TACKHUBBELLROOM
PATRICK DEAN
24 East 78th Street New York, NY 10075 212.628.9760 gpgallery.com@geraldpeterscontemporary 1011 Paseo de Peralta Santa Fe, NM 87501 505.954.5800 PATRICK DEAN HUBBELL TACK ROOM
3 Margaret Connell Szasz, ed., Between Indian and White Worlds: The Culture Broker (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), 3.
2 Philip J. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004).
PATRICK DEAN HUBBELL: TACK ROOM
Tack Room resembles exactly that; a “tack room” is an area of a barn or stable used to store riding and other ranching gear, i.e. tack. Viewers are confronted with saddle stands and wall-mounted racks and hooks featuring swaths and plaits of fabric draped over them in the way blankets, saddles, and ropes might be slung across such apparatus in a functioning tack room. Of course, the fabrics in the gallery space are the artist’s painted canvases, and Hubbell himself is part of Gerald Peters’ “stable” of artists, per the lingo of arts and entertainment industries that he puns with characteristic Diné humor.
“The work never ends.” Diné artist Patrick Dean Hubbell’s grandfather, a rancher, drilled this mantra into him from an early age. The elder impressed on Hubbell the value of a day’s labor, the necessity of staying organized, and the importance of community members caring for one another. 1
In Tack Room, the artist interrogates biases about Native peoples and histories of the American West, puncturing romanticizing imagery by deconstructing it. The installation centers around Hubbell’s blind contour drawings and paintings, an extensive series the artist produced by placing a stretched canvas on an easel; turning his head and partially covering his face such that he could not see the blank canvas
Hubbell’s effectiveness in mediating between Diné communities and outside populations makes him a potent “culture broker,” a term anthropologist Margaret Connell Szasz defines as an intermediary who traverses pathways across the cultural borders of differing groups, finding and explicating points of connection and conflict.3 Having operated in this capacity all his life, Hubbell unsurprisingly brings the approach to his artwork.
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Patrick Dean Hubbell: Tack Room features one of his latest projects. The installation is an evocative and highly personal synthesis of Hubbell’s experience growing up on his family’s Navajo Nation farmland, deep connections to Diné heritage, and struggles he has faced as a Native artist in the contemporary art world—an arena that continues to discount contributions of artists outside the insular Euro-American mainstream, operating under what Hubbell terms the “colonial cloud.”
It is a mantra that has served Hubbell well as an artist. The industrious creative recently completed an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, his already extensive oeuvre has been shown nationally and internationally, and he is continuously embarking on new projects that hone his practice and promote Diné worldviews in fine arts spaces that have historically ignored Indigenous makers.
Evocations of Hubbell’s experience growing up on a ranch are literalized in the materials used for the installation. The racks and stands are partially constructed from reclaimed and found wood from Hubbell’s family ranch, undergirding the project with kinship ties that heighten the emotional resonance of the work’s aesthetic effects. Tack Room also thereby reminds viewers that ranch culture has both Native and non-Native histories, despite being firmly placed in the non-Native camp of stereotypic “Cowboys and Indians” tropes that pit ranch hands against Indigenous peoples. In Hubbell’s family, the groups are one and the same, a combination that puzzled some of the artist’s non-Native friends and acquaintances growing up. From an early age, Hubbell sought to dispel such assumptions of cultural discordance, or what Dakota Sioux historian Philip J. Deloria characterizes as “Indians in unexpected places.”2
1 Patrick Dean Hubbell, conversation with the author, August 4, 2022. All references to Hubbell are from this conversation, unless otherwise cited.
Essay by Elizabeth S. Hawley Art historian, writer, and curator specializing in modern and contemporary art and art of the Americas.
The resulting works reveal the clichéd cowboy hats and warbonnets of nineteenth-century paintings produced by the likes of George Catlin, Frederic Remington, and Charles M. Russell, albeit reduced to faint yet eminently recognizable core imagery that indicates just how deeply such stereotypes have been internalized by Native and non-Native audiences alike.
Hubbell further deconstructs these epitomizing images by pulling the canvases off their wooden stretchers, which can be seen in a pile on the floor beneath the tacked-up paintings in one area of the installation. Elsewhere, he cuts up some of the works, reconstituting the canvases into the patchwork fabrics and braided ropes used to indicate tack on the stable racks and stands. Empty gold frames hang off one of the stands and a mounted hook, their ornate presence calling to mind the framing devices typically used for nineteenth-century western paintings in fine arts institutions. Shredded canvases, discarded stretchers, and empty frames drain the source materials of the power they have long held in shaping stereotypes. Yet Hubbell’s interventions are not simply a rejection of romanticizing imagery; Tack Room evinces a more complex array of references. The blind contour pieces also recall the works of prominent Native artists like Fritz Scholder and T.C. Cannon, who similarly drew from clichéd source material in the production of paintings aimed at de-mythologizing portrayals of the American West and the region’s modern Indigenous inhabitants.
4 W. Jackson Rushing, Native American Art and the New York Avant-Garde: A History of Cultural Primitivism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995): 186-89.
Pollock’s paintings are often described as web-like, and the skeins of paint on Hubbell’s blind contour works might also be characterized as threads, connecting his painterly practice to Diné weaving—a custom originating with Diné deity Na’ashjé’íí Asdzáá’s (Spider Woman), and one that Hubbell has frequently referenced in his projects.
