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N A   ”L O W   B R O W”   exhibit      –    until March 19

Roughness   –   toughness   –   coolness

and  –    C O L O R      

No disguise, no middleman’s hands   –   directly from Native America..

”Crown Dancer” by  Douglas Miles

What is Kiva Gallery  ?

Kiva Gallery specializes in art made by the Native people of North America and particularly the Southwest USA. This area is especially rich in cultural traditions, going back to the pottery and craftwork from the tribes of the middle ages, and continuing today with oil and acrylic paintings, sculptures, textile, as well as decidedly modern artistic expressions through graffiti and skateboarding, photography and graphic art.

Native culture today cannot be summed up with a few go-to terms and familiar motifs. Many contemporary artists are struggling with how to remain faithful to their cultural heritage while still updating its traditional idiom to modern times.    

The mission of Kiva is to capture Native culture in a time of transition and translation. We choose to display artworks that will illuminate this process. Combining traditional arts and crafts – such as pottery and Kachina dolls; rugs and jewelry – with contemporary painting that relate to a broader art-historical, as well as pop-cultural, context, Kiva’s ambition is to demonstrate a culture of vibrancy, of energy and restlessness.

In the years that Kiva has been open, it has come to function as more that an art gallery. It has become an open forum of conversation and exchange about marginalized cultures. This is how we like it. Stop by for a coffee and a chat.

Valentine night in the north:

An icy heart in the frosty city of Uppsala, Sweden

On Valentine’s Day:

To the Deserts and their People, –

LOVE   and Respect

San Francisco Peaks, Arizona.  Considered sacred by Native Americans

 Painted Desert,  Arizona

Indian Paint Brush

Another Kiva Gallery favorite is Ryan Singer. Some aspects of his art lend themselves to the classification of ”lowbrow”. Indeed, in some instances the influence of the aesthetics of the lower strata of culture is obvious. One often recognizes elements from comic book art and poster design – those of Frank Kozik in particular  – in Singer’s art.

While on the one hand a pop cultural muncher of americana, other work by Singer offers more astute social commentary.The darker aspects of american culture are present too – all too present. Some of his recent paintings capture the pervading sense of alienation and disconnect from Edward Hopper’s paintings, but supplements it with a more precise cause – alcohol. Excessive drinking has of course been the source of demise of many a Native American. Singer, however, seems to shun personal blame in order to cast light on the extent to which it has been used as a political weapon.

Amidst the arrows, guns and dead bodies in ”Flying Engine”, bottles lie strewn throughout the battlefield as if to suggest that alcohol was a dominant weapon in the white man’s conquer of the land.

In ”Returning to Childhood” the ever present gates to alcoholic oblivion remains a force of oppression and control.

…Personally, Singer’s drinking preferences lean toward the more modest stimulant of coffee.

I’m soon off to the deserts and the Indian markets of southwest USA again, and one stop on the way will definitely be LACMA in Los Angeles which is hosting a large retrospective exhibition on the work of Stanley Kubrick. One film that I’m particularly interested in is ”The Shining”. Far from being a gore-hound, however, it is not the excessive bloodshed that draws me. Instead I will view it as an important reminder of the tragic past of the American Native People and the silence that still surrounds the historical atrocities. This is perhaps not the most obvious way to approach the film but I have journalist Bill Blakemore to thank for it.

In an influential article from 1987, Blakemore suggested that the genocide of the Native American is in fact the central, albeit hidden, theme of ”The Shining”. Indeed, Indian motifs and references abound in ”The Shining”. The Overlook Hotel, where the bloody action takes place, is itself said to be built on an Indian burial ground. Inside the hotel, the Colorado lounge, where Jack is writing his ”epic”, is adorned with a traditional Navajo textile. In the freezer, the shelves are stocked with cans of Calumet (a word for peace pipe) baking powder which are decorated by the cliché image of an Indian chief.

As Blakemore has it, all these references add up to ”The Shining” ”really” being about America’s preference to overlook the genocide by means of which its civilization is established.

Blakemore concludes on these dismal yet noteworthy words: ”Kubrick is examining in this movie not only the duplicity of individuals, but of whole societies that manage to commit atrocities and then carry on as though nothing were wrong. That’s why there have been so many murders over the years at the Overlook; man keeps killing his family and forgetting about it, and then doing it again… Though [Kubrick] has made here a movie about the arrival of Old World evils in America, he is exploring most specifically an old question: Why do humans constantly perpetuate such ”inhumanity” against humans? That family is the family of man.”

Kubrick was of course notoriously tight-lipped as to the ”true” meaning of his films. Consequently, they have spawned wildly different interpretations. Blakemore’s perspective is, however, one that I find not only plausible but also most politically urgent. It allows one to inject with moral outrage the bloodbaths that gushes forth on screen as well as those that have soiled the ground of the American nation.