Luzene Hill

Last updated
Luzene Hill
Born
Caroline Luzene Hill

1946
Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.
Nationality Eastern Band Cherokee, American
Education Western Carolina University (BFA,MFA)
Occupation Artist

Luzene Hill (born 1946) is a Native American multimedia artist and citizen of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. She combines performance with installation to reflect on violence against women, using lyrical abstraction to approach difficult topics. [1] She is best known for her 2011-2015 work Retracing the Trace, an installation reflecting on the prevalence and pain of sexual assault through the lens of Hill's own experience. Her works primarily explore themes of the trauma and shame produced by various types of violence enacted against women and indigenous cultures and the transformative healing powers of art. [2] Beyond the United States, Hill's art has exhibited internationally in Canada, Russia, Japan, and the United Kingdom. [3]

Contents

Early life and education

Caroline Luzene Hill received the name "Luzene" through her paternal Cherokee grandmother. She grew up in Atlanta with her European mother and her family. Hill explained that because her father's parents were sent to Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania where they faced severe punishment for speaking their native language, her grandparents never spoke or taught Cherokee to their own children or grandchildren, despite teaching them to have pride in their heritage. [4] [5]

Hill began studying art in her early thirties, but did not pursue her art in earnest until her late forties, due to familial obligations. In 2006, she moved to Western North Carolina in order to focus on art, deepen her understanding of her Cherokee heritage, and learn more about the endangered Cherokee language. [5]

Hill completed a Master of Fine Arts degree at Western Carolina University in 2012, and Retracing the Trace was part of her Master's project. In her thesis, Hill explained that each cord contained between one and 3,780 knots, representing the estimated numbers of rapes that go unreported in the United States every day. [4] Elaborating on the use of these knotted and crimson-dyed cords, Hill stated that "They aren't being counted by our justice system, but I'm counting them. Each cord, like each woman, is unique." [6] Likewise, her use of South American qhipu knotting tradition connected the silencing of sexual assault survivors to the silencing of indigenous cultures. In developing Retracing the Trace, Hill found inspiration in the work of a handful of other women artists who, similarly, explored themes of abuse and trauma, including Suzanne Lacy, Kara Walker, and Tracey Emin as well as the ideas of Jacques Lacan. [4]

Artistic works

Hill's work explores trauma, violence against women, and the healing power of art. [7] Her first exhibit, In de Soto's Path, happened in 1997 at the Santa Fe Indian Market. [5] Some of Hill's earlier works also drew on Cherokee creation myths to explore linkages between sexuality, fulfillment, pain, and birth, presenting indigenous American art as connected to contemporary and universal, rather than strictly historical, themes. [8]

Her most famous work, Retracing the Trace, reflected her own experience as a rape survivor. The installation featured Hill laying in the middle of thousands of red cords tied into quipu knots. After Hill rose from the pile of strewn knots, her silhouette remained on the floor, the outline mirroring the imprint her own body left in the mud and leaves after her own rape. [2] [9] Over the course of ten days, Hill returned to the gallery, rearranging and affixing each knotted cord to a new position on the gallery walls until a new trace, this one of her own creation, encircled the space. [4]

Hill uses carmine to dye her works the signature crimson red that features so prominently in many of her works. In addition to being reminiscent of blood, the production of this particular dye by female cochineal insects to deter predators, also resonates with the major themes of Hill's work. Indigenous South American cultures used this dye during pre-colonial times in protection ceremonies and in creating protective objects. [10]

Artist and art scholar Tania Abramson saw Hill's art part of a tradition of "female artists who were victims of sexual violence as mediums of enduring transformation, agents of shifting kaleidoscopes that dance between shame and resurrection, humiliation and insight, rage and imagination." [11]

After receiving a Eiteljorg Museum Contemporary Art Fellowship and First Peoples Fund Fellowship in 2015, Hill collaborated with Frank Brannon of Speakeasy Press to produce a fine art book, called Spearfinger, printed solely in Cherokee syllabary. Hill discovered the story of Spearfinger, a frightening character from Cherokee myth who eats the livers of children, in James Mooney's History, Myths and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokee. [5]

Hill met Cherokee Nation artist Brenda Mallory in 2015 and, two years later, they co-exhibited Connecting Lines at the Portland Art Museum's Center for Contemporary Native Art. [12] [13]

