Crafting a Consequential Narrative, 2020

Painter Duane Slick served as the Arthur L. and Sheila Prensky Island Press Visiting Artist for fall 2019. Slick’s acrylic paintings blend the subjects of oral and visual Native American traditions with a focus on trickster strategies and modernist/post-modernist painting histories. His black-and-white series of Amercian flag-based paintings (2010-2012), titled The Untraceable Present, explored the contradictions and legacies of Native American identity in the grand narratives of American history. His recent work ruminates on the existence of metaphysical economies through visual schematics and the visual influences of pattern designs from the woodland nations of the northeast.

Born in Waterloo, Iowa, Slick earned his BFA from the University of Northern Iowa and his MFA from the University of California, Davis. He taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe from 1992-95 and is currently a professor of painting at the Rhode Island School of Design. Slick has lectured at colleges and universities across the United States, and his work has been exhibited widely, most recently in a national touring exhibition titled Native Art NOW!, organized by the Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis, and in Culture Shift: Contemporary Native Art Bienniel at Art Mur in Montreal. His work is included in the collections of the National Museum of the American Indian, The Decordova Museum, and the Peabody Essex Museum, among many others. Slick is currently represented by the Albert Merola Gallery in Provincetown, Massachusetts. (bio from 2019)