Sculptor with ties to state dies at 81
Tribe challenged claim by Durham
A renowned artist who grew up in Arkansas died Wednesday in Berlin. Jimmie Durham was 81. Durham was celebrated for incorporating traditional Native American imagery and materials into lively, unconventional sculptures before his claim of Cherokee ancestry was widely challenged, setting off an intense art-world debate over his authenticity.
Monica Manzutto, the co-founder of his Mexico City gallery, Kurimanzutto, confirmed his death but didn’t specify the cause. Mr. Durham had lived in Europe, mainly in Berlin and Naples, Italy, since 1994.
Mr. Durham began his career as an artist and activist in New York, working as an organizer for the American Indian Movement in the 1970s. He emerged as an important artist in the 1980s, gaining recognition for using materials like animal hides and skulls, feathers, beads, seashells and turquoise to create startling sculptures that skewer native stereotypes.
For one important work in 1984, he installed an openjawed puma skull adorned with a feathery headdress on a blue wooden police barricade, seemingly a symbol of oppressed Native Americans.
But over the years, Cherokee representatives questioned his Native American identity, becoming more vocal as his art became more visible.
In June 2017, shortly after his first American museum retrospective, “Jimmie Durham: At the Center of the World,” moved from the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, 10 Cherokee artists, writers and scholars published an opinion piece in Indian Country Today titled “Dear Unsuspecting Public, Jimmie Durham Is a Trickster.”
The article said Mr. Durham was neither “enrolled nor eligible for citizenship in any of the three federally recognized and historical Cherokee Tribes.” It went on to dismiss his being Cherokee in any “cultural sense,” either.
Mr. Durham didn’t publicly address the allegations made in Indian Country Today, but he did discuss his identity with this reporter earlier, in the lead-up to the Hammer show. “I am not a registered member, and I never would be,” he said, describing tribal enrollment efforts as a “tool of apartheid” and an attempt “by the Bureau of Indian Affairs to steal land and control the Indian population.”
He also pushed back against the idea that his artworks speak for or represent any ethnic group. “I am Cherokee,” he said. “But I’m not a Cherokee artist or Indian artist, no more than Brancusi was a Romanian artist.”
Jimmie Durham was born on July 10, 1940, in Houston, the fourth of five children of Jerry and Ethel (Simmons) Durham, who named him after the yodeling country singer Jimmie Rodgers. His father was an oil field worker at the time. Jimmie mainly grew up in rural Arkansas, where his father found odd jobs in construction and carpentry.
As a boy he spent a lot of time fishing, hunting and working in the tool shed, making his own tools, toys, slingshots and small animal traps. His father taught him to carve wood, and from early on, Mr. Durham said, stone and wood felt to him “like living things.”
“These things have always talked to me, jabbered at me,” he said.
He left home at 16 to travel and work on ranches; later he found a job as a mechanic at the University of Texas campus in Austin. He became friends with a Swiss student, visited him in Geneva and ended up moving there to attend its École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. He eventually earned his B.F.A. there in 1973.