South Berwick’s George Longfish is honored for his groundbreaking career exploring Native American identity

More than 30 years ago, fresh out of the MFA program at the Art Institute of Chicago and years before becoming known as one of the nation’s foremost Native American artists, George Longfish arrived at the University of Montana to establish the school’s graduate program in American Indian Art, one of the first programs like it in the country. The job lasted only a year, but it set the tone for his whole career.

“His art had a huge influence on students. He had studied contemporary art, minimalism and also abstract expressionism, and that was new to many Native American students. Especially more traditional students. He opened doors to them to express themselves as a Native American person today,” says Manuella Well-Off-Man, curator at the school’s Montana Museum of Art and Culture. A retrospective exhibit on display there through April reveals the breadth of Longfish’s artistic journey.

Longfish exposed students to leading contemporary artists, taking them on field trips to meet Robert Smithson or George Morrison, or introducing them to the editor of Art News magazine, according to Well-Off-Man. “It was a very avant-garde program.”

When the graduate program closed due to funding struggles, Longfish moved to the University of California at Davis, where he stayed for three decades, establishing a national reputation for that school’s Native American museum and fostering the careers of noteworthy students and peers.

Few of those familiar with that side of George Longfish would expect to discover him today in the quiet eddy of Rollinsford, where he keeps a studio on the first floor of the Salmon Falls Mills. Inside, a cabinet of long, flat drawers is filled with slides, prints and small paintings in oil, acrylic, pencil, pen and ink and mixed media. On the walls are quite large canvasses, as tall and wide as the span of a man. Longfish’s pieces take many directions, exhibiting the curiosity and exploration that’s engaged him for 35 years. Some elements are constant—the use of line, whether thick, thin, straight or curvy, the micromanaging of color and texture, the use of stenciled or handwritten text to convey a point or to provide contrast to an image. In all cases, the imagery pops and dances across the canvas, mirroring the artist’s driving desire to explore new territory. “There is no stagnation in his work,” observes Well-Off-Man.

The consistent themes, often communicated with a touch of humor, are the portrayal and treatment of Native Americans in society and the media, and the individual’s quest—even responsibility—to understand his or her own identity. In his work, Native American history intersects with popular culture, such as in a triptych that plays on Seneca brand Applesauce. Pieces from the 1980s relate to his family and his interest in spirituality. His more recent compositions are minimalist and direct: The “10 Little Indians” series plays off the U.S. postal stamp of the Indian motorcycle and words like “invisible,” “power” and “integrity”; the series “Bloodline” is a long horizontal composition of unembellished black text on a solid red background, resembling a series of brands identifying, from left to right, “1/2 blood,” “1/4 blood” and so on.

“If you look at my early work, I was classified as a colorist—critics called it ‘Kook-Aid color,’” Longfish says. “Right now, I’ve kind of limited my palette. I’ve begun to use a combination of text and painting.” He’s interested in the narrative he can create with the combination of the two. Given his proclivity to linger on some of the more uncomfortable intersections of cultures, the work often is labeled political.

“When I represent something, maybe you’re taken aback, maybe you don’t want to look at it, you get incensed or whatever. If someone is incensed or provoked, then I’ve been successful, I’ve stirred something to get them to address the controversy of what they’re seeing, and how they’re reacting to it. They had to think about it in order to be able to verbalize it, whether it’s negative or positive,” he says.

The message is insistent, but its creator seems interested in a dialogue. One of his often-shown paintings, “As Above So Below,” might be seen as aggressive—the lines of text read “truth,” “honor,” “integrity,” “lies, lies, lies”—if not for the juxtaposition of curious images laid atop earth and water.

“I think when you see an image painted from a historical photograph next to a giant hamburger, that’s kind of funny,” says Well-Off-Man. “When you see an image from Wounded Knee, and the text ‘no skateboarding,’ that might seem a bit shocking, but the general reaction is curiosity. ‘What does this have to do with that?’”

During his tenure at UC Davis, where the Senaca/Tuscarora artist was professor of historical and contemporary Native arts and directed the university’s C.N. Gorman Museum from 1974 to 1996, the museum rose to national prominence. Wrote Ellen Chrismer in an article in “UC Dateline” in 2002, “The modern, yet culturally inspired work of artists he has hosted—Kay WalkingStick, James Luna and Edgar Heap of Birds and others—often defied what critics have thought of as Native American art.”

Longfish’s own work is now in museum collections around the United States and Canada. In 2004, he was honored in a solo exhibition as part of the series “Continuum: 12 Artists,” which featured Native American artists who are breaking fresh ground in contemporary Native art. The exhibit at the Montana Museum of Art and Culture will close at the end of April, then travel to numerous museums throughout the United States through 2009.

After retiring in 2003, Longfish and his wife moved to South Berwick, Maine, to be closer to her family. The move gave him a clean break from the university culture, which he speculates would have continued to claim his time in retirement had he remained in the area. But it also divorced him entirely from the context within which he had been working for most of his career, including an arts community, an Indian cultural community, his support base and network.
At first it was intimidating, then it became a source for inspiration.

“I was thinking to myself, ‘OK, what do I do now?’” he says of the culture shock in the wake of the move. “A little voice came back and said, ‘you reinvent yourself.’ So I’m in the process of reinventing myself.”