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How the West is One
How the West is One
How the West is One

How the West is One

Artist (American, Navajo, born 1969)
Date2012 (printed 2013)
Mediumpigment prints, diptych
DimensionsImage (a): 35 1/16 × 23 1/8 in. (89.1 × 58.7 cm)
Support (a): 36 × 25 3/16 in. (91.4 × 64 cm)
Mat (a): 40 × 30 in. (101.6 × 76.2 cm)
Image (b): 35 × 23 1/16 in. (88.9 × 58.6 cm)
Support (b): 36 × 25 1/8 in. (91.4 × 63.8 cm)
Mat (b): 40 × 30 in. (101.6 × 76.2 cm)
ClassificationsPhotograph
Credit LineMuseum purchase with funds from FOCA+P and Bob Nurock, in honor of Dr. Joseph Traugott, 2013
Object number2013.18ab
DescriptionLeft print of diptych: Waist-length self-portrait with the artist’s head in profile. He is wearing a dark-colored button-front shirt with sleeves rolled up to elbows. Prominent silver necklace with some medallions in blue and a bracelet on his right arm. Right print of diptych: Waist-length self-portrait with the artist’s head in profile. He is wearing a light-colored shirt with sleeves rolled up to elbows, a striped vest with buttons, a dark necktie, and a white hat. He also wears a large, white glove on his left hand, which is held over his heart.
Text Entries

The photograph was made in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

 

To create this piece, the artist used a large-format camera and the historic wet-plate collodion process on an iron backing (a tintype). The unique original was scanned into a computer and then printed on paper. The paper print reflects the mottled chemistry and scratches on the surface of the unique original. The artist uses the historic process to refer to nineteenth-century photographs of Native Americans that have shaped popular conceptions of Indians. He sees his work as an “intervention” in that history of photography.

 

The left side of the diptych was made as one of the earliest images in the artist’s project titled Critical Indigenous Exchange (CIPX), initially conducted at the New Mexico Museum of Art during Indian Market in August 2012. According to the artist, he borrowed the necklace in the picture from Bruce Bernstein, the director of SWAIA/Indian Market, who asked him to shoot it for their auction and catalog. He has continued making work for that series at other sites including the Denver Art Museum, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and will be making portraits for it again at NMMA during Indian Market in August 2013. Wilson’s intention, as a Native American artist, is to make portraits of other Native American artists and those who have supported them in the art world, as an antidote to the  “outsider” or more colonialist portraits of Native Americans that permeate the culture (particularly those of Edward Curtis). Wilson creates these portraits as tintypes – wet collodion process on an iron backing – and before giving these unique originals to the sitter he scans them into a computer for his future use in exhibiting the overall series. He gives the originals to the sitter so they have control over their own image. At this point, he plans to keep the group of scanned images together so he does not have to “sell” Indians. The right side of the diptych was made some time later than the left, with the intention of putting the two images together. The artist first printed the two images on a single sheet of paper and exhibited that piece at the Heard Museum in Phoenix. Before it went on view, NMMA curators saw the piece and suggested it be realized as two separate prints. The artist was open to that but in the end decided to produce the edition as two LED panels. He printed the two images separately on paper as a unique edition for the museum. The title of the diptych was borrowed from an exhibition of the museum’s permanent collection organized by Joe Traugott in 2007.
This double self-portrait was originally made using a nineteenth-century photographic process in which light-sensitive material is poured onto a metal sheet before being exposed by the camera. The artist scanned the unique print that resulted and printed it as a larger image on paper. His use of the early process is a reference to photographer Edward Curtis and other European American artists whose photographs of Native Americans have permeated this country’s culture. By being “the Indian behind the camera” and photographing contemporary Native peoples, Wilson addresses the misconceptions and stereotypes that have resulted from a long history of portraiture by those with little knowledge or understanding of indigenous cultures.
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