Alex Jacobs

Last updated
Alex Jacobs
Karoniaktatie
Born1953 (age 68–69)
Alma materManitou Community College
Kansas City Art Institute

Alex Jacobs (born 1953), also known as Karoniaktatie, [1] [2] is an Ahkwesase Mohawk artist, poet, and radio host. [3] He, along with Janet Rogers, make up the poetry collective Ikkwenyes. They co-produced the poetry CD Got Your Back. [4] His artwork has been displayed at locations such as the American Indian Archaeological Institute. [5]

Contents

Early life and career

He attended the Manitou Community College at LaMacaza, Quebec and graduated with an AFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. He also attended a summer session at the Alfred College of Ceramics and graduated from the Kansas City Art Institute with a BFA in Sculptor and Creative Writing. [6]

Jacobs worked for the Mohawk Nation newspaper and Akwesasne Notes, an international native journal, as a poetry editor from 1972-1974 and a co-editor from 1983-1986. [7] He was involved with the founding of the community newspaper, Indian Time, and he co-founded Akwekon, a Native arts journal he also co-edited from 1985-1986. [7] He has worked as a DJ, talk show host, news director, program director and assistant station manager for CKON, Mohawk Nation Radio.

He taught art and poetry at Akwesasne Freedom School, and was artist-in-residence at the Akwesasne Museum. His art reflects his concern with both the ideal and the real. He explores what it means to be Indian and the creation of the Indian-self. As a Mohawk with land situated across the Canada and U.S. border, he comments on the meaninglessness of borders.

Poetry

Jacobs has put out two poetry collections. His first, Landscape: Old and New Poems, was published in 1984 through Blue Cloud Quarterly Press. [8] His second, Loving... in the Reagan Era, was released in the 1990s. It is a beat-inspired autobiographical and social examination of the 1980s where Jacobs wrote about his work at a nuclear power plant, his children, Indians, Ronald Reagan's policies, and the truth about the American Dream. It relates both his personal experience and provides a cultural critique. [7]

In 1979 Jacobs did his first performance piece with an artistic band that consists of other Santa Fe artists called Tribal Dada at the Kansas City Art Institute. The purpose of the group was to create some kind of artistic movement in Santa Fe. The group also performed in 1992. [7] Through the performances of the group, they attempted to convey what Jacobs refers to as the Indian thinking, concepts and conceptual thinking. [7]

Visual Art

Todd Moe has likened Jacobs' art to decoupage, as he cuts fabric that came from his mother and grandmother — both quilt makers — and glues and varnishes it together into a collage. [9]

In the early days, Jacobs also used his mother's calico scraps, cigarette packaging and butter wrappers for material for his art. [9] He created mixed media art collages portraits of Native peoples as a way of countering pop culture images and stereotypes. [10]

Further reading

Related Research Articles

Akwesasne Mohawk Territory

The Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne is a Mohawk Nation (Kanienʼkehá:ka) territory that straddles the intersection of international borders and provincial boundaries on both banks of the St. Lawrence River. Although divided by an international border, the residents consider themselves to be one community. They maintain separate police forces due to jurisdictional issues and national laws.

Suzan Shown Harjo Cheyenne-Holdulgee Muscogee activist

Suzan Shown Harjo is an advocate for Native American rights. She is a poet, writer, lecturer, curator, and policy advocate who has helped Native peoples recover more than one million acres (4,000 km²) of tribal lands. After co-producing the first American Indian news show in the nation for WBAI radio while living in New York City, and producing other shows and theater, in 1974 she moved to Washington, D.C., to work on national policy issues. She served as Congressional liaison for Indian affairs in the President Jimmy Carter administration and later as president of the National Council of American Indians.

Institute of American Indian Arts Public tribal college in Santa Fe, New Mexico

The Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) is a public tribal land-grant college in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The college focuses on Native American art. It operates the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA), which is housed in the historic Santa Fe Federal Building, a landmark Pueblo Revival building listed on the National Register of Historic Places as Federal Building. The museum houses the National Collection of Contemporary Indian Art, with more than 7,000 items.

Fritz Scholder American painter (1937–2005)

Fritz William Scholder V was a Native American artist. Scholder was an enrolled member of the La Jolla Band of Luiseno Indians, a federally recognized tribe of Luiseños, a California Mission tribe. Scholder's most influential works were post-modern in sensibility and somewhat Pop Art in execution as he sought to deconstruct the mythos of the American Indian. A teacher at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe in the late 1960s, Scholder influenced a generation of Native American students.

T. C. Cannon Kiowa-Caddo painter and print maker from Oklahoma and New Mexico (1946–1978)

Tommy Wayne Cannon (Kiowa) was an important Native American artist of the 20th century. He was popularly known as T. C. Cannon. He was an enrolled member of the Kiowa Tribe and also had Caddo and French ancestry.

Maurice Frank Kenny was a poet with strong ties to the Mohawk people.

