$40.00 U.S. (trade discount)
E-book TBD.
Hardcover
136 pages with 64 illustrations as follows: 53 color ledger drawings by the author, 3 historic ledger drawings, 7 historic black-and-white family photographs, and 1 color catalog cover
11.0″ x 9.0″ landscape
ISBN: 978–1–938086–84–7
Published in July 2021
Distributed by Casemate/IPM
www.casemateipm.com
Published in association with the Center for the Study of Place.
Events and Exhibitions
August 19, 2021, from 5:00-7:00pm
Exhibit opening and book signing
Morning Star Gallery, Santa Fe
Press Release about the sale of Wilcox’s work (2021)
New York Times article “A Site for Creative Collaboration: The Oglala Lakota Artspace is nurturing talent amid a resurgence of Indigenous Traditions” by Patricia Leigh Brown (2024)
by Dwayne Wilcox
edited and introduced by Karen Miller Nearburg
2021 Foreword Reviews INDIES Honorable Mention for Best Book in Popular Culture
Native American ledger art grew out of the Plains Indian tradition of recording and chronicling through art important tribal events, among them images of war and hunting, that would adorn tipis and animal hides. These were seen as pivotal historical markers.
But Native life on the Great Plains underwent tremendous change following the American Civil War, when the American conquest of the West was in full gear. In just a few decades, access to the hides of diminishing herds of bison, antelope, deer, sheep, and elk became more difficult and eventually impossible with reservation life. So Native people creatively turned to the easily available ledger books of settlers, traders, and military men for their new canvases.
The ledger art drawings of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are thus revered today for their depiction of Native life during the difficult transition from freedom on the Plains to life on the reservation. Ledger drawings became an even more important way for Native artists not only to preserve tribal events, but to serve as a new kind of personal socio-political expression.
Dwayne Wilcox, who grew up on the Pine Ridge Reservation and is a member of the Oglala Lakota Nation, became interested in ledger art at an early age. He was influenced by the work of Lakota ledger artists such as Amos Bad Heart Bull (1869-1913), but he always sought to defy stereotypical notions and perceptions of Native life and culture and create his own artistic vision. Dwayne eventually focused on humor as his way to comment on the objectification of Native Americans.
Skilled as an artist beyond measure, Dwayne’s ledger art drawings win major prizes and are sought by museums and collectors who see in him a true artist. In 2020, all of Dwayne’s drawings from Visual/Language were purchased by Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
Visual/Language: The Ledger Drawings of Dwayne Wilcox is a collaborative effort with curator Karen Miller Nearburg, who provides an enlightening introduction to Lakota ledger art and Dwayne’s journey as a Native artist. As she writes: “The ‘real art’ of Dwayne Wilcox reveals his life experiences as a window into life on the Pine Ridge Reservation.”
About
About the Author
Dwayne Wilcox was born in 1957 in Kadoka, South Dakota, grew up on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, and is a member of the Oglala Lakota Nation. He has been a full-time artist since 1987 but a life-long producer of art. Wilcox’s work has been widely exhibited and is in the collections of institutions throughout the United States, including the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of the American Indian, Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, Peabody Museum at Harvard University, Museum of Nebraska Art, Charles M. Russell Museum, and National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. And all 53 drawings from Visual/Language were purchased by Yale University. His drawings have received numerous awards from the Santa Fe Indian Market, Heard Museum’s Indian Art Market, and South Dakota Governor’s Award in the Art for Distinction in Creative Achievement, and he has received a Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship and a Bush Artist Fellowship. He resides in Rapid City, South Dakota.
About the Editor
Karen Miller Nearburg was born in 1960 and grew up in Hanover, New Hampshire. She earned her B.A. in fine arts and child development from Tufts University, her Ed.M. from Harvard University, and her M.A. in art history from the University of Maryland, College Park. Karen spent 15 years in Alaska and wrote her M.A. thesis on the work of contemporary Inupiaq sculptor Susie Qimmiqsak Bevins. Since then, she has worked in museums and galleries and was Assistant Curator at the Hood Museum at Dartmouth College, where she curated Contemporary Native American Ledger Art: Drawing on Tradition (2010), and coordinated Native American Ledger Drawings from the Hood Museum of Art: The Mark Lansburgh Collection (2010), as well as Native American Art at Dartmouth: Highlights from the Hood Museum of Art (2011–2012). In 2019, she also curated Dwayne Wilcox: Visual/Language at the Museum of Contemporary Native Art at the Institute of American Indian Art in Santa Fe, among other exhibitions. She resides in Dallas, Texas.
Slide Show
Praise
“Visual/Language is not only a superlative production of bookmaking but uniquely so. It can’t be compared to any other book that I know. The author’s artistic caricatures and commentaries are truly great, but the design of the book and the materials used to fulfill it surpass even the contents in aesthetic imagination. You have produced a masterpiece.”
—Anders Richter, former Director of the Smithsonian Institution Press
“Like William Hogarth or Bill Mauldin, Dwayne Wilcox depicts personal experience in ways that broaden and reshape our understanding of the world we share. That Dwayne is Lakota means everything and nothing. Funny, poignant, or pointed, his ledger drawings invite us to enter his life and consider the challenges, appreciate the humor, and respect the enduring presence of Lakota people in twenty-first century America.” —George Miles, William Robertson Coe Curator of the Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University
“Dwayne Wilcox’s ledger drawings are compelling, beautifully executed, and laugh-out-loud humorous in the way they poke fun at both white and Native cultures. Beneath the initial layer of an amusing story, however, is a complex world drawn from personal experience and his Lakota culture’s deep history. In Visual/Language, Wilcox provides a resolved, well-rounded narrative that has much to say about life in today’s Native world.”
