Taking it to the Streets

Native American street art sparks a dialogue about cultural and environmental issues

By Nancy Zimmerman

Back in the mid ’60s, when Simon and Garfunkel sang that “ . . . the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenement halls . . . ,” graffiti was perceived by the Establishment as vandalism and its purveyors as criminals. Fast-forward a few decades, and the landscape has shifted a bit. Simple graffiti phrases—from “Kilroy was here” to “U.S. Out of Vietnam” to “No Blood for Oil”—are still seen by many as an urban blight, but enough graffiti writers have revealed themselves as witty and talented provocateurs to establish the practice as an art form.

Add to that a recent proliferation of highly creative murals, billboards, posters, T-shirts, and performance pieces conveying political statements and cris de coeur, many of them produced by formally trained artists and graphic designers, and what was once a crime has become a movement. This outlaw activity has since moved into the salons and galleries of such highbrow bastions as Art Basel Miami and the Venice Biennale, and street artists like Shepard Fairey, Banksy, and the late Jean-Michel Basquiat have become household names.

But even as public understanding of its importance and quality as an artistic expression has grown, street art has managed to retain its youthful, gritty immediacy, along with its power to shift the collective conversation to new modes of thought and aesthetic appreciation. And it’s no longer a purely urban phenomenon: now it’s come to the rez.

The remote expanses of South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation and the Navajo Nation, which straddles New Mexico and Arizona, might seem unlikely venues for street art to flourish, given their lack of population density, few roads, and even fewer buildings. But flourish it has, and the messages conveyed by its practitioners now resonate with an urgency that extends far beyond the confines of the reservations.

“Native American graffiti has actually been around forever,” observes Jaque Fragua, who was raised in New Mexico’s Jemez Pueblo and currently resides in New York. “My first inspiration as an artist came from my people’s ancient petroglyphs and pictographs. They were so minimalist in their expression, getting to the core values of life and speaking volumes in their simplicity and beauty.”

Moving from the rustic canyons surrounding his pueblo to the concrete canyons of the city was a natural leap for Fragua, who began his foray into public art as a teenager, dodging the cops while writing graffiti in Denver. “Graffiti was a challenging boot camp,” he says. “I had to represent and defend myself, and fight off the authorities and other graffiti writers.” While he acknowledges the adrenaline high of evading detection while asserting his message, he soon tired of the arrests and confrontations, and sought other media to give voice to his Native perspective on issues of identity, cultural appropriation, and institutionalized inequality.

Left: Tom GreyEyes addresses the degradation of the environment caused by coal-fired power plants with a mural at the Inscription House, a clinic at the junction of Highway 98 and Indian Route 16 in Arizona. Right: The mural is the message—Jaque Fragua collaborated with Shepard Fairey to create poignant but pointed wall art in Los Angeles’s Indian Alley.

“It’s about educating people who are ignorant of the fact that there are highly developed cultures that have existed within the Americas for hundreds of years,” says Fragua, who studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe and has led community-based art workshops, mural projects, and studio classes in figure drawing and painting. He also has helped create exhibits highlighting Native issues for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts and the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture in Santa Fe. “Our differences need to be not just tolerated, but celebrated,” he adds.

A major subject of Native street art is cultural appropriation, the general public’s tendency to freely adopt Native themes and symbols without permission, attribution, or, indeed, any real understanding of their meaning to the people from whom they’re taken. From the sports world to the movie industry to history textbooks, Native identity has been exploited in ways few other ethnic groups have endured. After several centuries of watching the Anglo world distort cultural icons, perpetuate insulting stereotypes, and appropriate images for monetary gain, Native Americans are now wielding their power as street artists to reclaim their identities and assert their self-respect. Although galleries and museums around the country and beyond are increasing their recognition of fine art produced by Native Americans, Fragua feels that the art’s inherent messages of cultural autonomy need to be disseminated more widely—and that’s where street art comes in.

Shepard Fairey’s poster helped mobilize protesters at South Dakota’s Pine Ridge reservation.

“Cultural appropriation is kind of an entry-level issue, something a lot of people can understand,” he says. “There are millions of people who never set foot in an art gallery, but they see billboards along the highways and murals and posters on the walls of their city,” he says. “When we put our message beside a freeway or on a building, we can speak to people directly on both a spiritual and intellectual level.”

To that end, some of his colorful posters bear tersely worded messages that would be difficult to misconstrue: “Sovereignty,” “Stop Big Oil on Tribal Soil,” “Protect Mount Taylor.” All speak to the assault on the integrity of Native lands, while informing and engaging people in struggles that ultimately affect all of us.

