 | This article contains content that is written like an advertisement .(April 2017) |
Victor Masayesva Jr. | |
|---|---|
 Victor Masayesva in 2012 | |
| Born | 1951 (age 72–73) |
| Nationality | Hopi Tribe of Arizona, American |
| Education | Princeton University, University of Arizona |
| Known for | photography, filmmaker |
Victor Masayesva Jr. (born 1951) is a Hopi filmmaker, video artist, and photographer. [1] Masayesva's artistic career promotes Hopi culture. [2] The majority of his films are in the Hopi language. [3]
Masayesva was born on the Hopi Reservation of Arizona [4] and grew up in Hotevilla, Arizona. As a teenager, Masayesva was recruited to attend the Horace Mann School in New York. He later studied Hopi ceremonies and English at Princeton University [1] [5] and pursued graduate studies in English and photography at the University of Arizona. [6]
Following his studies, Masayesva became the director of Hotevilla's Ethnic Heritage Program, where, in 1980, he created a program to teach Hopi language. [1] In 1982, the documentary short Hopiit was created from footage he had shot during the Ethnic Heritage program. Masayesva's first film is intended for presenting a "montage of different views of Hopi landscapes and people during the cycle of a year." [1]
In Masayesva's first feature-length documentary created in 1985, Itam Hakim, Hopiit, a tribal elder from the Hopi historian's clan recounts stories of Hopi history and philosophy, which Masayesva interprets through visual imagery. [3] [6] Made to commemorate the Hopi tercentennial 1680–1980, the film received funding from the German national television ZDF. Although initially released in Hopi in the United States, after receiving distribution opportunities, Masayesva created an English version. [1] [7]
In 1988, Ritual Clowns is a film that uses computer animation. [5] [7] His next two documentaries were commissioned for museums, and both explore traditions in Native American ceramic-making: [8] Pott Starr (1990), which also incorporates animation, and Siskyavi: The Place of Chasms (1991). [1]
The 1993 film Imagining Indians was shot on 16 mm film with an entirely Native-American crew. The documentary critiques representations of Native Americans in Hollywood and other forms of media. [7] Masayesva visited indigenous communities in the United States and the Amazon to produce the film. [9] It is considered one of Masayesva's "best-known and most critically debated films." [7]
Masayesva received one of the first Intercultural Media Fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation. [2] He has received the University of Arizona Distinguished Alumni Award, the Gold Hugo at the Chicago International Film Festival, the Two Rivers Visionary Award, the Taos Festival's filmmaker award, and the American Film Institute's Maya Deren Award. [10]
His video work has appeared in the Native American Film and Video Festival, the Museum of Modern Art New York, the Long Beach Museum of Art, the World Wide Video Festival, the Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial, Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, the San Francisco Art Institute, and the American Indian Contemporary Arts Festival 2000. [10]
| Film | Year | Duration (minutes) [11] [12] |
|---|---|---|
| Hopiit | 1982 | 15 |
| Itam Hakim, Hopiit | 1985 | 58 |
| Ritual Clowns | 1988 | 18 |
| Pott Starr | 1990 | 6 |
| SISKYAVI - The place of Chasms | 1991 | 28 |
| Imagining Indians | 1992 | 30 |
| Two Faces of One Room | 1992 | 30 |
| TRANS-VOICES | 1992 | 24 |
| Paatuwaqatsi - Water, Land and Life | 2007 | 57 |
The Hopi are Native Americans who primarily live in northeastern Arizona. The majority are enrolled in the Hopi Tribe of Arizona and live on the Hopi Reservation in northeastern Arizona; however, some Hopi people are enrolled in the Colorado River Indian Tribes of the Colorado River Indian Reservation at the border of Arizona and California.
Ken Jacobs is an American experimental filmmaker. His style often involves the use of found footage which he edits and manipulates. He has also directed films using his own footage.
Rea Tajiri is an American video artist, filmmaker, and screenwriter, known for her personal essay film History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige (1991).
Imagining Indians is a 1992 documentary film produced and directed by Hopi filmmaker, Victor Masayesva, Jr. The documentary attempts to reveal the misrepresentation of Indigenous Native American culture and tradition in Classical Hollywood films by interviews with different Indigenous Native American actors and extras from various tribes throughout the United States.
Charles Sequevya Loloma was a Hopi Native American artist known for his jewelry. He also worked in pottery, painting and ceramics.
The imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival is the world's largest Indigenous film and media arts festival, held annually in Toronto. The festival focuses on the film, video, radio, and new media work of Indigenous, Aboriginal and First Peoples from around the world. The festival includes screenings, parties, panel discussions, and cultural events.
