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When artist Duane Slick was a child growing up in the Midwest, spending weekends with his family and six siblings at events with the Meskwaki and Ho-Chunk people was an important part of his life. But the visits also meant that when she returned to school, show-and-tell turned into a full-blown activity.
When the family huddled into the station wagons to return to their white-stuccoed home in Cedar Falls, Iowa, her mother would turn and say, “When you go to school on Monday and they ask you to show-and-tell. , tell them you’re going to visit your grandparents.”
“The white man doesn’t understand Indians,” he used to say. “If you tell them anything about what you’ve done and seen, the first thing they’ll do is try to take it all away.”
But in his teenage years, he found a loophole in the “parent law”. With the smile of someone who has stumbled upon a secret, he recounts one of those hey-minute moments: “They may have said they couldn’t speak, but they never said they couldn’t paint or draw.”
Slick’s work is on display at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, Conn., where the artist talks about his life and work. titled “The Coyote Makes the Sunset Better” her first solo exhibition in a museum and includes 90 works of art: abstract paintings, text art, prints, photography, found objects and video.
His output was not always very diverse. “When I met Duane, he was a great landscape painter with oil paints,” recalls artist and curator Jaune Quick-to-See Smith.
But that changed about thirty years ago. “I think it all started in 1990,” Slick said of the new direction his work took. At that time, preparations were being made for the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in America. Smith invited Slick to contribute to a show he curated “from the Natives’ point of view.” But he clearly wanted political work.
“I was hoping to open some doors and windows and get some fresh air to counter the misconceptions this country promotes,” he said.
At first, Slick found Smith’s demand for political work compelling. But then, while at the Provincetown Fine Arts Study Center in Massachusetts, he stumbled upon some local news: Coyotes, native to the American West, are on their way to the tip of Cape Cod. The news seemed to be by chance. When reading traditional stories in books like Barry Lopez’s, he was already thinking of Coyote, a recurring figure in many Native American myths. “Having Lightning, Sleeping With His Daughter.”
“I decided I couldn’t do the overtly political stuff,” Slick said, “but if I trusted Coyote, he could do it for me.”
Smith called the piece “highly political and laudable” in an email, a “knockout mixed-media picture that says ancestral names and records Native Americans from the turn of the century.”
Slick’s abstract landscapes soon gave way to wide-ranging application, often involving coyotes. He began performing what he called “sand stories” by dripping sand from his closed fist onto a black cloth while telling stories that featured the animal as a central character. He even gave a lecture in the form of a five-minute written speech with a coyote at the College Art Association. As Slick told stories, the coyote scolded him: “Duane, stay on topic. Why are you here?”
Thirty years later, Slick’s canine friend Aldrich shows up throughout the show—and not just in the form of two coyote traps set in a museum. The coyote’s wolf-like cup appears again and again in prints and paintings that are beginning to reflect Warhol’s many famous celebrities. The animal’s head is tilted at various angles in layered hues, while the brighter pieces in the series evoke the flashy, variable neon light animations one might find on a nightclub sign. The show also includes a video based on 3D scans of a coyote mask that Slick purchased from Mexico; a set of text images; and a photo of his personal book collection (like “Custer Died for Your Sins”).
Interspersed with these portraits are more abstract horizontal striped canvases that Slick produced during the quarantine. He says he had the American flag in mind when he made these pictures. (His father, a Korean War veteran, died in 2008, followed by several other family members.) He also says he thinks about the darkness of the night, the colors of the feather fans, and the rows of storage shelves he sees. While working on a project at Brown University’s Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology built around a collection of 60,000 Native American objects.
The pictures are awesome. Seeing them is a thrill akin to discovering a five-letter word that is both the password to a dormant bitcoin wallet and the answer to today’s Wordle. For one, they suggest the textures of modern life, whether in the perfect folds of prefab furniture or the faulty screens and grids of old video games. But they also seem to have an experience of mourning amidst nature: perhaps, the experience of pausing one night to look up at the sky and allowing a new unfamiliar solitude.
On top of that, they engage in various traditions. geometric pattern making was honed long before European and American modernists became famous for this practice. But they also thrive when their legacy is read through the lens of Minimalism and hardcore painting, which has become part of many top East Coast painting MFA programs today.
Slick has taught in both the painting and printmaking departments at the Rhode Island School of Design for nearly 27 years. (These two worlds seemingly come together in Coyote canvases whose painted, overlapping hues reflect layered approaches to printmaking.) “Many people work on one-offs”, painter Dennis Congdon, president. The RISD committee that hired Slick said. But the artist “takes the theme and disturbs it and reinvigorates and problematizes it.”
Congdon said of Slick’s current exhibit: “Every painting out there is beautiful.”
With work this good, it may be hard to believe that Slick will only now have his first solo museum exhibition at the age of 60. But as Smith explains, “This happens a lot in our Indigenous communities.” he noted If we were to research art museums in the US, he said, each “could have half a dozen contemporary Native artists, or none at all.”
Slick has had solo exhibitions at other nonprofit institutions, such as the UNI Art Gallery at the University of Northern Iowa, where he studied for an undergraduate degree. The gallery’s director, Darrell Taylor, has long been impressed by Slick’s work. When the gallery opened an annual alumni shows in 2010, he said Slick was “one of the first people I thought of.”
“His paintings had a kind of fluid quality, a fluid surface where you could see layers through,” Taylor said. “As you build its layers, it’s like you’re looking inward—perhaps looking into the past or the future.”
Duane Slick: The Coyote Makes Sunsets BetterBy May 8, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, 258 Main Street, Ridgefield, Conn., 203-438-4519, thealdrich.org
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