Recent and Upcoming Art Shows featuring Prof. Gerald Clarke
2024 has been a busy year for Professor Gerald Clarke! Here are some of Professor Clarke’s recent and upcoming shows:
Gerald Clarke: The Door is Open (May 24 – September 1, 2024, Breck Create, Breckenridge, CO)
Desert Forest: Life with Joshua Trees (September 7 – December 29, 2024, Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, CA)
Fire Kinship: Southern California Native Ecology and Art (January 12 – July 13, 2025, PST ART, Fowler Museum at UCLA, Los Angeles, CA)
Professor Clarke will also be giving a lecture in October:
Portland Monuments Project Symposium (October 11 – 12, 2024, Converge 45, Portland, OR)
Prof. Clarke’s Artist Statement (via Breck Create)
I aspire not to romanticize the subjects or content of my work. I strive to “keep it real” and have found that my best works are inspired by my personal experiences. Beer cans, branding irons, and gourd rattles represent aspects of my reality. These materials reflect who I am and not how the mainstream might understand the contemporary Native American experience. They represent my community as well: a community that struggles with various issues but that also laughs, loves, and continues to evolve.
While my work may not appear “traditional,” it is part of a continuation of creative responses to the world that the Cahuilla have exercised since ancient times. I believe the strict adherence to traditional materials and authentic forms has been forced onto Indigenous expression by Euro-American belief systems that view art and culture through a monetary lens. The result is a narrow conception of Native American art that imposes an eighteenth-century aesthetic and transforms it into a commodity.
As you view my work, I ask that you do not simply compare or contrast it to “traditional Native American art,” but that you understand my work exists within a spectrum of Indigenous expression that is simultaneously ancient and contemporary. I’m proud and humbled to contribute to the Indigenous Intellectual Tradition. I am not simply a contemporary artist that happens to be Indian. I am a Native American artist. I am a Cahuilla artist.
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