VIBRANT NUANCE
The Peabody Essex Museum explores the paintings, poetry and politics of T.C. Cannon.
The Peabody Essex Museum explores the paintings, poetry and politics of T.C. Cannon.
SALEM, MA
T.C. Cannon (1946–1978) was born in Oklahoma to a Kiowa father and a Caddo mother. During his brief life (he died in a car crash near Santa Fe, New Mexico, when he was 31) he studied at the Institute of American Indian Art (IAIA) during its vibrant early years, was awarded two Bronze Stars in Vietnam, and put an indelible mark on contemporary Native American art.
IAIA encouraged its students to learn about their traditions and to then paint how and what they wanted. Cannon was among the first to place his traditionally garbed subjects in contemporary mainstream settings.
Karen Kramer writes, “Through Cannon’s figurative work, he rejected the accepted, expected
representations of Native ritual life and instead chose to surface issues of the brutal traumas wrought by colonialism and power dynamics. Concurrently, through his paintings, poetry and music, he also emphasized the ways in which Native Americans persisted and thrived—sometimes in quietly radical everyday ways—in the face of oppression.”
Kramer is curator of Native American and Oceanic art and culture at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, and curator of the exhibition T.C. Cannon: At the Edge of America, which opened March 3 and continues through June 10.
The 90 works include 30 major paintings and are as fresh and vibrant today as they were in the turbulent 1960s and ’70s, addressing issues that continue to be relevant.
Kramer says, “Never shying from the complexity and nuance of identity politics, Cannon interrogated American history and popular culture through his Native lens and showed us that Native American history and culture are integral to the American experience.”
The painter was also a poet and a musician and the exhibition adds substance to that part of his output including an audio recording that will play in the galleries.
The museum has commissioned the Choctaw musician Samantha Crain to write music and perform a song in response to Cannon’s most monumental painting, a 22-foot mural, Epochs in Plains History: Mother Earth, Father Sun, the Children
Themselves, 1976-77.
Cannon signed the painting with handprints in the center connecting his present and the past.
Native artists had begun to incorporate influences from European painting traditions in the ’50s. Cannon read voraciously, listened to opera—as well as Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie—and studied artists from Matisse to Rauschenberg.
In Collector #3, 1974, a Native woman reclines nude in the pose of a traditional Odalisque. She rests on a Native rug Matisse would have loved. Cannon’s linocut, Big Soldier, 1971, hangs on the wall.
Another print, this time a woodcut, A Remembered Muse (Tosca), 1978, is from the last year of his life and is a fitting summation of his career. A couple, dressed traditionally, listen to Puccini’s Tosca on their Victrola phonograph with its large morning glory shaped horn. A dangling light bulb attests to their having electricity in their home. They are a modern couple at home in their ancient traditions.
Cannon wrote, “We are the embodiment of tradition at this very moment. Thru our present work will evolve those inevitable nuances and mannerisms that the far future will praise or abolish.”