Skip Blumberg is an American filmmaker. He is one of the original camcorder-for-broadcast TV producers, and among the first wave of video artists in the 1970s. His early work reflects the era's emphasis on guerrilla tactics and medium-specific graphics, but his more recent work takes on more global issues. His work has screened widely on television and at museums. His video Pick Up Your Feet: The Double Dutch Show (1981) is considered a classic documentary video and was included in the Museum of Television and Radio's exhibition TV Critics' All-time Favorite Shows. His cultural documentaries and performance videos have been broadcast on PBS, National Geographic TV, Showtime, Bravo, Nickelodeon, among others.
Stanya Kahn is an American artist. She graduated magna cum laude from San Francisco State University and received an MFA in 2003 from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. Kahn lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
Neil Randall David Sr. is an American artist and katsina carver. He learned the basics of carving from his grandfather Victor (Kawayo) Charlie.
Dimitri Devyatkin is an American director, producer, screenwriter, video artist, and journalist. Devyatkin uses elements of humor, art and new technology in his work. He is known as one of the first video makers to combine abstract synthesized imagery with camera footage. His programs have been broadcast domestically and internationally on ABC, PBS, Channel 4, WDR, France 3, TF1 and Channel One Russia. His works consist of digital media, computer art, broadcast news and feature filmmaking. His activities in the creation of new independent US filmmaking have been documented by Jonas Mekas in "Birth of a Nation" (1997).
Billy Luther is a Native American independent film writer, producer and director. He has made several documentaries and short films. He belongs to the Navajo, Hopi, and Laguna Pueblo tribes. He is known for his movies Frybread Face and Me (2023) and Miss Navajo (2007), and the 2022 television series Dark Winds. Luther identifies as gay.
Lisa Jackson is a Canadian Screen Award and Genie Award-winning Canadian and Anishinaabe filmmaker. Her films have been broadcast on APTN and Knowledge Network, as well as CBC's ZeD, Canadian Reflections and Newsworld and have screened at festivals including HotDocs, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Melbourne, Worldwide Short Film Festival and Berlin International Film Festival.
Techqua Ikachi, Land – My Life is a feature documentary by Swiss/German director Anka Schmid, the Swiss artist Agnes Barmettler and the Hopi Native American James Danaqyumptewa from 1989. The documentary shows the history and life of Native Americans of the Hopi tribe in Arizona, in particular their problems with the American government in their fight for sovereignty. It is being told from the perspective of the Hopi tribe.
Frank Gillette is an American video and installation artist. Interested in the empirical observation of natural phenomena, his early work integrated the viewer's image with prerecorded information. He has been described as a "pioneer in video research [...] with an almost scientific attention for taxonomies and descriptions of ecological systems and environments". His seminal work Wipe Cycle –co-produced with Ira Schneider in 1968– is considered one of the first video installations in art history. Gillette and Schneider exhibited this early "sculptural video installation" in TV as a Creative Medium, the first show in the United States devoted to Video Art. In October 1969, Frank Gillette and Michael Shamberg founded the Raindance Corporation, a "media think-tank [...] that embraced video as an alternative form of cultural communication.
Tracy Rector is an American filmmaker, curator, and arts advocate based in Seattle, Washington. She is the executive director and co-founder of Longhouse Media, an Indigenous and POC media arts organization and home of the nationally acclaimed program Native Lens. She has worked as an education consultant at the Seattle Art Museum, as a native naturalist for the Olympic Sculpture Park, and has developed curriculum for IslandWood, an environmental education center.
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.
Patty Talahongva is a Hopi journalist, documentary producer, and news executive. She was the first Native American anchor of a national news program in the United States and is involved in Native American youth and community development projects. A past president of the Native American Journalists Association, she was the recipient of their Medill Milestone Achievement Award in 2016. In 2019, she was hired as the news executive for the national television news program developed by Indian Country Today at Arizona State University.
Shalom Gorewitz is an American visual artist. Gorewitz was among the first generation of artists who used early video technology as an expressive medium. Since the late 1960s, he has created videos that "transform recorded reality through an expressionistic manipulation of images and sound". His artworks often "confront the political conflicts, personal losses, and spiritual rituals of contemporary life". Gorewitz has also made documentary and narrative films.
Ed Bowes is a filmmaker, writer, and director who pioneered the use of video as cinema. The first person to make a feature-length film in video, he used poets, musicians, artists, video- and filmmakers as performers in films such as Romance (1975) and Better, Stronger (1978–79). As a result of the notice given to his camera work, Bowes began his long career as a cinematographer for filmmakers and video artists including Kathryn Bigelow, Lizzie Borden, Vito Acconci, and Robert Longo, among others. In the 1970s, he was instrumental in creating early exhibitions of video art at MoMA, The Kitchen, and other Downtown New York venues. He taught advanced filmmaking for more than three decades at the School of Visual Arts, where he influenced several generations of contemporary filmmakers. His work is in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden. It is also represented in The Kitchen Archive at The Getty Research Institute and the Long Beach Museum of Art Video Archive.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Artists | |
| Other | |
