George Longfish
By Shanna Ketchum-Heap of Birds
George Longfish (Seneca/Tuscarora) has worked in the field of contemporary Native American art as an artist, educator, writer, and curator for over thirty years. He served as Professor in the Department of Native American Studies at the University of California, Davis, from 1973 to 2003 and director of the Carl N. Gorman Museum from 1974 to 1996. Trained as a painter at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he received his M.F.A. in 1972, Longfish was influenced formally by abstract expressionism, and spiritually by what he calls “warrior information.”[1] According to Longfish, “the greatest lesson we can learn is that we can bring spirituality and warrior information from the past and use it in the present and see that it still works.”[2] It is this spirituality inherent to the traditions of Indigenous peoples that inspires him to create large paintings, prints, drawings, and sculptures that challenge viewers with social and political issues affecting modern Indian life. [3]
In an essay for the exhibition Continuum: 12 Artists (2004) at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York City, scholar Molly McGlennen states, “it is with spirit George Longfish enters the creative act, and it is with spirit that he is guided through and beyond it. As he steps into a painting, he and the work create dialogue, a space mutually respectful and adaptable.”[4] She is describing Longfish’s approach to The End of Innocence (1993), a three-panel painting that is ten feet tall and twenty-five feet in width. Longfish created the piece for Indigena (1992), an exhibition at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, as a response to the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s “discovery” of the Americas.[5] Longfish re-appropriates nineteenth century photographs of two warriors (Pawnee Chief Pita Lisaru and Medicine Crow) and places them amidst stenciled words that describe the process of colonization. Words like “sacred land,” “self-determination,” and “survival” are juxtaposed with “toxic waste,” “assimilation,” and “acculturation.” The narrative quality of the piece is matched in emotion by the color palette wherein fiery slashes of reds and oranges are balanced above and below by dark blues and cool greens. To Longfish, the painting represents a level of maturity in his work in terms of line, form, composition, and story.[6]
With the triptych Modern Times (1994), Longfish reaffirms Indian identity by confronting the popular stereotypes that position Native people as living in the past. n one panel, the words “20th century, Tribal, Seneca, Warrior, Artist, Healer” are superimposed over a photograph of the artist as a young man. The next panel shows a jar of applesauce with the word “Seneca” appropriated and commodified on the label. Lastly, a photograph of a powwow fancy dancer moves behind the words “America, White Bread, Mom, Apple Pie, The American Dream.” The prints represent the history of a people that demands respect while also problematizing homogenous definitions of Native culture. In Blood Line or Accepted Federal Government Standard for Blood Quantum (2005), Longfish confronts the racist construction of Native identities in the United States that have historically “reduc[ed] the human to a measurable substance, a breed, a certain amount of blood.”[7] In this stylistic departure, the artist paints thick black text on a red, ten-foot panel divided in six sections that reads “RED MAN, FULL BLOOD, 1/2 BREED, 1/4 BLOOD, 1/8 BLOOD, 1/16 BLOOD.” Longfish has commented that the use of words as a stylistic element has come full circle at this point in his career: “the words were part of the painting, but now they are just words.”[8] Since retiring to Maine in 2003, Longfish continues to develop these word pieces while keeping in touch with the Native art movement he was so instrumental in propelling forward.
[1] Neal Keating, “George C. Longfish,” in Native Perspectives: George Longfish/Shelly Niro (Clinton, NY: Emerson Gallery, Hamilton College, 2006), 7.
[2] George Longfish, “Artist Statement,” in Gerald McMaster and Lee-Ann Martin, eds., Indigena: Contemporary Native Perspectives (Quebec: Canadian Museum of Civilzation and Vancouver/Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 1992), 151.
[3] See George Longfish: A Retrospective (Montana: University of Montana Press and Montana Museum of Art & Culture, 2007) for a more detailed discussion of his works.
[4] Molly McGlennen, “George Longfish: Displacing the Lies” (New York: National Museum of the American Indian Smithsonian Institution, George Gustav Heye Center, February 28-May 23, 2004).
[5] See Gerald McMaster and Lee-Ann Martin, eds., Indigena: Contemporary Native Perspectives (Quebec: Canadian Museum of Civilzation and Vancouver/Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 1992).
[6] George Longfish, telephone interview by author, May 8, 2010.
[7] Keating, op. cit., 10.
[8] Longfish, telephone interview by author, May 8, 2010.