Artist brings Creek heritage to Underground
BECCA MARTIN-BROWN
bmartin@nwadg.com
Image courtesy Bobby Martin
“Aunt Kate,” a three-color screenprint by Bobby C. Martin, is among works based on family photographs that show his Creek heritage. Martin will be among artists honored at an opening reception tonight at the Fayetteville Underground for the August exhibit, “Contemporary Art in Native America: Deep Roots.”
Artist Bobby C. Martin’s maternal grandmother was full-blooded Creek and spoke her native language fluently and English only brokenly. But even growing up in Tahlequah, Okla., the capital of the Cherokee Nation, Martin was not really invested in Native ways.
“My experience was like a lot of people my age,” he says. “We assimilated so well, we just became part of the mainstream culture.”
That didn’t change until Martin was headed back to college after spending his 20s as a rock musician and recording studio owner.
“About the time I turned 30, I got the urge to find out more about the Native side of my history,” he says. “I made a transition from musician to artist and double-majored in fine art and Indian studies.
“I also realized I really had no connection to the sort of traditional Native art with buffaloes and tepees, no real historic connection to the tribe I was a member of,” he explains. “I flailed around for awhile trying to figure out if I was going to be a Native person and artist, what should I do?”
Martin, an associate professor of visual arts at John Brown University since 2008, explains that he stumbled onto “photographs that belonged to my full-blood Indian grandmother, my aunts, my mother — images found in shoe boxes, forgotten in the bottoms of drawers, or found among the tattered black pages of old leather-bound photo albums. The photographs have very personal meanings for me as the artist, but I have found also that there is an almost universal recognition among viewers of a sense of history and identity, evoking memories of their own family’s past.”
“As I started using those photos, I started thinking about identity,” he says, and he began to use census numbers — from the original count of the Native Americans in 1885 — in his work, sometimes obviously, sometimes part of the layers he hopes viewers explore.
“My hope is for my art to become like an old family photograph — perhaps cherished, perhaps stuffed in a box in the attic — but always able to evoke memories every time it is viewed.”
FAQ
‘Contemporary Art in Native America:
Deep Roots’
WHEN — Opening reception, 5-9 p.m. today; exhibit through August
WHERE — Fayetteville Underground
COST — Free; some works will be for sale
INFO — 871-2722
BONUS — Also on show are works by Roy Boney Jr., Leah Cowden, Jeff Edwards and Wanbli Gamache.