In 2019, Hill received the Ucross Fellowship for Native American Visual Artists. [14]

Personal life

In 1994, Hill experienced a brutal rape, involving being strangled by her jacket's cord, while jogging in an Atlanta park. The details of this event later informed Hill's art and particularly her most notable work, Retracing the Trace. [9]

Hill is an enrolled member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia. [3]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sequoyah</span> Cherokee polymath and creator of the Cherokee syllabary

Sequoyah, also known as George Gist or George Guess, was a Native American polymath and neographer of the Cherokee Nation. In 1821, he completed his independent creation of the Cherokee syllabary, enabling reading and writing in Cherokee. His achievement was one of the few times in recorded history that an individual member of a pre-literate group created an original, effective writing system. His creation of the syllabary turned the Cherokee nation into one of the first North American Indigenous groups with a written language. Sequoyah was also an important representative for the Cherokee nation; he went to Washington, D.C., to sign two relocation-and-land-trading treaties.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art</span> Art museum in Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S.

The Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art is an art museum in downtown Indianapolis, Indiana, United States. The Eiteljorg houses an extensive collection of visual arts by indigenous peoples of the Americas as well as Western American paintings and sculptures collected by businessman and philanthropist Harrison Eiteljorg (1903–1997). The museum houses one of the finest collections of Native contemporary art in the world.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mike Dart</span> Cherokee basket weaver from Oklahoma

Mike Dart is a Native American basket weaver and citizen of the Cherokee Nation, who lives in Oklahoma.

Kay WalkingStick is a Native American landscape artist and a member of the Cherokee Nation. Her later landscape paintings, executed in oil paint on wood panels often include patterns based on Southwest American Indian rugs, pottery, and other artworks.

Bonnie Devine is a Serpent River Ojibwa installation artist, performance artist, sculptor, curator, and writer from Serpent River First Nation, who lives and works in Toronto, Ontario. She is currently an associate professor at OCAD University and the founding chair of its Indigenous Visual Cultural Program.

Corwin "Corky" Clairmont is a printmaker and conceptual and installation artist from the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Nation. Known for his high concept and politically charged works, Clairmont seeks to explore situations that affect Indian Country historically and in contemporary times.

I don't put work out that gives solutions but provokes questions. - Corky Clairmont

Lorenzo Clayton is a contemporary Navajo sculptor, printmaker, conceptual and installation artist. His artwork is notable for exploring the concepts of spirituality through abstraction.

Dana Claxton is a Hunkpapa Lakota filmmaker, photographer, and performance artist. Her work looks at stereotypes, historical context, and gender studies of Indigenous peoples of the Americas, specifically those of the First Nations. In 2007, she was awarded an Eiteljorg Fellowship for Native American Fine Art.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jeffrey Gibson</span> American painter and sculptor

Jeffrey A. Gibson is an American Mississippi Choctaw/Cherokee painter and sculptor. He has lived and worked in Brooklyn, New York; Hudson, New York; and Germantown, New York.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Faye HeavyShield</span>

Faye HeavyShield is a Kainai First Nations sculptor and installation artist. She is known for her repetitive use of objects and writing to create large-scale, often minimal, site-specific installations.

America Meredith is a painter, curator, educator, and editor of First American Art Magazine. America Meredith is an artist and comes from a Swedish-Cherokee background who blends pop imagery from her childhood with European and Native American styles.

Susie Paallengetaq Silook is a carver, sculptor, writer and actress, of Siberian Yupik, Inupiaq and Irish descent. She was born in Gambell, Alaska.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shan Goshorn</span> Eastern Band Cherokee artist

Shan Goshorn was an Eastern Band Cherokee artist, who lived in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her interdisciplinary artwork expresses human rights issues, especially those that affect Native American people today. Goshorn used different media to convey her message, including woven paper baskets, silversmithing, painting, and photography. She is best known for her baskets with Cherokee designs woven with archival paper reproductions of documents, maps, treaties, photographs and other materials that convey both the challenges and triumphs that Native Americans have experienced in the past and are still experiencing today.

