Museum Welcomes Indigenous Artists

The High Desert Museum welcomes three indigenous artists to the Museum today as part of the “Imagine a World” exhibit. Entering the exhibit, visitors are greeted by two life-size, brightly painted astronauts hovering over a mural with blue bison running over a moonscape and flying saucers in the sky above. The display is the artwork of Frank Buffalo Hyde (Onondaga Nation Beaver Clan and Nez Perce).

The Museum will welcome Hyde as well as two other Indigenous artists featured in Imagine a World–Camas Logue (Klamath, Modoc, Northern Paiute) and Brutis Baez (Wasco, Paiute, Warm Springs)—for the panel event “A Future That’s Indigenous” on Thursday, March 31 at 6:00 pm. Doors will open at 5:30 pm.

The three Native artists will explore a concept called Indigenous futurism and discuss their artwork in Imagine a World. Indigenous futurism envisions alternative worlds and recognizes the ways that cosmology, science and futurism have long been part of Indigenous worldviews and oral traditions. Artwork imagines Native people well into the future, including in the realms of science fiction and outer space.

Frank Buffalo Hyde was born in Sante Fe, New Mexico and raised on his mother’s Onondaga reservation in New York. Hyde returned to New Mexico to attend the Santa Fe Fine Arts Institute and Institute of American Indians Arts. His artwork, he says on his website, combines modern culture and technology with Indigenous themes and tradition using “overlapping imagery to mimic the way the mind holds information: nonlinear and without separation (sic). I don’t need permission to make what I make. Never have… no artist should.”

Camas Logue is a weaver, carver, fine woodworker, painter, illustrator, printmaker and musician who lives in the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community in northwest

Washington with his family. Logue’s artwork has been shown at the Portland Art Museum, Northwest Marine Ironworks and Abrons Arts Center in New York City.

Brutis Baez hails from California and Warm Springs, Oregon and has created music since 2002. In 2015, he released “More Than Music,” an autobiographical DVD. His short film Indians on the Moon featured in Imagine a World was also on exhibit in The Museum at Warm Springs 26^th Annual Tribal Member Art Exhibit.

The original exhibit Imagine a World will be open at the High Desert Museum through September 25. It examines efforts over the decades to create ideal societies throughout the Western United States from the glass domes of Biosphere 2 to Rajneeshpuram. Learn more at highdesertmuseum.org/imagine-a-world.

Tickets for “A Future That’s Indigenous” are $10 (members receive 20 percent discount) and can be purchased online at highdesertmuseum.org/future-thats-indigenous.