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North America

Jim Denomie
Standing Rock, 28 Degree

Standing Rock, 28 Degree is part of one of Jim Denomie’s most important series of narrative paintings dedicated to the ceaseless violence wrought by white supremacy. The artist represents the Standing Rock Sioux’s fight, since 2016, to block plans to run the Dakota Access Pipeline straight through Sioux territory, a proposal which posed major environmental contamination risks. In this iteration, Denomie turns away from the water protectors to portray the police, military, local government authorities, and attack dogs as faceless ghostly creatures threatening those approaching the nearby Blackwater Bridge. Even when the artist is devoted to representing historical or political events, his images respond to the desire to capture the spiritual energy and forms of Indigenous protection involved in that struggle. Denomie’s work witnesses these forms of contemporary aggression in dialogue with a long history of similar racist and settler-colonial violence, capturing the ongoing fight of Native American and other Indigenous peoples for the right to self-determination.

As a child, Jim Denomie moved to Chicago as result of the Indian Relocation Act of 1956, a United States law created to encourage Native Americans to leave reservations and assimilate into the general population. Continuing the Ojibwe oral and visual storytelling tradition, Denomie created paintings–and later on sculptures–that looked closely and critically at the history between the U.S. Government and Native Americans. His works share histories left out of traditional schooling, documenting the different forms of violence perpetrated against Indigenous Peoples in the United States today. Deploying humor, caricature, and a vibrant painting style of rapidly applied brushstrokes, Denomie captures the ongoing fight of Native Americans for the right to self-determination and to occupy their constantly threatened homelands. Denomie's work also portrays various forms of mystic affective encounters as a metaphor for reconnection with the territory, more-than-human worlds, sacred knowledge, and spiritual forces. The artist combined personal experience with images appropriated from the mainstream media to create paintings that flit between flares of pain, irony, and rage. At the time of his death, Denomie was preparing a major survey of his work for the Minneapolis Institute of Art (2023-2024).