2025
Tutse Nakoekwu (Minor Threat)
Tutse Nakoekwu (Minor Threat) prior exhibition installation at the Emmanuel Gallery, UC Denver. All work by Gregg Deal.
Gregg Deal is an unapologetic artist. His provocative artwork challenges, questions, instigates, and sometimes even laughs with his viewers. Engaging with art history, stereotypes, racism, and popular culture, he deftly weaves narratives through painting, performance, and sculpture. Deal鈥檚 art explores the world we live in through his lens of being Indigenous in modern America.
Deal鈥檚 paintings smartly dialogue with modern art historical movements, including Abstract Expressionism, High Modernism, Conceptual, Performance, and Pop. The profoundness of his work is revealed through the symbols, stories, and questions that emerge as he explores the clash between stereotypes and assumptions of a traditional western viewer versus his lived experience and the aspirations of the disenfranchised.
As a teenager, Deal gravitated to Punk because he related to the music鈥檚 expression of the marginalized outsider. References in Deal鈥檚 art come from the lyrics of his anti-establishment Punk heroes: Sex Pistols, Minor Threat, Black Flag, and Misfits. Growing up in a predominately white neighborhood in Park City, Utah, Deal did not experience a childhood with other children who looked like him or viewed the world like he did. It was not until he was in college, studying visual art at George Mason University, that he came across the work of James Luna. It was the first time he experienced another artist who was 鈥渦napologetically Indigenous.鈥�
Most art depicting Indigenous people in the U.S. reinforces stereotypical tropes of assumed 19th or early 20th-century imagery鈥撯�揳s if Native Americans are a uniform people frozen in time and trapped in sepia tones. Deal underscores the incredible diversity among the Indigenous who live within the borders of the United States. The federal government currently recognizes 574 Tribes speaking over 300 languages. Deal is careful to say he does not speak for Indigenous people; rather he speaks to his own experience.
Deal threatens boundaries in an art world steeped in imperialism. Having suffered censorship from art institutions, these conflicts have pushed him even further to explore his voice and stake his own space. His work grapples with challenging topics such as boarding schools, representation, visibility, racism, and historical atrocities, all of which are a threat to systemic expectations of how Indigenous artists exist within spaces not traditionally created for them. Yet it also celebrates individuality, hope, identity, and community. Gregg Deal asks us to 鈥淩ise Above鈥� and glimpse the world through each other鈥檚 eyes.
Family Tree
Susanne Slavick, Tree of Life: Nepal, 2020
Family Tree brings together the work of four sisters to "talk about trees." As curators, painters, photographers and writers, we portray trees in conditions in and outside of human care and conflict. Genealogical roots and botanical roots intertwine.
In its beauty and force, "nature" is often regarded as benign and apolitical. We do not expect trees to assume editorial stances or embody ideologies. Whether bombed or irradiated, contained, or marginalized, in underground union or standing in persistence, trees and their representations can offer solace and space鈥攆or the necessity of talking, listening, and learning.
Family Tree offers both critical commentary and sensual delight in visualizing the tree as refuge and livelihood, consumed and consuming, under assault and triumphant, as historical record, and as harbinger of things to come.
- Elin o鈥橦ara slavick / California
- Madeleine Slavick / Aotearoa New Zealand
- Sarah Slavick / Massachusetts
- Susanne Slavick / Pennsylvania