The dense layering of associations in Tack Room precludes any one interpretation; the installation is powerful in the way it has the capacity to impact viewers from different backgrounds in varying ways. My introduction is the approach of a non-Native art historian invested in decolonizing the canon, and my hope is that these words will merely serve as a point of departure for a multitude of other readings.
The blind contour works are sketchy, the loose mark-making and rejection of conscious visibility echoing Surrealist automatism and Abstract Expressionist gesturalism. Circuits of influence among modern and contemporary Native and non-Native artists flow in many directions: as scholars like art historian W. Jackson Rushing have argued, Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock were themselves inspired by Diné sand painting, a process that Hubbell also cites as significant for his work.4
5 before him; consulting, via his phone or a print-out, a well-known work of art depicting figures of the American West; and then blindly outlining a rough copy of the scene on the canvas.
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17 By denouncing specific and romanticized imagery of Native American people, the work seeks to address outdated and inaccurate stereotypes and create space for equity and inclusion.
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EXHIBITION CHECKLIST
Pg 7: Installation view of Tack Room at Gerald Peters Contemporary, 2022 Pg. 8: They Want the Portrait, Not the People, 2022 oil, acrylic, enamel on canvas, wood frame Pg. 9: Tomorrow is A New Day, 2022 oil, acrylic, charcoal, oil pastel, on canvas, reclaimed wood stretcher bar saddle stand 40 x 6 x 24 inches Pg. 10: The Work Awaits Tomorrow, 2022 oil, acrylic, charcoal, oil pastel, on canvas and drop cloth, reclaimed wood 56 x 6 x 24 inches Pg. 11: Repurposed Cowboy Portrait, 2022 oil, acrylic, charcoal, oil pastel, spray paint, sewn thread on canvas, reclaimed wood, wood frame, hand braided canvas ranch rope 54 x 48 x 4 inches Pg. 12/13: Dismantled, 2022 oil, acrylic, charcoal, oil pastel, synthetic polymer on canvas, steel nail, wood stretcher bars dimensions variable Pg. 14/15: Dismantled, (detail) 2022 oil, acrylic, charcoal, oil pastel, synthetic polymer on canvas, steel nail, wood stretcher bars dimensions variable Pg. 16: Your Healing Touch, Equine Medicine Blankets, 2022 oil, acrylic, charcoal, oil pastel, synthetic polymer, natural earth pigment, sewn thread on canvas, wood stretcher bar 60 x 48 inches Pg. 18: Blind Contour Portrait: Cowboy, 2022 oil, oil pastel, charcoal on canvas, wood lattice strip frame 24 x 17.75 inches Pg. 19: Blind Contour Portrait in Red, 2022 oil, oil pastel, charcoal on canvas, wood lattice strip frame 30 x 23.75 inches Pg. 20: Blind Contour Portrait in Black & White, 2022 oil, oil pastel, charcoal on canvas, wood lattice strip frame 30 x 23.75 inches Pg. 21: Blind Contour Portrait: Red Blanket, 2022 oil, oil pastel, charcoal on canvas, wood lattice strip frame 24 x 19.875 inches Pg. 22: Let Us Free: Western Art, 2022 oil, oil pastel, charcoal on canvas, wood lattice strip frame 30 x 23.75 inches
Pg. 23: I Asked the Only Native I Knew to Sit for This: Western Art, 2022 oil, oil pastel, charcoal on canvas, wood lattice strip frame 19.875 x 19.875 inches
Pg. 24: Pew, Pew, Cowboy, 2022 oil, oil pastel, charcoal on canvas, wood lattice strip frame 30 x 23.75 inches Pg. 25: Portrait of a…, 2022 oil, oil pastel, charcoal on canvas, wood lattice strip frame 24 x 19.875 inches Pg. 26: They May Run out of Natives to Sit for These Portraits, 2022 oil, oil pastel, charcoal on canvas, wood lattice strip frame 19.875 x 19.875 inches
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Pg. 27: This Painting Will Diversify Your Collection, 2022 oil, oil pastel, charcoal on canvas, wood lattice strip frame 24 x 19.875 inches Pg. 28: Un-Romantic Portrait, 2022 oil, oil pastel, charcoal on canvas, wood lattice strip frame 24 x 17.75 inches Pg. 29: Untitled Blue, No. 2, 2022 oil, oil pastel, charcoal on canvas, wood lattice strip frame 30 x 23.75 inches Pg. 30: Untitled Blue, No. 3, 2022 oil, oil pastel, charcoal on canvas, wood lattice strip frame 30 x 23.75 inches Pg. 31: Untitled Red, 2022 oil, oil pastel, charcoal on canvas, wood lattice strip frame 30 x 23.75 inches Pg. 32: Western Art Sunset, 2022 oil, oil pastel, charcoal on canvas, wood lattice strip frame 19.875 x 19.875 inches Pg. 33: Yellow Blind Contour Portrait, 2022 oil, oil pastel, charcoal on canvas, wood lattice strip frame 24 x 19.875 inches
24 East 78th Street New York, NY 10075 212.628.9760 gpgallery.com@geraldpeterscontemporary For information please contact Evan 505.954.5800Santa1011efeldman@gpgallery.comFeldmanPaseodePeraltaFe,NM87501