountered the Oscar Howe Summer Art Institute and seen Oscar Howe's work for the first time, it was like a whole nother like reemergence, you know, something like brand new to me, and that was like a huge motivation.

And from that moment on, I dedicated my life to art and I said that this is what I want to like have in my everyday.

Regardless of how it may come to me, it's gonna be that important to me.

So that's really what set me on my trajectory, my path of going to art school, but then also staying committed and saying, "You know what?

I'm gonna do this regardless."

(chuckles) As a youth, especially being in high school, it's hard to make a decision on what exactly you want to do with your life.

I was no different.

I didn't know what I wanted to do.

My only goal was to graduate high school, and that's what I was working towards.

I was like, "Well, I gotta go to class just so I could finish and get my diploma."

But whenever I got closer to that point, I was like, "Wow, what am I gonna do next?"

And so I considered options of what I could do, because I really wanted to see more of the world.

I wanted to get out of my community of Kyle, South Dakota, a small community on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

And I hadn't really seen much of the world in my youth.

I knew about Rapid City, of course, but I was pretty much just so developed with just knowing the reservation life.

So I never imagined going to college.

I never thought I could go anywhere else, really.

I didn't think that I was that standout as an academic or an athlete that I could actually, you know, go someplace.

But when I went to that Oscar Howe Summer Art Institute, it totally did change my life.

And that it made me aware that there were art institutions, there were colleges for fine art, and there were also some that were exclusively for Native American artists.

And so having that guidance by some of the instructors at the Oscar Howe Summer Art Institute to consider either going to University of South Dakota or to the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, that was a pivotal moment for me.

It made me decide quickly like, what do you want to do?

And so I definitely looked at IAIA in Santa Fe, just because it was intriguing to think about Native art, especially contemporary Native art, as I was made aware of it just then by Oscar Howe.

When I was graduating high school, I had decided, "Well, I'm gonna try it out."

But it was kind of one of those things where last minute, I was trying to talk myself out of it, but I had a teacher who was really a generous teacher and he helped raise some funds to get like gas money for me to travel from western South Dakota, Kyle, all the way out to Vermillion.

And so I kind of felt like I owed it to him and his efforts to follow through.

So that's kind of the whole story behind that.

As I grew with that art institute, that I realized that there was a responsibility that I was receiving, and that was to make sure that I would become versed in Oscar Howe's biography.

I knew his story through-and-through, but not just his, also his students, Bobby Penn, Don Montileaux, Arthur Amiotte, and all the way up until, you know, my time.

And I don't just share that knowledge or hold onto it with privilege or selfishly, I feel like I need to make sure that it's voiced and applied to the larger art world so that people can learn from it and realize that there was a lot of greatness that happened here in our state of South Dakota, in our region of the northern plains.

And it goes back even beyond Oscar Howe, all the way back to our ancestors and that there was supreme intellect in how they viewed art.

And that it was something that, again, was just a part of life, lifestyle.

It was culture, it was spirituality.

It was just being.

There was definitely no separation.

And so a lot of that thought is still carried today, but it's also being magnified and encouraged today as far as how do you start to talk to students who come from reservation lands, tribal lands, and encourage them to think that they hold greatness.

There's something intergenerational that's in their just DNA that is greatness.

Those are not speeches that they hear to often.

Well, there's definitely a lot of like statements to be shared, like draw outside the lines, you know, don't be scared to, you know, use your hands or things that are not art supplies to make a painting.

You know, that's another big moment that reveals the wonders of art and especially painting is like you don't have to use a paintbrush.

You can use a piece of cardboard.

You look at Athena's work right there.

I mean, and she's a leading artist as well, too, that's giving a lot of exposure and a lot of acclaim.

There's no right or wrong when it comes to art.

And so you're not still so stuck on something that's only in the past.

You know, you're not staying in only one lane of making art.

You're witnessing new things happen every day.

And if you're in touch with the media that's around you, if you're looking at TV, today it's the internet, you know, social media, that's the way that most people consume what's happening in the world.

You're gonna encounter things that are just so exciting, you know.

But also being in touch with artists, you know, getting out there and exploring community.

Don't feel like what's in a museum is the only thing that's what art represents.

You know, there's people who are making art that's in the streets, you know, in the grass fields, you know, all of these different places that art can exist.

And that can be exciting to a person.

And for me, that is what is what is exciting for me and what helps me start to imagine, "Well, what can I do next?"

you know.

