Indian Country: The Art of David Bradley

This catalog accompanies the currently mounted exhibition of the same name at Santa Fe's Museum of Indian Arts and Culture. David Bradley is a Southwest-based artist of American Indian (Minnesota Chippewa) descent. Seventy-one full-color, large format plates are reproduced with fields of sensuous color, laden with meaning and commentary pertaining to the experience of Native Americans in the United States. The artist's carnivalesque compositions are portraits of power reversed. Through use of humor and biting social commentary the crowded tableaus offer strategies of resistance to certain viewers. Museum of Indian Arts & Culture curator Verzuh's primary essay offers a highly detailed and complexly reasoned formal and cultural analysis that resists using impenetrable academic language. Rendering this state of liminality gives representation to the social realities of Native Americans.