Two recent videos from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., spotlight the work of UW–Madison’s John Hitchcock, a contemporary artist and musician and Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor in the School of Education’s Art Department.
An installation by Hitchcock is part of the National Gallery’s current exhibition, “The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans,” which brings together works by an intergenerational group of nearly 50 living Native artists practicing across the United States.
The exhibition opened Sept. 22 and is on view through Jan. 15, 2024.
The artists featured in the exhibition use a variety of practices — including weaving, beadwork, sculpture, painting, printmaking, drawing, photography, performance, and video — to visualize Indigenous knowledge of the land. The first video the National Gallery published shows a time-lapse of Hitchcock and the exhibition team transforming an empty gallery into “a wall of wonder” as they install Hitchcock’s work, “Impact vs. Influence.”
The National Gallery also published an interview with Hitchcock about the installation, where he talks about his journey to becoming an artist. “When I was a little kid, my mother, she would let me run up and down the hallway with crayons,” Hitchcock says. “And I would have crayons on both sides, and just (run and draw) on the wall. And it was super exciting.”
Hitchcock explains that his work is strongly influenced by his experience growing up on Comanche tribal lands in Oklahoma. His work, “Impact vs. Influence” drew inspiration from the symbolism of Kiowa Comanche beadwork, he says, and uses symbols including animal heads, tanks, helicopters, birds, butterflies, and an hourglass to speak to the complexity of our shared environment and the “hopeful small moments” inside that chaos.
Work by UW–Madison’s Tom Jones, a professor of photography in the Art Department, is also included in “The Land Carries Our Ancestors.” Learn more about the exhibition, which is curated by artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith.