Onondaga artist Frank Buffalo Hyde, born in Santa Fe, New Mexico and currently based in Northfield, Minnesota, has had his work featured on the MTV and Smithsonian Channel reality show, “The Exhibit,” in 2023, as well as Showtime’s TV series “The Curse.” He’s also had solo museum exhibitions, including at the Gilcrease Musuem in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and his work is in the collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian.
At All My Relations, Buffalo Hyde offers a satirical foray into topics like cultural appropriation and stereotypes about Native culture and history. In one painting from 2023, “No, Let Me See Your CDIB,” (referring to Certificate of Indian Blood), Hyde paints a giant hand pointing at a much smaller, proportionally, image of a Native figure that looks a bit like Wes Studi as Magua In “The Last Of The Mohicans.” The top of the painting reads: “Want a little Indian in you?” The work pokes fun at the ways in which blood quantum has been used as a tool by the American government for subjugation and often land theft. At the same time, it questions ways in which Native identity has often been manipulated in mainstream narratives and films, historicizing cultures that are very much still alive.
In another series of works, Buffalo Hyde assumes the role as curator, using pizza boxes and papier-mâché to unpack the gatekeeping involved in the art world, where often non-Native curators and museum directors make decisions about art works that fit a particular narrative. Buffalo Hyde’s curated boxes juxtapose vestiges of mainstream culture like Darth Vader and drip them in paint and feathers. In a way he’s appropriating popular culture into makeshift, improvised new form.
You’ll see teddy bears drenched in red paint, stacked on top of each other like totem poles, and Pablo Picasso in a Native headdress, holding a firearm and surrounded by colorful circles of color. It’s a body of work that embraces the messiness of creative practice, and purposefully rebuffs sleek lines and over-production. Rather, Buffalo Hyde celebrates a frenetic sarcasm and art that hasn’t sold out.
