"Happy Indigenous People's Day"
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This painting/collage was inspired by my visit to the MoMA yesterday as I saw a 1972 assemblage/ painting by the artist Bette Saar entitled
"Let me entertain you" , where she transforms a banjo-playing minstrel figure into a rifle-bearing Revolutionary. It was a very small painting but very powerful. So as I assembled my painting together I thought about the idea of a people having there land stolen from them and a people stolen from their land and I wanted to make that connection.
I first thought of the famous JAYZ lyrics and wanted to show a vision of how hip hop and indigenous peoples culture could connect and say something powerful. So I imagined a native person standing with a gold crown on his head in front of old posters of indian stolen land sales and him standing defiant with a Coogi sweater on and a "Biggie Smalls" medallion saying "The only Christopher we acknowledge iz Wallace" as a statement of resistance to Columbus Day.