Put Something Up!

by Tristan Ahtone

Lloyd Oxendine dispenses with formal greetings by immediately introducing his birds. There are five of them in five separate and very large cages, bright green with the unmistakable “dinosaur-eyes” which watch his every movement as he gloats over them. His apartment is on the Upper West side close to Columbia , his old alma-matter, and filled with huge paintings that he has created on every wall.

Lloyd is considered one of the Godfathers of contemporary Indian art around New York , and I would be willing to wager that the title could be extended nationally even though he is a bit of an unknown pioneer. “I came to New York in the early sixties, but I didn’t really get into the Indian scene until about ’67 or ’68,” he begins, “about that time there was a rebirth of Indians and Indianness among Indians, and [the Indian artists here in New York] were involved with reintroducing Indianess to the Indians and the white people.”

We’ve all seen the stock footage and read about the Native movements in our alternative history books, but what’s interesting about Oxendine’s involvement was his contribution as an artist: get Indians back into American thought by showing their art. This may not be a very big deal now, but trying to fit my very young brain into the thoughts and ideas of the time period makes me believe that this approach was pretty revolutionary.

Oxendine accomplished this by setting up the American Art Gallery in Soho in 1971, marking a birth point for contemporary Indian art on the east coast as well as providing a starting point for what Soho is today. “The whole country needed to know that Indians were still around and that they were doing things – modern things; that they weren’t stuck in this pigeon hole that people are still trying to create for us.”

Granted, the scene in New York was vastly eclipsed by the goings on in Santa Fe at the time, and still is for the most part, but the big difference is that the art in New York sprung up organically, without having to be built up around an institution. Other Indian galleries began to spring up in the city, almost as points of resistance, working autonomously, known to each other but surviving on their own, at least for a little while. It’s inspiring in a lot of ways, but also a bit nerve racking. This is mainly due to the old idea of giving credit where credit is due, and me being from that Santa Fe scene very recently, I had never heard of much of anything going on out here in New York in terms of Native arts, leaving me to wonder why the whole thing worked like it did.

"Well it works because the United States thinks that way: that there are no Indians, or would like to think there are no Indians, east of the Mississippi .” This is obviously a bit of a hot button, and as a journalist, you can’t wait for what comes next when your subject hits a stride. “Around Washington they’ve got this mish-mash of culture which is very hard to understand with the tribes there, and they don’t know whether they’re white or black or whether they really have a culture! They’ve been together for all this time and they have as much culture as anybody, it may not be what they had, but that’s the way culture is: whatever you are, that’s your culture, but it’s not Plains Indian culture and that’s the emphasis. I’m just trying to think things through myself, because I never really realized that that’s what happened with stereotyping and self-stereotyping too; like Indians stereotyping each other, and it’s hard to be a free thinker when you’re from a different place – when you’re a regional thinker – I think that’s probably what it’s all about: just stereotyping and all, but it’s bad; so now they’re going to look for someone like Jaune Quick To See Smith!”

It’s definitely a hot button, which means that he’s not speaking in written English, he’s speaking regular, every-day words: long, run-on sentences, long strings of parenthetic expressions, loss of needed conjunctions, but what I think he’s telling me is that stereotyping and outright racism are to be blamed for ridiculous view points; that the idea of Santa Fe is romantic, and conjures images of Indians and Indian artists both traditional and contemporary, while images of New York rarely yield the likeness of an Indian, let alone their artwork. Luckily I’ve sort of got him going in his own excited-yet-cool sort of Lloyd way, so I figure that it’s safe to make a good and righteous blunder…

"So do you think that the stereotype extends to the idea that Indians can only do arts & crafts type things?”

"A stereotype is really a put down; putting somebody down for what they’re doing instead of putting them up for what they’re doing.”

"How so?”

"There’s nothing wrong with arts and crafts. There has always been an argument among the fine artists and the crafts people about what art was, that’s why the Museum of Modern Art is on one side of the street and the American Craft Museum is on the other side of the street. The stuff looks the same. It’s just called different things.”

This is obviously a very good argument, and unfortunately all I can manage in response is “huh,” in a sort of enlightened, guttural way.

"Any craft that excels and speaks to a lot of people becomes art. Painting is a craft. Sculpting is a craft. Writing is a craft,” an obvious pointer to the young, naïve journalist on the other end of the table, “People just didn’t understand what the words they were saying really were, so the argument about whether something is art or craft is superficial; does it speak to you? Is it art? You don’t have to put something down to put something else up.”

I turn off my tape recorder and tell him I’d like to take a few pictures before I leave, so we meander out of his apartment down to the street. It’s dark outside now, I’ve been among his birds and paintings for nearly four hours, and despite that he’s been more than generous with his time and space, one never wants to overstay their welcome, and nobody ever wants some wet-behind-the-ears journalist hanging around their house for a story like a barfly waiting for a free drink.

I forget to say goodbye to the birds before we leave, and I hope that Lloyd will be more forgiving of my social faux-pas than the birds will be. Animals tend to hold guests at higher standards of decorum when entertaining, and when it comes to birds, the dinosaur-eye never lies.

I know that nothing in the world would ever be different if more people knew about all the happenings out here from back in the day, but I’d like to think they would be. Especially when you meet people who are kind, like Lloyd is. Conversely, you could care less if the person who invented the color blue got credit if they were cocky, unprincipled, and acted as if the word ‘humble’ were just an archaic verb in the dictionary. Most normal people are pretty vain though, yet sometimes, especially in this case, some people need to get a little credit when they deserve it. So Lloyd, as I finish my last beer and cigarette until payday, I’ll raise my bottle to you and say “thank you,” because now I’m the guy in your shoes hoping to blaze new trails. You’re one of our Indian pioneers, venturing into the uncharted east, making it safe for future generations, and if no one else out there cares to acknowledge, I will. Thank you.

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