MONOCULTURE | A Recent History

Jimmie Durham lived in New York from 1973 to 1987 and, after a period of exclusive engagement with American Indian issues, re-started making art in 1980. There, he made a few shows such as The Manhattan Festival of the Dead and A Matter of Life and Death and Singing, where artworks like New York Gitli and Tlunh Datsi were exhibited. These two pieces, both made with ornamented animal skulls, are works where Durham mixes American identity with a Cherokee vocabulary (gitli means dog in Cherokee).