Sean Chandler, an award-winning Aaniinen (Gros Ventre Nation) artist, has a solo exhibition opening at the Paris Gibson Square Museum of Art in Great Falls.
“The One Defined To Be No One” is on view from May 26-Sept. 20. It opened at the Missoula Art Museum during the pandemic and is now traveling the state through the Montana Art Gallery Directors Association. Chandler will give a lecture on May 26 at 5:30 p.m. It’s free.
Chandler’s success in art came after he developed a parallel academic career — he’s the president of Aaniiih Nakoda College on the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation.
He received a bachelor of arts in art in 1997 and a master’s in Native American Studies in 2003 from Montana State University in Bozeman, and later in 2014, an education doctorate from the University of Montana.
In 2018, he began making art again through the Paintallica collective. Like that group, he produces large works with mixed media, including oil, acrylic, charcoal, paint stick and more that reference paintings on buffalo hides and petroglyphs.
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In a statement, he said, “Once in the mode to create, I like to just let the work take me where I’m supposed to go. … But very often, parts of the painting that seemed to be the best expressions turn out to be better by covering them up. Maybe that is due in part to me, covering myself, layer by layer. More likely, however, it is a line formed by my own contemporary experiences in mainstream society connected to the years endured by ancestral experiences of dehumanization, racism, and cultural genocide.”
He listed mentors such as the late Blackfeet artist Ernie Pepion, Salish Kootenai artist Corwin Clairmont and Bozeman-based artist Jay Schmidt (of Paintallica).
His father taught him traditional art such as hide and tipi painting from an early age, and he now “voices his own style to communicate the contemporary life he lives. Themes of racism, loneliness, depression, anger, humor, stereotypes, sovereignty, dependency, and cultural genocide reside within Sean’s work,” the museum said.
His work has been awarded by and shown at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, and collected by the Museum of Natural History in Paris and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts Museum in Minnesota.
In late 2022, Chandler won an Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship from the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art in Indianapolis. It comes with an unrestricted grant of $50,000, along with an exhibition and a commitment to purchase their work for its collection.
Our favorite photos of the week from May 1 to May 7.
