Markings on Land:

From Petroglyphs to Canvas

READINGS

Dobkins, Rebecca J. Rick Bartow: My Eye. Hallie Ford Museum of Art, 2002.

Sandos, James A. “Between Crucifix and Lance: Indian-White Relations in California, 1769-1848.” California History, Vol. 76, No. 2/3: 196- 229 Contested Eden: California Before the Gold Rush. Summer - Fall, 1997.

Rick BartowNo Polite Conversation, 2002. Pastel and charcoal on paper, 40 x 26 in

I always feel very beholden to people. As a recovering alcoholic and general ne’er-do-well, I know that so many times, if it hadn’t been for my friends, I may not have survived. I’ve been blessed to know a lot of wonderful, supportive people.

For many years, these people would try to get me to see myself as an artist, but I just couldn’t believe that was possible. I kept doing art but then I wouldget drunk and burn it up, or give it away... It wasn’t until recently that I really came to understand my gift, and the responsibility it carries.

It was through ceremony at the sweathouse I go to that I saw I was given something that could be very powerful, and it is there that I continue to learn how to change my life... With this gift comes responsibility, which in turn requires self-discipline and humility. Previously I hadn’t taken responsibility for it. It’s difficult to explain, except to say that it’s through people that I’m alive.

Rick Bartow

Bartow is Wiyut (California) and lives in Oregon

Bear Heart, 2012Painting acrylic on canvas   40 x 30 in PIN: BAR2396

Little Bear Dance, 2011Sculpture wood   26.5 x 10.5 x 11.5 in

When Women Were Doctors2006

Monoprint - monotype, 1/1 30 x 22 inches

Both Feet on the Ground #1 Snake Dancer2009

acrylic on panel12 x 9 inches

Green Crow Hop Pow Wow2009

pastel, graphite, charcoal 40 x 26 inches

Two Step Pow Wow2009 pastel, graphite, charcoal 40 x 26 inches

Crow Hop 102009

Carborundum print 15 x 11 inches

From the Mad River to the Little Salmon River, or The Responsibility of Raising a Child (Bartow, 2005)

Harry Fonseca1946 – 2006

Making and Breaking Standards

“We weren’t doing what people expected Native American work to be..”

Coyote #11975

Acrylic on Canvas 48 x 29 inches

Deer Dancers 1979

Serigraph 52/6030 x 22 inches

Fonseca, When Coyote Leaves the Res or Portrait of the Artist as a Young Coyote, 1980 48 X 36”

Shuffle Off to Buffalo #51983

acrylic / mixed media60 x 48 inches

Fonseca + coyote on web

Wish You Were HereFonesca, Harryc.1986

“Why do I paint? I do it because I love to do it. I remember seeing someof Robert Motherwell's work and falling in love with that and starting to movepaint around and drip paint and having a great time, but not really with anydirection. It was almost art for art's sake. I didn't know what I was sayingbut the paint was really moving. Then I found out more about my NativeAmerican background, and became involved with the dances and thatwhole traditional base. That really gave me a foundation, not only for mebut for my art work as well.” (Abbott)

Robert Motherwell, "Mexican Night II” 1984, 63.5 x 61 cm

Robert Motherwell (January 24, 1915 – July 16, 1991) was an American painter, printmaker, and editor.

Elegy to the Spanish, 1966 84 x 147 in.

"Frank Day was born in Berry Creek, California, into the Konkow Maidu tribe. The Maiduan peoples - the Konkow, Nisenan, and Mountain Maidu - have occupied the region of California from the northern Sierra Nevada Mountains to the Sacramento River Valley for hundreds of years. Day's father, Billy, was one of the last traditional leaders of the Bald Rock Konkow Maidu. From his father and other Konkow Maidu elders, Frank Day learned the language, myths, legends, songs, and traditions of his people."

Frank Day (1902-76)

. . . The importance of his vision is through his identity as a Maidu culture bearer, his oral and symbolic interpretation of Maidu heritage, and his seminal role of song-giver to the dance and ceremonial activities of the Maidu Dancers and Traditionalists."

Ishi and Companion at Iamin Mool 1973 Oil on canvas, 24 x 36 in.Collection of Herb and Peggy Puffer

Ishi, the last known member of his Yahi tribe, suddenly appeared in Butte County in August 1911, after a lifetime of avoiding contact with white society.   In the artist's account, then nine-year-old Frank Day and his father came upon Ishi just outside Oroville. Ishi was engaged in an elaborate healing practice to save a wounded companion. Day explained: "It was apparent that the companion suffered from a wound in the stomach perhaps, a gunshot wound. A clamshell shield was placed to reflect the hot morning sun to heat water without smoke, in a round lava water holder. . . . A cloth was wrapped round and round and was thrown over a limb and at each end was a round rock, like an acorn pounding rock, that was heated and applied to the wound." Although he and his father returned to this spot to look for evidence of these strangers, it was not until Ishi appeared in Oroville and was held in the local jail that they saw him again, this time without his companion.

