Do Indian Artists Go to Santa Fe When They Die?, 1988
Offset Lithograph
Edition of 90
30 x 22 in
Collaborating Printer: Bob Franklin
The title alone stops you. Richard Ray Whitman, a Yuchi/Creek artist and filmmaker, poses the question with full awareness of its edge — Santa Fe long functioning as shorthand for a certain institutionalized, romanticized idea of Native American art, the kind that gets collected, canonized, and kept safely in the past.
This print refuses that past. The upper half presents a black-and-white photograph of a group of Native people, vivid color exploding around them: a nuclear symbol, a bull skull, tribal nation names lettered across their figures. The lower register shifts to a map of the United States labeled "Home Lands," flanked by spinning wheel forms in yellow and blue. The composition moves between documentary and symbol, between the photographic record and the living language of Indigenous visual culture.
Whitman describes his practice as a layering of cultural, political, and aesthetic ideas in constant evolution, mirroring the identities of Native people themselves, which have never been fixed, despite the persistence of institutions that preferred them that way. This print is that argument made visible, insisting on complexity, contemporaneity, and the right to keep changing.
