'Where art resides': George Alexander blends sci-fi, abstractions to create a conversation
Aug. 11—The figure straddling a horse dons an astronaut's helmet amid a landscape of chamisa and cholla.
George Alexander's acrylic painting is much more than some kind of interstellar joke. To him, the image represents humanity's search for God and connection.
"When the astronaut looks at the world, they don't see religion, they don't see race; they don't see anything that would separate you from your neighbor," said the Muscogee (Creek) artist.
Alexander will show his work at next weekend's 102nd Santa Fe Indian Market. The annual event lures upwards of 100,000 people to the Santa Fe Plaza and its tributaries seeking jewelry, pottery, sculpture, painting, weaving and more. Visitors can also view traditional dancers, fashion shows and nearby food booths for breakfast burritos and fry bread.
Alexander grew up in Mason, Oklahoma, the son of a Muscogee (Creek) minister father and a white mother who served as the Sunday school director.
The urge to put pencil to paper emerged when both of his parents were sick in the hospital. Alexander's mother gave him some copy paper and a No. 2 pencil.
"My parents were very sick," the Santa Fe artist said. "My mom had high blood pressure and my dad had heart failure.
"Whenever they were in the hospital, I would sit there and draw because there wasn't much else to do. I would try to draw my favorite cartoon characters."
They both died when Alexander was 14.
He would go on to draw in his high school cafeteria, a skill that helped him make friends who asked for a picture of their current crush.
After graduation, Alexander wanted to join the Marines but a diagnosis of a small hole in his heart prevented it. Then an aunt told him about Santa Fe's Institute of American Indian Arts.
It would change his life.
"IAIA is probably the most important place in my life," he said. "Everything I do now I owe to IAIA. I've made life-long friends; they support me even today."
Those friends included the legendary painter Tony Abeyta, who mentored him.
It was at IAIA that Alexander learned the spiritual history of his own tribe.
"I didn't know anything about my own heritage," he said. "What I did know came from the Christian influence. We already had a monotheistic spirituality, that way of looking at things. When the Europeans came, they didn't see us as that different from them. We were known as one of the 'civilized' tribes."
When Alexander arrived at IAIA, he didn't know how to express himself because he didn't want to be seen as different. He had recently watched the 2014 movie "Interstellar," so he decided to go sci-fi.
He found an astronaut's helmet on eBay, marking the beginning of his astronaut series.
At first, Alexander thought of the figure as a metaphor for God. After seeing the work at a critique, an IAIA colleague told him the painting was about humanity searching for God.
Today Alexander's work consists of his astronaut cowboys, and what he calls his "Neo Flat Style," "Identity" and "Part of the Heard" series.
His "Neo Flat Style" series references the Santa Fe Indian School paintings produced under Dorothy Dunn in the 1930s. He embellished two flat style paintings of bison with his own abstractions.
"I like to work in various different styles," he said. "My main goal is to get better than I did previously."
He's focusing on a pair of Creek warriors for Indian Market, beginning with Osceola, whose mother was Muscogee. When Osceola was a child, the family moved to Florida after the tribe's 1814 defeat in the Creek Wars.
In 1832, a few Seminole chiefs signed the Treaty of Payne's Landing, by which they agreed to give up their Florida lands in exchange for lands west of the Mississippi River. According to legend, Osceola stabbed the treaty with his knife.
Alexander is also working on a portrait of Chitto Harjo, a leader of the Crazy Snakes, a traditionalist faction of the Creek Indians. He opposed federal incursions on reservation land.
"He was accused of stealing a piece of meat off a farmer's land," Alexander said. "They sent the National Guard after him."
The artist plans to bring about 10 large paintings, 15 smaller paintings and about 3 medium-sized paintings to Indian Market.
On Sept. 20, he'll do a pop-up show in Los Angeles.
After graduating from IAIA, Alexander studied in Italy at the Studio Arts College International in Florence.
It was there that he learned about art as conversation.
"Art isn't to make art the object itself," he said, "but how you perceive the object. You can have 20 million conversations about a pop bottle — the contents, the space around it. That conversation is where art resides."