James Thomas Stevens is an American poet and academic. He is a member of the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation and currently teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

John Brandi American writer

John Brandi is an American poet and artist. San Francisco Poet Laureate Jack Hirschman has said of Brandi:

He has been an open roader for much of his life and like his two great forebears, Whitman and Neruda, has named the minute particulars, the details of his sojournings … infusing them with a whole gamut of feelings— compassionate, mischievous, loving and righteous. It's what's made his poetry one of the solid bodies of work that's emerged from the North American West since the '60s.

Nora Naranjo Morse is a Native American artist and poet. She currently resides in Española, New Mexico just north of Santa Fe and is a member of the Santa Clara Pueblo. Her work can be found in several museum collections including the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, the Minneapolis Institute of Art in Minnesota, and the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC, where her hand-built sculpture piece, Always Becoming, was selected from more than 55 entries submitted by Native artists as the winner of an outdoor sculpture competition held in 2005. In 2014, she was honored with a NACF Artist Fellowship for Visual Arts and was selected to prepare temporal public art for the 5x5 Project by curator Lance Fung.

Richard Ray Whitman

Richard Ray Whitman is a Yuchi-Muscogee multidisciplinary visual artist, poet, and actor. He is enrolled in the Muscogee Nation and lives in Oklahoma.

Peter Blue Cloud (Aroniawenrate) was a Mohawk poet, and folklorist.

Jon Davis is an American poet.

Shelley Niro is a Mohawk filmmaker and visual artist from New York and Ontario. She is known for her photographs using herself and female family members cast in contemporary positions to challenge the stereotypes and clichés of Native American women.

David Bradley is a Minnesota Chippewa artist. He is known for his sociopolitical critique of contemporary Native American art, and as an artist-activist battling art fraud among other concerns.

Redface

Redface is the wearing of makeup to darken or redden skin tone, or feathers, warpaint, etc. by non-Natives to impersonate a Native American or FNIM person, or to in some other way perpetuate stereotypes of Indigenous peoples of Canada and the United States. It is analogous to the wearing of Blackface. In the early twentieth century, it was often Jewish performers, who wore blackface or redface when portraying Plains Indians in Hollywood Westerns. In the early days of television sitcoms, "non-Native sitcom characters donned headdresses, carried tomahawks, spoke broken English, played Squanto at Thanksgiving gatherings, received 'Indian' names, danced wildly, and exhibited other examples of representations of redface".

Mary Kawennatakie Adams Canadian Mohawk artist

Mary Kawennatakie Adams was a Mohawk First Nations textile artist and basket maker.

Frank Buffalo Hyde is an Onondaga artist that grew up in New York on his mother's Onondaga reservation. He began exhibiting his artwork at 18 years old as a hobby. He began taking his artwork career more seriously when he attended the Institute of American Indian Arts. His artwork has been described as humorous and featuring vibrant colors and unusual subjects, most commonly buffaloes and hamburgers.

Margaret E. Jacobs is a Native American artist and member of the Akwesasne Mohawk tribe, known for her sculptures, jewelry, and sketching. She draws inspiration from her culture and upbringing. She values natural and synthetic objects and is inspired by buildings in the United States; they are a reminder of Mohawk ironworkers who left their tribes and communities to help build structures. Most of Jacobs' work has been based on the history of the Mohawks, her cultural heritage, and stories.

Terran is an American visual artist. He is a citizen of the Piikani Nation of Montana, a member of the Siksikaitsitapii. He lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

References

  1. ↑ Bataille, Gretchen M. (2001-12-01). Native American Representations: First Encounters, Distorted Images, and Literary Appropriations. U of Nebraska Press. p. 94. ISBN   9780803200036.
  2. ↑ Gibson, Abigail M. (2016). "The Last Indian War: Reassessing the Legacy of American Indian Boarding Schools and the Emergence of Pan-Indian Identity". Global Tides. 2: 1.
  3. ↑ Alia, Valerie; Bull, Simone (2005). Media and ethnic minorities. Edinburgh University Press. p. 37. ISBN   9780748620692.
  4. ↑ "Lunch & Lit with Janet Rogers" . Retrieved Feb 8, 2019.
  5. ↑ Charles, Eleanor (1987-12-27). "Connecticut Guide". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2019-04-02.
  6. ↑ "Alex Jacobs". 2014-06-23. Retrieved Feb 8, 2019.
  7. 1 2 3 4 5 Abbot, Larry (Fall 1995). "Between Heaven and Earth: The Art of Alex Jacobs". Studies in American Indian Literature. 7 (3): 39–49. JSTOR   20736866.
  8. ↑ Karoniaktatie; Blue Cloud Quarterly Press (1984). Landscape: old and new poems. Marvin, S.D.: Blue Cloud Quarterly Press. OCLC   11732946.
  9. 1 2 Moe, Todd; Fe, in Santa; NM. "A Santa Fe artist with roots in Akwesasne". NCPR. Retrieved 2019-03-25.
  10. ↑ Buken, Gulriz (October 2002). "Construction of the Mythic Indian in Mainstream Media and the Demystification of the Stereotype by American Indian Artists". American Studies International. 40 (3): 46–56. JSTOR   41279925.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.