Sun King1990Mixed media on unstretched canvas60 x 72 inches

“Petroglyphs play a major role in our aesthetic, history, and keeping of intellect. They are a means of telling a story, writing or describing an event, or are marks from some supernatural being with a specific intent.”

“The original hand carefully made a place for a descendant to observe and respond: not a material item to cart about with the maker, but a place which the maker knew we would eventually return to.”

“..history without alteration.”

“I imagine the West before it became an open window of a car…”

“It is a place one should linger to know oneself in a simple and vulnerable relationship…. This dignified attention is the essence of rock art and present in the attention and energy of Fonseca.”

Elizabeth Woody, 1996, Harry Fonseca: Earth, Wind and Fire

A petroglyph of a caravan of bighorn sheep Moab Utahhttp://www.thefullwiki.org/Petroglyphs

Stone Poem #11, 1989, Mixed media on unstretched canvas, 84” X 72”

“I'm using big brushes and oil stick, and oil stick is a real awkwardmedium. You have to be really aggressive with it in order to pull it off. Youcan't be tender with it, or at least I find a hard time being tender with it. Also,they are emotionally-charged when they are larger”.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_art_of_the_Chumash_people

I had some black paint, red oxide and some artificial gold leaf around, so I started to do The Discovery of Gold and Souls in California series. I did four of them and thought I would not do anymore because these were just too brutal, but there was something that intrigued me about both their brutality and their elegance, so I ended up doing 160 of them, and I think that they probably are my most pointed, political statements.

That doesn’t mean a great, great deal to me. I don't think you have to toss a bomb atsomething that you dislike to be conscious of political situation. I think the most profound political statement being made today is by any Native American that is still breathing. They don't have to be marching, justbreathing.

Abbott 1996 “A Time of Visions”: Contemporary American Indian Art and Artists”

Harry Fonseca, The Discovery of Gold in California, 8.5.97, #10

The Gold Rush, an event that profoundly shaped California, brought disastrous consequences to California Indians, especially Fonseca's Nisenan Maidu ancestors living in the heart of gold country. Between 1846 and 1870 alone, the number of California Indians declined from 150,000 to 30,000, an 80 percent reduction in population. They died from disease, starvation, forced labor, and state-sanctioned murder. Historian James Rawls refers to this event as "California's Holocaust."http://museumca.org/goldrush/fonseca01.html

Sandos – “Indian White Relations”

Franciscans did not succeeded unless Indians cooperated and Indians only cooperated when… they had something to gain…Resistance and Hidden stories..

Harry Fonseca, The Discovery of Gold in California, 5.21.97, #6Photograph by Catherine Buchanan

The Discovery of Gold and Souls in California, 1991-1992,eight crosses from a series of 160, mixed media on paper, 15” X 11”

Dialogue with a Deer1996

Mixed media on unstretched raw canvas60 x 34 inches

“You get a sense ofdepth because of the black base on the canvas. It's like a hole you can go into. You could have a black canvas and put a white hand on that canvasand you'll have space for days. That hand will hover there forever and the black will suck you in. I like that.”

Saint Francis of Assisi1996Mixed media on canvas63 x 38 inches

Maidu Creation Story1999

Mixed media on canvas 60 x 72 inches

Sun Dance #132003acrylic on canvas48 x 36 inches

Canyon I2005acrylic on canvas72 x 60 inches

Sandos“Our known stories of California's history are frequently no more than the most

recent telling by the conquerors of their own great deeds”

“a richer, more interesting, and more inclusive history of colonial Californiaawaits.”

William Cronan, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin

1)Species-shifting –new animals and plants + no immunity to infections.2)Boundary-setting - boundaries between baptized and non baptized Indians3)State-forming Indians were to become the labor force in a

new Spanish world4) Land-taking – settlement' meant land taking5)Marketmaking - European material goods gradually entered the world market far beyond California6)Self-shaping - the way individuals refashioned themselves to meet new conditions

It is this difference in approaching the land – tribal communal sharing bounded by river and creek drainages versus Spanish and Mexican grants of extensive acreage to individuals and subsequent American subdivision into personal plots-that caused most of the Indian-white conflict in early California

When Europeans entered the New World, they unleashed “disease miocrobes” – decimated AI population in Western Hemisphere by the millions.Number of California Indians at contact as 310,000, Cook calculated a decline from 1770 to 1830 of about 21 percent, or 65,000 people. In the missions, the decline was far more precipitous. Although violence contributed, decline came primarily from the unintended introduction of disease

Patriarchy, lowered the status of Indian women within Indian culture.

The horse changed everything. Sedentary life eroded as native peoples became mobile

"Act for the Government and Protection of Indians," enacted in 1850 - Indians arrested for vagrancy or any other minor offense could be hired out for up to four months by any white man who could pay their bail. Whites could also obtain Indian children legally as servants, and Indian adults could be hired as indentured servants. Abuses under the law led to virtual Indian slavery. Not until the Civil War, and following the Emancipation Proclamation, was the California law repealed, since it countered Union policy.