Douglas Miles

By Barry Ace

Douglas Miles is Akimel O’odham /Apache artist living on the San Carlos reservation in eastern Arizona. His cutting-edge art is about being in the “now” and in the “hip.” It is about the immediacy of creating a new aesthetic, strategically making an intervention and taking a cultural stance on contemporary Native American art. What his work is not about is presenting a cultural stasis. His oeuvre is a poetic, and strangely profound vernacular of visual and literary narratives that question what it means to be a contemporary Native American. He locates the signposts and markers Native Americans reference for the cultural continuity of their rich and vibrant histories and cultures.

Melding a graphic-cum-graffiti sensibility, Miles’s timely cultural aesthetic captures the spontaneity of urbanity, much like the esoteric works of Jean Michel Basquiat, whose New York City poetic street tags under his pseudonym (SAMO) and Haitian-inspired iconography broke new ground in the contemporary art scene of the 1980s. Miles’s work can be compared also to the profundity of England’s Bansky, whose recent strategically placed international tagging interventions heighten our collective contemporary consciousness through satirical, political, and social commentaries on war, poverty, violence and modernity. Miles completes this trinity of street-inspired artists by confronting us with his own saavy, hard-ass and hard-hitting cultural stance that is not only unconventional—challenging, unsettling and raw in its positioning—but also seductive and visually luring through his reuse and re-contextualization of Native American subject matter and historical imagery.

Purporting revolution and chaos as a theoretical premise, Miles’s art is not deliberately about marketing, branding, or commercialism, nor is it about high art versus low art (a now defunct and old-school debate of the 1990s), but instead, Miles’s work can be seen as a series of fresh and focused artistic interventions and strategies on the very products and ephemera of popular culture itself. A heroic historical image of Apache leader Geronimo on a skateboard or stenciled political/warrior narrative Apachelypse Now (2008) confronts the viewer, garnering a deeper personal introspection on representation and place. These re/presentations of historical imagery are about presenting a living, vibrant, and contemporary culture that is not dead or dying, but instead constantly changing, transforming, and reinventing itself in as much as western culture or any other culture for that matter. The work challenges the notion of marginalization by reversing the center; indigenizing or “counting coup” on the popular cultural icons of western culture. This strategy of intervention for Native American youth entails overwriting western popular culture and materialization.

Miles’s approach codifies Native American presences in mainstream culture by creating an aesthetic sensibility through skateboard culture, thus strengthening and instilling cultural pride and tribal consciousness. Apache Skateboards is a moniker created by Miles to further his artistic investigations and expand his collective philosophy of outreach by providing the impetus for collaborations with other young and talented creators interested in skateboard culture and integrated as Apache Skateboard Native Agents Team. Miles’s collaboration has expanded his outreach into a multiplicity of genres including film, still photography, public murals, digital works, skate-park design, shoes, clothing and conference and speaking engagements. Apache Skateboards is documented in the recent film co-directed by Douglas Miles and Franck Boistal Walk Like a Warrior: The Apache Skateboards Story (2008). Apache Skateboards continues to work with a diversity of tribes, universities, public art institutions and businesses including the Gila River Tribe, Salt River Pima Maricopa, Red Lake Nation, Navajo Nation, Princeton University, Harvard University, Institute of American Indian Arts, the Peabody Essex Museum, The Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center and IPATH skateboarder clothing company.

In 2009, the National Museum of the American Indian at the George Gustav Heye Center in New York City presented Ramp It Up: Skateboard Culture in Native America. This timely exhibition addressed emerging culture-change and the impact of skate culture on urban and reservation Native American communities. The exhibition drew together archival film, photographs, and skateboard deck motifs and contemporary iconography created by skateboard companies and contemporary artists. The skateboard culture is rapidly becoming a transborder phenomena in both Canada and the United States. Skateboard park design companies are currently engaged in constructing professional, and in some instances, monolithic concrete parks on reservation land. Despite the divergent polarity in communities concerning the influence of popular culture, marketing, and consumerism, Native American youth are quite adept and savvy in their ability to not only negotiate this contemporary movement, but also to engage and infuse it with their own unique form of cultural branding.