—Stephen Glueckert, Senior Curator Emeritus, Missoula Art Museum
“Dwayne Wilcox’s Visual/Language has a level of respect for his subjects: his own Lakota people. He works tirelessly to be true to the challenges of reservation life while supporting cultural traditions, defending a way of life yet being honest throughout with the reality that none of us are perfect. We are all struggling along life’s journey. The drawing style Dwayne uses intentionally removes individuality. At the same time his captions point out social significance while his personal narrative offers an unfolding life story, acknowledging his own vulnerability. At each step, Dwayne balances the desire to be honest and respectful of us all, both Native and non-Native, forgiving our flaws, if he even sees them as flaws rather than the reality of us all trying to learn the lessons needed on our journey. He does so pointedly, calling out actions yet without any individual being blamed. Dwayne’s skillful use of direct Lakota humor—cutting-edge, burst-out-loud-laughing humor—is filled with compassion for the Lakota people and all First Nation’s people in their struggle to hold onto cultural beliefs amidst a dominating society surrounding them and attempting to stifle their ways relentlessly for hundreds of years now at every turn.
“Dwayne’s use of the Lakota tradition of ledger art to tell his stories could not be more fitting. The ledger art tradition itself grew from the early days of Indian reservations being used to control his Native people. As the white people overseeing the reservation’s allotment of goods filled their ledger books, they cast them aside to the Native artists, the visual storytellers, who sadly had been allocated to live a restricted lifestyle in their own land where they then had no access to the more traditional animal hides to paint their visual narratives on. Earlier the hides were gathered from the tribe’s hunting and gathering harvest. As with all aspects of life, the animals hunted were used with every portion having a purpose, with nothing being cast aside in waste. This was done always in respect, honor, and gratitude for all life and the sacrifices made from one life form to another in contribution to the sacred circle of existence.
“Dwayne’s masterful storytelling and humility are a generous offering to all. Any reader will have the opportunity to be reminded of the value of all living things within this work while laughing hard and at times crying equally as hard. I am grateful to have been introduced to Dwayne and his work many years ago. Through it he has continually reminded me of what around us is truly worthy of valuing. This book and the work within it should be shared with people from all walks of life.”
—John Willis, author of Views from the Reservation: A New Edition and Mni Wiconi / Water Is Life: Honoring the Water Protectors at Standing Rock and Everywhere in the Ongoing Struggle for Indigenous Sovereignty
My Place
Once it was full of cedar trees that were cut and sold for fence post. By the time I came along they were all gone except for the stumps. My dad told me the cedar stumps were a hundred years ago.
We as a family used to climb to the top when we had company from out of state. Over the years when I would come home to visit my mother, she would ask if I was going up to the butte? And the answer was always yes.
Many times as a teen I would spend a night up there where you’re able to see for nearly fifty miles. It may not seem that monumental, but it has a ten-acre flat top. When I was in maybe 6th or 7th grade there were at least three golden eagle nests around it. From the summit you could look down into the pine trees and see the nesting eaglets. We would watch the parents hunt rabbit and prairie dogs. On clear full-moon nights you could see the badlands’ white glow, and on a new moon so dark the Milky Way was bright you could see a thunderstorm a hundred miles away. At night the sound would travel a great distance: a coyote’s howling or just the breeze on the grass. On windy days the grass would look like waves on the ocean.
I used to set and think how many people have set and looked out at this view, because some of the bigger rocks had small markings on them. I took my son and daughter up there nearly twenty years ago and now it’s my grandchildren’s turn, but my youth is gone so it will probably be the last time I’ll get to go up. When I was young it was grass as far you could see. Now it’s covered in very small pine trees—not cedar—and it’s plowed ground all around—farms have replaced the cattle ranches.
Why is it that I think of this place as so inspirational? One night I woke from a dream that to this day I can remember like reality. I could fly, and that was long before I ever got on an airplane, and the views were exactly the same. I always anticipated my future from my secret spiritual perch and the offerings I left there.
Copyright © 2020 Dwayne Wilcox. All rights reserved.
My concept of my place in the world has changed dramatically over time as I have lived a rather nomadic life and experienced great change due to the unexpected death of my first husband Bart when he was 49 in 2006.
In the summer of 1979, Bart and I traveled to Alaska, a land that held great fascination for us. I fell in love with that place—the land and its people—and its grip has never let go.
Living in Kodiak, Anchorage, Nome, and Fairbanks introduced me to the Native cultures, arts, and people of Alaska. Contemporary Native Alaskan art became my professional focus.
Educational and employment opportunities caused us to leave the state, but I always imagined I would return to live there one day. That is, until Bart was killed in an accident and I was left unmoored, no longer feeling as though I had a place in the world, because he had been my home, and Alaska our place. Without him, where did I belong?
I had to allow myself to emerge from the fog of grief and learn how to live again. I had to because I had two sons, aged 13 and 14 at the time of their father’s death, and I needed to take care of them. Thankfully, despite the ups and downs of adolescence compounded by their own grief and emotional upheaval they are now both healthy, productive young men.
It was shortly after being widowed that I began working at Dartmouth’s Hood Museum of Art where I again became involved with Native arts and peoples.
When Dwayne Wilcox and I met in April of 2009, he had just lost his mother days before, and my own grief was still perceptible. This shared emotional rawness, I believe, allowed him to open up to me, and to know that I could hear what he had to say. This was the beginning of our collaboration.
Since then, I have found happiness again with my second husband Charlie, with whom I spend much of the year in Colorado and New Mexico, immersed once again in Native lands and cultures. And while all of us in this country occupy Native lands, in some locations this reality is more tangible, and it is to these places that I feel most connected.
My place then is less about specific location and more about people. My place is with the people I love. That’s where I live.
Copyright © 2020 Karen Miller Nearburg. All rights reserved.