As a boy growing up in the Midwest, artist Duane Slick recalls, spending weekends with his parents and his six siblings at parties with their fellows from Meskwaki and Ho-Chunk was an important part of his life. But the visits also meant that showing and telling became a fraught activity once he went back to school.
As the family climbed into their station wagon for the ride back to their white-plastered home in Cedar Falls, Iowa, his mother turned and said, “If you come to school on Monday and they ask you to show-and-tell.” do, just tell them you went to visit your grandparents.”
“The white man doesn’t understand the Indian,” she would say. “And if you tell them something about what you’ve done and what you’ve seen, the first thing they’re going to do is try to take it all away.”
During his teens, however, he discovered a loophole in his “old age”. With the smile of someone who has come across a secret, he describes having such a hey-wait-a-minute moment: “They may have said I can’t talk, but they never said I can’t paint.” or draw.”
Slick’s artwork is now on display at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Conn., where the artist spoke about his life and work. Titled “The Coyote Makes the Sunset Better,” it is his first solo exhibition in a museum and features 90 works of art: abstract paintings, text art, prints, photography, found objects, and video.
His output was not always so varied. The artist and curator Jaune Quick-to-See Smith recalls, “When I met Duane, he was a fantastic landscape painter in oil.”
But that changed about three decades ago. “I kind of think everything starts in 1990,” Slick said of the new direction his work was taking. At that time, preparations were underway for the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas. Smith invited Slick to contribute work to a show she was curating “from an Indigenous point of view.” But she wanted explicit political work.
“I was hoping to open some doors and windows, let some fresh air in, about the fallacies this country promoted,” she said.
Initially, Slick found Smith’s request for political work challenging. But while at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center in Massachusetts, he came across local news: Coyotes, native to the American West, had made their way to the tip of Cape Cod. The news seemed coincidental. He had already thought of the Coyote, a recurring figure in many Native American myths, while reading traditional stories in books like Barry Lopez’s “Giving Birth to Thunder, Sleeping With His Daughter”.
“I decided I couldn’t do the overtly political works,” Slick said, “but if I trusted Coyote, he could do it for me.”
He eventually delivered a work that was “highly political and commendable,” Smith said in an email, “a knockout mixed-media painting that recited the names of his ancestors and listed Native Americans from the turn of the century. .”
Slick’s abstract landscapes soon gave way to a broad practice, often incorporating the coyote. He began performing what he calls “sand stories,” dripping sand from his closed fist onto a black cloth while telling stories centered on the animal. He even gave a lecture to the College Art Association that took the form of a five-minute conversation with a coyote. As Slick told stories, the coyote urged him, “Duane, stay on topic. Why are you here?”
Three decades later, Slick’s canine friend shows up at his Aldrich show — and not just in the form of two coyote decoys placed in the museum. The coyote’s wolf-like mug appears repeatedly, in prints and paintings that begin to mimic Warhol’s famous multiples of celebrities. With the animal’s head tilted at various angles in layered hues, the brighter pieces in the series evoke the flashy alternating neon light animations you might find on a nightclub sign. The show also features a video based on 3D scans of a coyote mask that Slick bought in Mexico; a series of text paintings; and a photo of his personal book collection (with titles such as “Custer Died for Your Sins”).
Between these portraits are more abstract, horizontally striped canvases that Slick made during the lockdown. When making these paintings, he says he had the American flag in mind. (His father, a Korean War veteran, had died in 2008, followed by several other relatives.) He says he also thought about the darkness of the night, and the colors of feather fans, and the row upon row of storage shelves he kept. saw while working on a project at the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology at Brown University, which was founded around a collection of 60,000 Native American objects.
The paintings are great. Seeing it gives a thrill that I think is comparable to discovering a five-letter word that is both the password to a sleeping bitcoin wallet and the answer to the current Wordle: the works have the ingenuity of a single answer to several puzzles at once. First, they suggest the textures of modern life, be it the perfect curves of prefabricated furniture or the glitching screens and grids of early video games. But they also seem to experience the experience of mourning in nature: the experience, perhaps, of pausing to look at a night sky and letting an unknown new loneliness sink in.
In addition, they engage in different traditions of the making of geometric patterns was honed long before European and American modernists became famous for the practice. But they also succeed when read through the lens of minimalism and hard-edge painting, the legacies of which have become part of many East Coast MFA painting programs today.
Slick himself taught at the Rhode Island School of Design for nearly 27 years, in both the painting and graphics departments. (Those two worlds seemingly come together in his Coyote canvases, whose painted, overlapping hues reflect the layered approaches to printmaking.) said the RISD committee that hired Slick. But the artist “takes the theme and he disturbs it, and he revives it and problematizes it.”
Of Slick’s current exhibition, Congdon said, “Every painting there is so good.”
With such good work, it may be hard to believe that Slick is only now getting his first solo exhibition in a museum at the age of 60. But as Smith explained, “This is happening a lot in our Indigenous communities.” She noted: that if one were to research art museums in the US, each “could have half a dozen contemporary native artists or none”.
Slick has had solo exhibitions at other nonprofit institutions, such as the UNI Gallery of Art at the University of Northern Iowa, his undergraduate alma mater. Darrell Taylor, the gallery’s director, has long been impressed with Slick’s work. He said that when the gallery opened a year of alumni shows in 2010, Slick was “one of the first people I thought of.”
“His paintings had a kind of liquid quality, a liquid surface that you could see the layers all the way through,” Taylor said. “In its build-up of layers, it’s like looking inward — maybe to the past or to the future.”
Duane Slick: The Coyote Makes the Sunset BetterThrough May 8 at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, 258 Main Street, Ridgefield, Conn., 203-438-4519, thealdrich.org.