I do love a certain look to my paintings and I will always practice, because that's what makes me feel good and I like to do that.

But I'm also not scared to embrace things that might happen, that I can explore something totally different.

I can go in and just go in a totally opposite direction of what I normally do, and still feel fine about that.

And I think that that's one of the biggest encouragements that I do share with youth is like, you know, just be you.

You know, however you want to start to identify who you are, be confident in that, you know.

Sometimes we gotta build up the confidence, but you should never question that too much.

And you should never let anybody kind of push you outside of that realm or a bit of where you feel confident in that.

And then just look at all the nice things that are available.

You know, some people might start to like really fear change and progression, and that could be like technology, looking at, you know, for me, I came in and I said I didn't like to see paintings in any digital format.

I don't like to look at it on a phone or on a computer, because I like the look of the paint when I see it in person.

But for some people, maybe they love the quality of a digital aesthetic.

You know, you love graphic design or even now, augmented reality, all of these things that are a part of that culture that you as a youth are involved with.

I mean, embrace that.

You know, gaming is a culture that's an art form as well, too, that's beautiful.

Don't totally close yourself off to what other arts can be out there that you are not aware of yet.

(serene music continues) I definitely make mistakes in my art.

I think all artists make a mistake now.

Nobody's perfect.

Some people are close to perfection.

I'm not one.

So I think when I encounter a mistake, it's usually something that I can be aware of, that I can kind of rectify, fix early on.

But it usually happens when I'm tired.

You know, when I'm trying to paint when I'm tired, I'm probably gonna make a mistake.

Or I also know that when you're not in a mood to make art, you probably shouldn't make art either.

And this is one of the things I share with my own students as well, too.

If you're in a bad mood for some reason, if something's just not going your way for that day, and you're frustrated, don't try to keep pushing yourself forward, 'cause you're probably gonna make more work for yourself that you're gonna have to fix later.

And it's totally fine to also paint over a painting as well, too.

And that's why I think I love painting so much is that it's so forgiving.

It could be so forgiving if you allow it to be.

So it's just an easy, like, I guess, technique (chuckles) or action to take a spray bottle and to spray your paint, 'cause the paint that I'm working with most of the time is acrylic paint, which is a safe paint to work with, but it's also water-based.

So you can use water to activate it to thin it out, but it would also thin it out enough that it starts to drip off your canvas.

And it's a cool effect.

People enjoy just having this kind of like line quality that draws your eye around your painting, your composition.

But for me, it's just a reminder that it's just paint on a surface.

It's nothing like I'm trying to manipulate too much to create an illusion over somebody that it's actual flesh or actual organic nature or material.

It's just something that's just a reminder that, hey, just simply paint.

It's just another one of those tools in your box that you can work with.

Mistakes; if things do happen, like by accident, if I somehow like accidentally throw paint onto my canvas or I put too much water into my brush and I put it on my canvas and there's a lot of drips that occur, I embrace those.

I welcome those.

I love unpredictability.

And that's one of the stages of an artist's life where you get a little bit further along, where you're able to like really seek out unpredictability, mistakes, things that can occur that are challenges, obstacles, and how do you shape those?

How do you make them a part of the work?

Are you gonna feel defeated and spend a lot of time just looking at it as something that's, you know, impossible to overcome?

Are you gonna be able to remind yourself like, "Hey, it's just paint.

I can wipe it off or I can merge it in somehow to this work of art."

So it's important really for any person, especially young artists, to start thinking about, like, how do you become aware of what a mistake might be to you?

(serene music continues) I think it took time for me to realize that what would be the most special power that I can apply to art making was nothing that was ever truly achieved elsewhere.

It was always where I was from.

It was always at my home.

It was always there from the beginning.

You know, when I look back to my youth and just seeing, you know, how much fun it was to just be a kid and to have this landscape in front of me, to have the community embrace me, to have relationships with my family and friends, you know, all of that is really what I draw upon now as an artist.

But I think when I look back after learning about art, after having training and thinking about the fundamentals of elements of art, what is it that we apply to a two-dimensional work that makes it so great that people want to look at it?

Well, those things have always been around.

You know, I saw the foundations of line, shape, perspective, space in the landscape, you know, but especially the color.

When I think back about the colors that I just naturally select, when you look at paintings like this behind me and you think about the very, very natural looking, you know, colors, the tones, it's what I've seen in the land, you know, why I chose to depict the land as this brown.

That's the soil.

But seeing the badlands on those muddy days, you encounter that by driving up and seeing how those roads can get.

