Jimmie durham biography of william shakespeare

On the occasion of the traveling retrospective &#;Jimmie Durham: At the Center of the World,&#; currently at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, through May 7, we looked back in our archive for this feature on Durham by Lucy Lippard. The Cherokee artist&#;s work contests derogatory stereotypes of Native American art and culture. &#;[T]hrough punning titles and contemporary details like discarded car parts, hardware, plastic toys, a police barrier or quotations from Frantz Fanon, the sculptures break through the Western time frame that is supposed to confine them,&#; Lippard writes on Durham&#;s work of the early s. &#;They emerge, belligerently, in today&#;s screwed-up world.&#;  We present Lippard&#;s article in full below. —Eds.

I am a Cherokee artist who strives to make Cherokee art that is considered just as universal and without limits at the art of any white man Is considered&#;.If I am able to see both Cherokee art and all other art as equally universal and valuable, and you are not, then we need to have a serious talk.

—Jimmie Durham, Bulletin of the Alternative Museum,

Jimmie Durham offers a dialogue for which neither the Native nor the non-Native world is ready. As a Cherokee artist, writer, poet, performer and treaty activist, he sees the world through the eyes of Coyote––the trickster, the Native American embodiment of all that is base and godlike in humans. His art peels away the decorative wrappings that disguise the American Indian in the United State&#;s colonial present.

To begin with, Durham&#;s work is often deceptively modest, its anger and its intelligence veiled by a deliberate obtuseness and formal awkwardness. His oeuvre can be wrestled into five overlapping categories. First, there are the handsome sculptures that focus on animal skulls, large and small, plain or embellished, re-embodying and redecorating a physical p

The Hammer Museum presentsJimmie Durham: At the Center of the World, the first North American retrospective of artist, performer, poet, essayist, and activist Jimmie Durham (b. , Washington, Arkansas).One of the most compelling and inventive artists working internationally today, Durham has been an elusive figure for American audiences. After studying art in Geneva and then returning to the United States and working for the American Indian Movement for several years, Durham became part of the vibrant New York downtown art scene in the s. In he moved to Cuernavaca, Mexico, and then to Europe in While his work has been widely shown and critically embraced in Europe and elsewhere, he has rarely exhibited in the US during the last two decades. Nonetheless Durham’s work is meaningfully connected to important activities, movements, and genres of American art since the s—including assemblage using found objects, appropriation of text and image, institutional critique, the politics of representation, performance art—and, moreover, to the colonial history and political struggles of the country.  

At the Center of the World, the artist’s first major US exhibition since , features nearly works from Durham’s expansive practice including sculpture, drawing, collage, printmaking, photography, and video,dating from to present. With strategic wit and humor, his works tackle important issues like the vital role of art in critical thinking, modes of representation, genocide, and statehood. Boundlessly curious, Durham takes on wide-ranging subject matter from specific historical events or figures—such as Malinche and Cortez—to classical architecture, religious martyrdom, quantum physics, and literary sources from Shakespeare to Jose Saramago. Durham’s work offers a vital perspective on present-day discussions about the relationship between the local and

Originally published in Flash Art no. , January – February

Standing before the US House of Representatives, Jimmie Durham, head of the International Indian Treaty Council at the United Nations and a leader of the American Indian Movement, deliberated eloheh. The word for land in Tsalagi, the Cherokee language, he explained to his fellow Americans, is the same word for history, culture, and religion. “We cannot separate our place on earth from our lives on the earth nor from our vision and our meaning as a people” [Jimmie Durham, Columbus Day, Albuquerque, NM: West End Press, , p. 70]. The Cherokee nation had occupied present-day Tennessee, Georgia, and Carolina — Echota — for millennia until President Andrew Jackson, or “Sharp Knife” to the Creek nation, emboldened with exceptionalist, romantic notions of Manifest Destiny and an urgency for American swelling, began a remorseless westward exile in the dead of winter in ; the Trail of Tears caused nearly a quarter of the Cherokee population to die on the journey. So on June 20, , when Durham testified before Congress, reading his objection to the building of the Tellico Dam on the Little Tennessee River, source of water for the areas of Echota and Tenasi, his address was not over an ambiguous intimidation — it was a familiar historical threat being repeated. “The anthropologists have dug up some bones and some pottery at Echota, and TVA [Tennessee Valley Authority] tells us that we can visit those bones in a museum. But the spirits of our ancestors are not in a museum. They live in the Pine and Hickory and Walnut trees and in those free-running creeks and rivers. I will never live at Echota, any more than a Greek in New Jersey will ever live at the Parthenon, but the hearts of our people say it must be there” [Ibid.].

His political address is part of a lifelong undertaking of dissent — through protest, prose, action and a