Jimmie Durham is a Cherokee, born in Arkansas in 1940. He is a visual artist, and also a politcal activist for the American Indian Movement and an essayist. In the ‘60’s and ‘70s he dedicated his time to theatre and performances, and since the ‘80s he was been creating strange objects, assemblages and installations that find their principal source in his Native culture, which he uses to deconstruct the stereotypes and prejudices of Western culture. Thus dealing with issues of identity and political correctness.
One of the most impressive works from that period is Karankawa (1983), a human skull that Durham found on a Texas beach where the Karankawa people had been massacred. He inlaid it with turquoise and adorned it with symbols and a feather necklace. (It is tempting to see a reference here to the ongoing Native struggles to reclaim ancestral remains and artifacts from national museums.)
By 1989, Durham was expressing reluctance to show the bone pieces because they were too "beautiful" and fed viewers' stereotypes about "Indian" art. In its humor and irony, however, his work is in fact very "Indian." "Humor is a good weapon against victimization," he observes. "We Indians are very funny. I'm always impressed at how silly we can be in beautiful ways that would be inappropriate in the normal world."[12] Yet even as he makes "Cherokee art," Durham resists making anything recognizably "Indian" in the Santa-Fe-Indian-market mold. His art is not decorative or lyrical and does not reference history through style. He avoids noble braves and bashful maidens, tipis and warbonnets, like the commercial plague they have become. "The |Indian' art market continues to expand," he says, "but it has never been ours. It has served to isolate |Indian' artists through commercial success in a specialized area."
This shows that no matter how unintentional, a persons culture and "identity" always shines through to reveal either what can be seen as a positive or negative thing- depending on your point of view.
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