Skawennati is a Mohawk multimedia artist, best known for her online works as well as Machinima that explore contemporary Indigenous cultures, and what Indigenous life might look like in futures inspired by science fiction. She served as the 2019 Indigenous Knowledge Holder at McGill University. In 2011, she was awarded an Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship which recognized her as one of "the best and most relevant native artists."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Iva Casuse Honwynum</span> Hopi American craftswoman and social activist (born 1964)

Iva Casuse Honwynum is a Hopi/Navajo artist, social activist, and cultural practitioner. A Native American, Honwynum is best known for her woven baskets and figurative sculpture. Honwynum's most important breakthrough was the development of the pootsaya basket, called "a rare innovation in Hopi basketry". She developed the pootsaya during her 2014 residency at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico, having been awarded the Eric and Barbara Dookin Artist Fellowship.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rebecca Nagle</span> Queer and Indigenous activist

Rebecca Nagle is an American activist, writer, and public speaker. She is a citizen of Cherokee Nation. Nagle is one of the founders of FORCE: Upsetting Rape Culture, an organization led by artists and activists dedicated to promoting a culture of consent. Nagle has also served as a coordinator of the event "PINK Loves CONSENT."

Tanis Maria S'eiltin is a Tlingit installation artist, painter, printmaker, and sculptor.

Hannah Claus is a multidisciplinary visual artist of English and Kanien'kehá:ka (Mohawk) ancestries and is a member of the Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte First Nation.

Holly Wilson is a Native American artist from Oklahoma. She is an enrolled member of the Delaware Nation and is of Cherokee descent.

Brenda Mallory is a Native American visual/sculpture/mixed media/installation artist and a member of the Cherokee Nation. Her artwork ranges from small decorations to large sculptures and utilizes a variety of materials such as handmade papers, cloth, wax, and recycled objects.

References

  1. ↑ Fricke, Suzanne Newman (Spring 2016). "Book Reviews". Conversations: Eitlejorg Contemporary Art Fellowship 2015.
  2. 1 2 Abramson, P. R., & Abramson, T. L. (2020). Visual and narrative comprehension of trauma. AMA Journal of Ethics, 22(6), 535-543. https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/visual-and-narrative-comprehension-trauma/2020-06
  3. 1 2 "Luzene Hill comes to MSU Billings in honor of Indigenous People's Day". MSU Billings University Communications & Marketing. October 3, 2019.
  4. 1 2 3 4 Hill, C. L. (2012). Retracing the Trace [Master's thesis] . Western Carolina University. ProQuest.
  5. 1 2 3 4 Hill, Luzene (2016). "Sovereignty through Print: New Type, and a New Letterpress-printed Book, in the Cherokee Syllabary". Ecotone. 11 (1): 106–111. doi:10.1353/ect.2015.0065. S2CID   162706583.
  6. ↑ Walker, Taté. Eiteljorg Fellows. (2015). Native Peoples Magazine, 28(3), 47. Database: Bibliography of Native North Americans
  7. ↑ Abramson, Tania Love; Abramson, Paul R. "Charting New Territory: the Aesthetic Value of Artistic Visions That Emanate in the Aftermath of Severe Trauma". www.contempaesthetics.org. Retrieved 2020-08-08.
  8. ↑ Williams, Laurinda (November 23, 2000). "PICK OF THE WEEK: ARTIST DEPICTS CHEROKEE THEMES". The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. p. JA20.
  9. 1 2 Walker, Tate. (May/June 2015). Of drums, dreams, and art. Native Peoples Magazine, 42-46. Database: Bibliography of Native North Americans.
  10. ↑ "Cherokee Artist Luzene Hill". Different Trains Gallery. Retrieved 2020-08-08.
  11. ↑ Abramson, Tania L. (2019-07-01). "Unchain My Anguish: A Feminist Take on Art and Trauma". Feminist Review. 122 (1): 189–197. doi:10.1177/0141778919844179. ISSN   0141-7789. S2CID   204392382.
  12. ↑ Caporale M. NO PONIES IN THIS SUNSET. In These Times. 2017;41(9):40. ProQuest Database.
  13. ↑ "CCNA: Connecting Lines". Portland Art Museum. Retrieved 2020-08-08.
  14. ↑ The glittering prizes. (Jul/Aug 2019). Art Newspaper, 28(314), 19. Database: Art & Architecture Source
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.