We live in a time when artists of color are wondering if their only path to artworld legitimacy is to do the work that a predominantly white artworld expects of them. Current anti-racist thinking holds that it is not the duty of the marginalized or otherwise disenfranchised people to do the emotional labor of explaining their historical backgrounds and the grounds for their grievances to those who won’t do the work of trying to figure it out themselves. They ask: if I am indigenous, am I only allowed to do work that speaks of indigenous?
Ho-Chunk Artist Tom Jones puts it more simply: whether or not the art looks “Indian” enough, “Native American art is always Native…because it comes from Native thinking and education.” Jones has consistently created art on and for the Ho-Chunk Nation for over two decades. Over the past year, the art world has started to take notice. With work currently on view in statewide And nationally Recognized places, the many currents of thought of the artist concerning the indigenous identity surfaced in the walls of the PWI, asking for recognition and consideration.
Although he maintains that his primary audience is the Ho-Chunk people, his most recent work, Powerful and implacable spirits, has a mass appeal that extends beyond the Ho-Chunk Nation. Against black backgrounds, Jones creates life-size portraits of Ho-Chunk members, then laboriously hand-beads traditional Ho-Chunk floral designs around his subjects, creating what he calls a sort of ” will have”. Beginning with a portrait of his mother, JoAnn Jones, and more recently completing a portrait of Bella Falcon, a young female Ho-Chunk of the Bear Clan, Jones has increased the scale of his ambition; larger portraits take 120 hours or more to bead. Always aware of the legacy of Edward Curtis and his portrait series North American IndianJones finds ways to create images that speak to the individual within the collective, rather than to individuals as collectives.
Many of Jones’ subjects wear traditional native clothing, although there are notable exceptions of t-shirts, khakis, suspenders, overalls, and camouflage patterns. Participants wear what they want to the session, which Jones’ portraits share with Charles Van Schaik, a 19th-century photographer who photographed the Ho-Chunk people not as cultural props, but as paying patrons with portraits taken for personal use. As with Van Schaik, the people of Ho-Chunk come to Jones’ studio with an idea of how they want to be seen. In most portraits, the sitter looks directly at the viewer, preventing them from imposing a cultural projection without the subject “seeing” them doing so.
A popular way of interpreting portraits is that a portrait of another is also a self-portrait of the artist. If this is the case with Jones, his portraits reveal an inquisitive and generous nature, aware and confident in who the sitters are, but with a simultaneous awareness that they are being valued by the outside world. In an essay, Jones wrote for People of the Big Voice: Photographs of Ho-Chunk Families by Charles Van Schaikit addresses this double consciousness:
There is an unacknowledged complexity in the way a photograph is read by individuals from different cultures and backgrounds. Each time a photograph is encountered, the viewer will decipher the image with an imagination constructed of knowledge constructed. There are also the intentions of the photographer and the subject. What did the photographer decide to show us and what did the model decide to reveal to us? The interpretation we give to the image comes from our understanding of what the people in the photographs have been through.
What do we know about what a Ho-Chunk person went through? What are we ready to let each other know? Do we know that the tribe was forcibly removed from their ancestral lands in Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri and Minnesota 13 times between 1832 and 1874? Or that as a condition of the right to remain on their land in 1874, they had to give up and give up tribal rituals and relationships, and that outdoor photographs of prohibited indigenous practices were used as evidence to arrest and deport people? This last historical fact is directly linked to bans by tribal elders on photographing traditional and private ceremonies, although Jones said Hyperallergic that the ubiquity of cellphone cameras has changed tribal perceptions about it, especially among younger members. Whether permissions from Ho-Chunk elders to photograph rites and ceremonies are granted or assumed, it stands to reason that there is a wide gap between what we think we know and what we should already know.
Jones sometimes embraces the task of educating the non-native viewer. He draws a line between the ongoing work he is doing for the Ho-Chunk and more conceptual work that has a definite point of completion, the latter speaking more generally to the Indigenous experience. In these more speculative series, non-Aboriginal viewers find themselves embedded in, often in, postures of involvement. In the series Remains, Jones combines Indigenous casino rug designs with glass etchings of historical – and often racist – depictions of Indigenous peoples. Appropriate drawings and prints from 19th century publications are used in diptychs and triptychs that deal with issues of cultural genocide, forced religious conversion, white assimilation, and most importantly, white fantasies of indigenous peoples.
Surprisingly, Jones says he sat on the majority of the work he’s done and for the Ho-Chunk out of tribal deference, and it’s possible that will never be seen. When asked whether or not he hoped to exhibit this work one day, he replied, “It’s not really important to me that the outside world sees it.” Much of it exists as future material for Ho-Chunk members, as archival material. Conversely, in a job like Powerful and implacable spirits, Jones sees his role as creating visibility for his people. “This visibility is important to me. I think of young children, teenagers, and I think being able to see yourself represented in art is so powerful.
Tom Jones is currently in speak with light at the Denver Art Museum (100 West 14th Avenue Parkway, Denver, Colorado), until May 22, curated by John Rohrbach and Will Wilson; Native American: in translation at the Milwaukee Art Museum (700 North Art Museum Drive, Milwaukee, Wisconsin), through June 25, curated by Wendy Red Star; And water memories at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1000 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan), until April 2, curated by Patricia Marroquin Norby (Purépecha).
