The Butterfly and the Ancestor: On Reverence, Not Ownership

Some paintings arrive as decisions. This one arrived from a dream.

My newest piece called ‘Kamama’ holds a Native American figure with a butterfly suspended above the crown of the head. Not landing, not leaving, just hovering in that threshold space where transformation hasn't finished deciding what it's becoming. I didn't choose the butterfly for prettiness. I chose it because it is the oldest symbol I know to represent the soul in metamorphosis, and because painting this figure felt less like invention and more like listening.  Because my dream was so intense, I knew I had to paint it to try to capture what I was shown. 

[‘Kamama’, acrylic on canvas: Link to original artwork once posted]

I've spent recent weeks posting about native American art from the past.  Walking through my fascination with these artists and their stories about gathering in Taos in the early 1900s: Blumenschein, Phillips, Couse, Sharp, Berninghaus, Dunton.  These are the founders of what became the Taos Society of Artists. A special place that captured many artists who visited and never left.   I keep returning to their work not for nostalgia's sake, but because something in it still hums a hundred years later. These were painters who left the East Coast art establishment behind to build a colony in the high desert, and what drew them there?  What drew there was the light, the land, and their proximity to Native American and Hispanic cultures whose visual language they spent their lives trying to earn the right to witness. The National Park Service's own historic landmark documentation credits the Society with generating unprecedented national interest in the Indigenous cultures of northern New Mexico, and with helping establish that region as a genuine center of American art (National Park Service). One requirement of the Society membership was proof that an artist had spent real time there,  years not weeks, and earning the trust to paint the people around them (Pasatiempo).

That distinction matters to me more than almost anything else in this practice. There is a version of "inspired by" that is theft with better lighting. And there is a version that is closer to prayer that is slow, humble, willing to be corrected.  I want my work to belong to the second kind.

What keeps me honest is staying in conversation with the artists doing this work today, on their own terms, in their own voice.  Not as subjects painted by outsiders, but as the authors of the canon themselves. The Nasher Museum's recent exhibition Power, Presence, and Future: American Indian Pop Art in Action showcases artists like Jeffrey Gibson, Cara Romero, Wendy Red Star, and Virgil Ortiz confronting stereotype and reclaiming imagery with humor, defiance, and total authorship (Nasher Museum, Duke University). And curator Kathleen Ash-Milby, in framing an earlier Nasher exhibition of Native voices spanning 1950 to now, made a point I try to carry into every piece I paint: there is no single way to be a Native artist, and no single image can carry the weight of over five hundred distinct nations (Nasher Museum, Duke University). Princeton's recent survey The Land Carries Our Ancestors, curated by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, makes the same case in paint and beadwork and photography which is a living, self-authored tradition, not an artifact for the rest of us to borrow from (Princeton University Press).

So, when I pick up a brush to paint an American Indian figure with a butterfly hovering above their head, I'm not claiming a culture. I'm bowing to one.  Honoring the dream that I received that was so powerful.  I'm trying to paint by listening to where I am lead.

"’Kamama’ came from a dream before it was ever a painting. It helps me to express the deep reverence for the American Indian culture, and putting brush to canvas is my way of honoring it.  I’m doing my small part to turn attention toward something so beautiful.", April Paige