Northern and Brown. Jemison’s fascination with the texture of paper bags carried over to specialty handmade paper. This 2D fish study from the NMAI collection is being rotated into the “Stretching the Canvas: Eight Decades of Native Painting” exhibition at the NMAI in New York.
“Northern and Brown,” G. Peter Jemison (Seneca), 1985, paper, watercolor, glitter, pencil, 30.3" x 40.2". 26/2212 After graduation, he moved to New York
City with ambitions of becoming a famous artist. He recalls that he was living hand-to- mouth after losing a day job when a friend helped him crash an opening reception at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Helping himself from “a mountain of shrimp,” he overheard someone being addressed as “Ti- bor.” Knowing that Tibor de Nagy was one of the city’s leading art dealers, Jemison intro- duced himself to him. Nagy took his phone number (even though Jemison didn’t even have a phone and he used his neighbor’s line) and, to Jemison’s astonishment, called the young artist several days later. After just nine months in Manhattan, Jemison was exhibiting in a major gallery. At this point in his career, Jemison was an
abstract artist, using mathematics to make ran- dom choices of images. In reaction to the large amount of artificial light in New York City, he used a lot of white space to make the viewers’ eyes jump around to these spaces on the can- vas. Jemison later stored these paintings in his
grandmother’s barn on the Cattaraugus Reser- vation, but almost all of them were destroyed when the barn burned down in 1974. But the sudden success was unsettling and
plunged Jemison into a period of depression. “I didn’t know what to do next,” he said. “I didn’t have a follow-up.” He knew, “I had to get out of New York City.” He returned to Buffalo to teach art to high school students but then moved to San Francisco to work as a display artist for Design Research, a store for which he had worked in New York. In 1971, he returned to New York, moving to the Sche- nectady area where he taught art and served as counsellor to grade school children. The small city was a three-and-a-half-hour drive from New York City, which allowed him to visit and keep in touch with what was then the vibrant but contentious Indian art scene in Manhat- tan. He often crashed on a sofa in the loft of a gallery owned by his friend and supporter Lloyd Oxendine (Lumbee), an advocate for contemporary Native art. In 1971, Jemison appeared in his second
On his head, Peter Jemison wears the “gustowa” of a Seneca elder. Draped over his arm are repli- cas of the Two Row and the George Washington wampum belts.
SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION 41
PHOTO BY AMY BLUM
PHOTO BY NMAI STAFF
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