Some people would view that as ugly, like that can be harsh to just like practically drive through.

But we can look at it and say, "Well, look at the color, look at the beauty that's, you know, something nice in that umber, that brown."

It's something that looks like it could be smeared.

It's real messy, but it also adds a aesthetic quality.

It's something that just makes you so interested in it.

It doesn't look synthetic, it doesn't look fake.

You know, I'm not talking against any of that type of aesthetic at all.

It's just that I think that that's where I'm kind of maturing myself into when I began.

And there's a lot of my artwork that you can see that I was heavily inspired by the artists that I was looking at in Santa Fe, and I was making a lot of work that was like really saturated, really, really bright.

But that's also something that was in our traditional aesthetic as well, too.

If you look at the artifacts, the old regalia, the beadwork and quillwork, there's a lot of bright colors as well, too.

So all of these things are important.

All of these things are very much my toolbox of what I use when I make my art.

I really enjoy the South Dakota Art Museum.

I do feel like it's a hidden gem in our state, but when I come here, I'm just always so impressed and amazed by the space, the architecture, how this museum is built, and how it's presented to the public.

It's so great.

You know, that's why I do consider it one of my favorites in our state.

I would even say one of my favorites anywhere.

I really enjoy the staff who've worked here and how they've worked with me.

A lot of the times they've really been respectful and how they started to handle the art forms that are representing my culture.

And that's something that does go a extra mile, I believe, as an artist, but also just as a Lakota person, as a Native person of the state, it's something that you appreciate to see that people are actually applying some sort of like sincere care for what your artworks are about, and seeing that there could be a lot of critical discussion around these art forms.

And it's not something that's only viewed as artifact, something that's just kind of in the distant past, but presented as thriving and living today.

That's really important.

I believe it is important for any person to visit a museum, especially if they have access to a museum like the South Dakota Art Museum, because they're gonna learn more about themselves.

And that's a hard claim to make, but it's real, and that they're gonna see their culture, they're gonna see their community, they're gonna see bits and elements of who they are in the artwork.

If they are willing to give that time to go and view, but also beyond view, communicate, have a conversation, have an interaction with the artwork, actually see things that they're curious about and they start to have a unspoken conversation with the artworks, they're gonna find answers for themselves.

And that usually is what most people are gonna be more concerned with is like, "How does this affect me in my day-to-day life?

How is this relevant to me right now in whatever my life is about?"

And it's good to have those moments of just clarity, have a moment of just like, your mind can kind of just go on it, on how it wants to go.

Not be distracted by everything else that's out there in the world.

But it's also just beautiful to go out and have an opportunity for aesthetic pleasure, see things that are pretty, see things that are beautiful, see things that are maybe opposite of that.

See things that are ugly.

See things that are challenging as well, too.

You know, there's a lot of learning that can develop in the mind, in the spirit as well, too.

And it could lead to action.

You know, a lot of these thoughts can manifest into doing something for yourself or for others, but it's also just a great opportunity to make relationships I believe as well, too.

When I encounter artworks, like I said, with Oscar Howe, Bobby Penn, Arthur Amiotte, Don Montileaux, all the way down the line to all these artists that are in here, I see them more than just an artist.

There isn't no big separation from me to them.

I view them as a relative.

I feel like I appreciate them to that extent, where they mean that much to me.

And I might not know 'em personally, maybe things will change if I meet 'em personally, but through their artwork, I feel like I really cherish them that much, you know?

And it's not only just for the Native art and for me as a Native person, I can start to extend that further.

Look at Harvey Dunn's work, you know, and not know anything about Harvey Dunn too much, but seeing what he did in his paintings, and especially as a painter, I can already create a relationship instantly, you know?

So I think that that's something that does exist.

There's a potential for that, for any person, but they gotta make time for that chance, for that possibility for themselves.

And most people are sometimes a little hesitant to go to a museum.

They feel like there's a lot of certain assumptions of what a museum represents, and they just gotta get out there and see that it isn't gonna be privileged all the time.

There should be something that's welcoming.

And that's really what I feel like is represented here at South Dakota Art Museum.

I've been to a lot of museums, and you can encounter certain degrees of privilege, but when you come to the South Dakota Art Museum, it is welcoming, you know, and it's really beautifully situated here in the campus of SDSU.

And so it's one of those gems, like I said, you just gotta find it, but when you do, you're so happy that you found it, that you look forward to returning to it again, just like I do.

(serene music continues)