Poster art is a quick and compact way to package and disseminate a political message. The artists are Ernesto Yerena (top left), Gregg Deal (top right and bottom left), and Jaque Fragua (bottom center and bottom right).

Honor the Treaties (HTT) is a loose collective of street artists that came together organically around 2010 after internationally renowned photojournalist Aaron Huey began exploring the issue of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, which preserved 27 million acres in the Black Hills of South Dakota for the Sioux Nation. The land was illegally usurped and opened up to prospectors and homesteaders despite the treaty, and the Sioux Nation sued to enforce it. Litigated until 1980, the case became the longest-running lawsuit in U.S. history. The Supreme Court finally acknowledged the land theft but awarded the tribe a mere $106 million in compensation. The Sioux refused the payment, declaring, “The Black Hills are not for sale!”

That rallying cry fueled a movement to publicize the injustice of the court’s decision after Huey gave a TED talk on the topic, and renowned artists Ernesto Yerena, a Yaqui/Chicano originally from California, and Shepard Fairey, best known for his 2008 Obama “HOPE” poster, collaborated on a street-art campaign to plaster hundreds of walls throughout the country with posters bearing the slogan.

Since then the HTT collective, directed by an advisory board whose members include Native American civic leaders, lawyers, educators, musicians, and entrepreneurs, has brought together a diverse group of Native street artists who use their talents to further the effort to protect the culture, water, air, and land by pursuing enforcement of treaties that have been systematically breached. Fiscally sponsored by the Lakota People’s Law Project, the group promotes individual ventures as well as collaborations among Native artists and advocacy organizations.

Above: Nani Chacon (top right) offers a contemporary take on mythological Navajo figures like Spider Woman, who graces the mural She Taught Us to Weave, along a railroad corridor in Albuquerque. Top left: Chacon creates the mural Manifestations of Glittering World in the Allan Houser Art Park at Santa Fe’s Museum of Contemporary Native Arts. By integrating ancient archetypes and designs into pop culture, she gives them new relevance and immediacy.

One such effort is the Painted Desert Project, which came into being initially when African-American physician James “Chip” Thomas, a longtime resident of the Navajo Nation, began venturing out into the reservation to photograph the Navajo residents as they went about the business of their daily lives. In 2012 he decided to turn his hobby into a public art project by enlarging the photos and wheatpasting them onto buildings along the roads that wound through the reservation. The idea was to create cultural and environmental messages that could be seen by the local residents as well as visitors traveling through the area.

Among those participating in both HTT and the Painted Desert Project is Navajo artist Tom GreyEyes, an Arizona resident and recent college graduate who has already achieved acclaim as an artist, teacher, and social activist. In 2012 he was awarded the Phoenix New Times’s Big Brain award in visual art, and he used the prize money to participate in a training camp for nonviolent, direct activism.

“I believe in the power of art as a political megaphone,” he says. “It can break through language barriers with visual statements, and it becomes almost a language in itself. Chip Thomas was my introduction to the street-art community, and those artists involved in the Painted Desert Project have taught me a lot. You need stamina and commitment to create art in remote locations, to withstand the hot sun and the dust storms, and the artists really impressed me with their passion for their work.”

While the project is directed toward the residents of the Navajo Nation, designed primarily to inspire the younger generation by giving them a positive way to see their culture, GreyEyes observes that both this art and street art in general offer important means of speaking back to power in addition to speaking to each other.

“We’re trying to build a movement to inspire people and to engage in dialogue about issues important to our survival. Neocolonialism is still alive in this country, and cultural appropriation is a big issue. Through our art we can make critiques and propose solutions; we can offer a vision of how things could be.”

Above right: Tom GreyEyes at work on the streets. Above left: In this digitally composited image, GreyEyes explores the concepts of identity and the “masks” people wear in their lives. Top: GreyEyes painted this work on the wall of the Taala Hooghan Infoshop in Flagstaff, Arizona, to protest environmental injustices in the region.

GreyEyes approaches his forays into issue-based street art as research projects, first steeping himself in the background and details before engaging his creative skills. He cites his work with Save the Confluence, a movement organized in response to the proposed Grand Canyon Escalade project, which has split the Navajo Nation and occasioned a groundswell of protest. The project is a multimillion-dollar tourism development that would brings tens of thousands of visitors to the eastern edge of the Grand Canyon, threatening a fragile ecosystem and displacing people from their homes in the process. “I did a mural about the political issues surrounding it, but I first had to get information from everyone, read the environmental impact report, and learn the details of the project. Once I had the information, it was up to me as an artist to conceptualize it, create it, and disseminate it.”

