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Native art in the digital age by Ja s on Str ykowski
All Shook Up, archival ink on canvas, acrylic, UV varnish, 50 x 32" Below: X-Indian, archival ink on canvas, acrylic, UV varnish, 36 x 48"
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Roger Perkins
santafeanNOW.com
Mohawk potter and painter Roger Perkins brings together traditional and modern techniques to create works of art across different mediums. His pottery draws from ancient methods used by the Mohawk peoples. Perkins also uses round canvases to paint with acrylics. His graphic prints, however, take advantage of recent photo editing software to smash pop culture together with Native Americana in what he calls “Powwow Pop Art.” Raised on the Akwesasne Reservation near the border between New York State and Canada, Perkins started playing with Adobe Photoshop after college. He found that he enjoyed both the software itself and the challenge of seamlessly blending art and pictures from different time periods. “I’m taking old photographs from Edward Curtis and other photographers from the 1800s and early 1900s and adding a lot of different images, like a digital collage,” explains Perkins. “It’s a mixture of old and new. We’re using old images with cutting-edge photo technology and state-of-the-art printers with archival inks.” Perkins finds that his Photoshop art can reach a wider audience than some of his more traditional work does. “Usually only Native people wanted my paintings, but this digital stuff appeals to everybody,” he says. Even so, Perkins still draws his inspiration from the past. “The culture is the foundation, and everything that I’m doing comes from that,” he says. “It’s like a tree; I’ve got different branches, and I’m branching out all over the place. It’s all about creativity. It’s all about culture. It’s all about teaching. It’s all about sharing, and enlightening people.” As much as Perkins has adopted technology in his art, he has also made a considerable effort to embrace traditional Mohawk crafts. Perkins’s pottery re-creates a millennia-old method used by his Mohawk ancestors. “I’m the only Mohawk of 70,000 people who does this unique, traditional style of Mohawk pottery that died out in the 1660s,” explains Perkins. “I did all the research and all the studying, and I brought it all back in 1993 and 1994.” He went on teach this method of potmaking, and he is excited to be the first artist to bring that style of traditional Mohawk pottery to SWAIA. The future holds still more growth for Native artists who hope to take advantage of emerging applications and the ever-faster internet, according to Perkins. “I can see a lot of great political art being created with the technology that exists today,” he said. “We can spread messages in the blink of an eye.”
Above: Apache Kid, archival ink on canvas, acrylic, UV varnish, 20 x 52"