Renegade | Jim Denomie

Denomie’s Renegade series illuminates how his distinctive vision coalesced around humor, politics, and sensuality early in his career. Created between 1994–2004, this series of bold, brightly colored paintings share fantastical landscapes dominated by mesas, an isolated landform Denomie used as a metaphor for reservations as imagined by the United States’ government to confine and contain Native Americans. Atop Denomie’s mesas are complex scenarios commingling life, death, and sovereign acts of survival in the face of genocide and colonialist extraction. Multi-colored winged horses and masked riders fly liberated from confinement, ahead of missiles, a covered wagon, or an armored vehicle. They pass and encircle plateaus of tipis and Christmas trees, coffins and crosses, nuclear reactors, an oil derrick, and a casino.

As Robert Cozzolino writes in the newly commissioned exhibition essay, Origin Story, these biting critiques of history are at times directly informed by Denomie’s sketchbooks from his student years at the University of Minnesota (1990–1995) where he earned degrees in Studio Art and American Indian Studies while an active community member and organizer with the American Indian Student Cultural Center. As Cozzolino exquisitely speculates with the “candy-like sweet and sour” colored paintings “keyed to Denomie’s playful but dark humor,” he affirms how the Renegade series performs the powerful, emergent narrative voice of a prescient and insightful artist and thinker.

Gallery Hours:
Tuesday through Saturday, Noon to 5:00 pm

Image: (Detail) Jim Denomie, Transitions, 1997, oil on canvas, 35 x 49 inches (image)