Another HTT artist, Navajo/Chicana painter and illustrator Nanibah “Nani” Chacon, also paints murals with a message. Raised on the Navajo reservation and now living in Albuquerque, Chacon says her intention is to create a connection between traditional culture and contemporary social perspectives. She accomplishes this through abstracted illustrations featuring a character for whom she crafts a visual narrative.

“I really want to create pieces that make a statement that brings Native philosophy into a contemporary context,” she explains. “I feel that the only reference for Native philosophy has been an archaic culture, a relic of the past. I want to show its contemporary relevance through my art.” Her mural She Taught Us to Weave, which was commissioned in 2012 by the City of Albuquerque for the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) to adorn a railroad corridor in downtown Albuquerque, stars the archetypal Spider Woman and addresses her relationship to technology and the responsibility that goes with it. “In our creation stories, Spider Woman taught us to weave, and to weave with beauty and harmony,” she says. “At the beginning of the mural, the pattern around Spider Woman resembles a rug motif. As it proceeds down the wall, the pattern appears as a circuit board, raising the question, ‘How will we now use the modern technology we have?’” In addition to incorporating elements of traditional textile patterns into the story, Chacon also likes to use the architecture of the building to make each mural site-specific.

“My work is definitely different in the respect that I focus on the beauty, the compassionate side of the cultural issues. I believe battles will be won with positive messages. And I feel a sense of responsibility about what I paint because once I put it out there it no longer belongs to me. My particular interest is in reaching young people with my HTT work,” she adds. “We’re not always going to change the world, or even change a law, but we can open the dialogue.”

A more confrontational but wryly humorous approach can be seen in the performance art of Gregg Deal, a Pyramid Lake Paiute painter and graphic artist originally from Utah who now lives in Washington, D.C. His trenchant social commentary is ironic in tone as he explores the misappropriations of Native culture that go back centuries, as seen in his project The Last American Indian on Earth. For this performance piece, Deal dresses up in a stereotypical Indian costume complete with headdress and feathers, then positions himself around town doing ordinary things like buying coffee at Starbucks, mowing the lawn, or visiting the Washington Monument. Video and still cameras record people’s reactions to seeing this Hollywood-style Indian in their midst, and Deal reports that the stunt has occasioned a wide variety of responses and conversations.

Gregg Deal’s performance pieces and artwork satirize stereotypes and insulting representations of Native Americans.

“The perception of indigenous people in and out of Native culture needs to change,” he says. “We need a dialogue. I take stereotypes and regurgitate them, take relics and place them in the modern world, and people are forced to reconcile the odd juxtapositions. Irony and humor can get through in ways that earnest exposition can’t. Being angry and defensive all the time doesn’t work.”

Deal underscores the difference between honoring a culture by borrowing positive elements and acts of true cultural appropriation. “With appropriation, you don’t have a conversation,” he points out. “No one’s asking for permission or even an opinion. Some argue, for example, that naming the city’s football team ‘the Redskins’ is a way of honoring us, but it only ‘honors’ romanticism, the nostalgic notion of an Indian that never actually existed.”

Despite the frustration of having to counter these notions—“On the East Coast, the novelty of being Native American is alive and well,” he says—Deal believes that the digital age is “a good believes that the digital age is “a good time to be Indian. With the advent of social media and the Internet, hashtags, posters, and stickers, we can reach more people than ever before in new, more immediate ways.”

The movement continues to spread, not just via the streets and social media but also through film, television, and music. It has attracted support from such notables as Neil Young, who performed a concert to fund a lawsuit against the Tar Sands development in Canada that featured Fragua’s poster and T-shirt designs.

“The artists are the ones leading the way for how we see things,” says Fragua. “We connect the issues with the external world to get the message out at the same time that we internalize the message for the Native communities.”

Important as it is to Native Americans for the process of decolonization to continue, it is, in fact, equally important to the culture at large. By reclaiming and reasserting their true identity as a people, Native artists open up and share a world that broadens everyone’s understanding of human history and the human condition, and exposes us to a new aesthetic and worldview. Likewise, by drawing attention to the environmental degradation that threatens traditional lands, air, and water sources, they fight for environmental integrity for everyone. Beyond the hip visuals and edgy messages, the Native street-art movement presages a saner, more inclusive world that benefits us all.

The Painted Desert Project sprang from Dr. Chip Thomas’s photos of Navajo Nation residents. With the help of volunteer artist crews (opposite), he wheatpasted the photos onto structures throughout the reservation, offering positive images to bolster the Navajo sense of identity.

From the Summer 2014 issue