MSP Mag: All My Relations Arts Opens J. White Solo Exhibition

The new All My Relations Arts solo exhibition, Arikara Proper,  features J. White, an Arikara Native American artist based in Sioux Falls, SD.

As a self-taught artist, she started painting professionally in 2010. Inspired by a desire to make a place for Native art in Sioux Falls, she’d created a vibrant body of work focused on Native storytelling and her Northern Plains culture. White succeeded both in expressing her own emotions through her work and opening up a gallery, Post Pilgram, to showcase the work of other Native artists as well.

“At the time, the art scene for Natives was very limited, modern painting was limited, to say the least,” White describes on her website.” At the very core of downtown, I was one of a small handful of modern Native painters. I just wasn’t ready to have our youth grow up in a city that didn’t regard Native Art as a necessity.”

The name of her gallery, Post Pilgrim, means “the marriage of progressive thought, technique, and style with deep roots and love for our Native cultures,” and this mantra is practiced deeply in her own art as well.

White describes her style as a narrative painter through the lens of an urban Indian. Growing up both in rural settings on reservations and in urban environments throughout the Midwest, she often felt isolated and saw painting as a medium to work through this.

Her explosive use of color through acrylics combined with her abstract expressionism is her preferred medium to express culture-driven storytelling of the Native community.

White described in an interview with SDPB how her product, the final painting, is not what is important to her, it is the process. She never goes in with the intention of creating something, she lets the color and her body guide her to the final product and what is produced, is what the viewer gets to see.