Making Indigenous Art with Louie Gong

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4.7 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 4 October 2022

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Louie Gong is one of the most successful Native American visual artists in the country. At the beginning of his artistic career, he wanted to find a way to sell and license his work without having to go through a gallery or museum. So he founded his own company, Eighth Generation.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Can I show you my latest piece?
0:02.0	Yeah, so I would love to see it.
0:03.5	Okay, hang on a sec.
0:04.5	Okay.
0:05.5	All right, so my most recent piece is called Black Sheep, and it's the main piece that
0:13.5	I did during the pandemic, and it was my attempt to sort of capture the malaise that was
0:18.3	like washing over everybody during isolation.
0:22.7	The image that you see here behind me features a Black Sheep, so the sheep's face is
0:29.5	executed in really contemporary, post salish art, but the sheep's body is composed of these
0:35.4	wolf mouths.
0:37.4	The tongues are going in different directions.
0:40.4	For me, I often use a jumble of wolf mouths to represent stress or anxiety, but what I
0:46.1	wanted to capture here is that our past experiences aren't something that we can set down like
0:52.9	a piece of baggage and then walk away from them.
0:56.4	They're leaving breathing parts of ourselves that we have to learn to live in symbiosis
1:00.7	with.
1:01.7	So the real pathway to happiness is not to try to set things down and walk away from them,
1:09.0	they will always be part of you.
1:11.1	That's beautiful.
1:15.3	Louis Gong is known as one of the most successful Native American visual artists in the country,
1:21.2	but he didn't start making art professionally until he was in his 30s.
1:25.6	At the beginning of Louis's artistic career, he wanted to find a way to sell and license
	...

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