Vicki Monks

American, Chickasaw, born 1952

BiographyVicki Monks discovered her love of photography as a child in the 1960s when she borrowed her father’s old Brownie box camera and began documenting the people and events in her hometown of Tahlequah, Oklahoma, the capital of the Cherokee Indian Nation. During her subsequent career as a television and radio reporter and magazine writer, Monks has continued to explore documentary photography as a means of communicating nuances beyond what is possible using the written and spoken word. Her projects have included photographing women in Guatemalan villages where, a few years before, vigilante death squads had executed all of the men and older boys, and photographing the indigenous people of Irian Jaya, Indonesia, whose survival is threatened by corporate and government sponsored ventures.

In 2006, Monks returned to her home state to begin work on Lost in Oklahoma, a narrative and photography book project that examines the perseverance of Indian people in Oklahoma in the face of eradication through the pressure of assimilation. Her recent photographic series, Mixed Indian, developed out of encounters with many Indian people of mixed tribal descent, who often also have some European and African American heritage. The portraits in this series offer a glimpse into the current realities of Indian people after more than one hundred years of assimilation policies. Though the issue is a divisive one at first glance, Monks emphasizes that it has also resulted in greater unity among many Native Americans.

Monks is a member of the Chickasaw Nation. Her photographs have appeared in publications including National Wildlife Magazine and the Los Angeles Times. She has only recently begun exhibiting her photographs, beginning with the 2007 exhibit Current Realities, an invitational, multi-media traveling art show that began at the Individual Artists of Oklahoma Gallery (Nov. 9-Dec. 21, 2007). The exhibition presented an American Indian perspective on the Oklahoma statehood centennial. Monks’ photograph Chii was selected for the exhibition New Native Photography, 2011, at the New Mexico Museum of Art (Aug. 12-Jan 8, 2011) by jurors Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie, Larry McNeil, and Katherine Ware.

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