(upbeat jazz piano Music)
- [Male Narrator] We're in the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa
Oklahoma looking at a large playful canvas
by Harry Fonseca called, "Two Coyotes and Flags".
- [Female Narrator] In this painting, we see two coyotes
as human figures. One sitting, one standing,
very cartoonish in nature and whimsical.
They are wearing Plain style headdresses
holding tomahawks and drapes over the shoulder
with American flags.
They're both wearing Converse sneakers style shoes
and they're against this flat bright pink backdrop.
What's significant to note here about the headdress is
it's a war bonnet, it's given in ceremonial practice,
it's sacred. And yet it's often used
as a symbol to homogenize Indigenous cultures as one.
Fonseca is Maidu and Maidu would not
traditionally wear a war bonnet.
So he's just playing on this stereotype of
this homogenized Indigenous image.
- [Male Narrator] That bright bubble gum pink background
feels so artificial.
This is an image that we can recognize
as being part of this larger movement that we call Pop Art.
- [Female Narrator] He's also purposely using this
to express his Queer identity,
and that is seen in the Converse sneakers,
which calls back to the Castro Clone, which is
a super hyper-masculine style worn by men both hiding
and expressing their Queer identity and Fonseca is
from Sacramento So he would've been privy
to this particular style.
And it's shown in a lot of his work where
his coyote is usually wearing leather jackets,
the white tank top jeans.
- [Male Narrator] He's replaced the leather jacket
with the American flag.
- [Female Narrator] He's draping these figures in the flag
in a way that wouldn't be appropriate according
to the U.S. Legion Flag Code.
Flags are not to be worn,
they're not to be touching the ground.
It's draped over him like it's part of the Indigenous dress;
like it's a blanket.
These stereotypes of the Plain's headdress and the tomahawk.
He is saying that America is wrapped up
in an idea of what Indigenous identity is.
- [Male Narrator] So the flag here is being used as a
subversive tool.
- [Female Narrator] The average American has no idea
what the life and experience of the Indigenous person is.
I think he does well to remind Americans of that,
but he's still placing himself here.
He is struggling with his own identity
as an Indigenous person, as somebody who has served
for the U.S. Navy, as somebody who has to be
both an American and an Indigenous person.
- [Male Narrator] And that idea of overlapping identities
is referenced in a subtle way in the identity of the coyote
as a trickster figure in Native traditions.
- [Female Narrator] In oral traditions,
the coyote is both a helper and a trickster
in that he's ready to fool everyone
but he ends up fooling himself.
- [Male Narrator] Fonseca does present himself
as coyote in the large series of paintings.
- [Female Narrator] Coyote takes on a lot of different roles
in his paintings.
Coyote could be anywhere from an opera singer
to a piano player.
You know, he's up to something.
- [Male Narrator] Fonseca's coyote is a performer.
He is here staging his complex identity.
- [Female Narrator] The headdresses are frenetic compared
to the solid background.
- [Male Narrator] That activated brushwork is set against
these broad pools of color, the pinks, the blues,
the lavenders, the reds and whites.
Often overlapping on outlines creating this liquid quality
to those surfaces.
Then there are these drips which have to remind anybody
who's looking at this painting of earlier Mid-Century
Abstract Expressionism and exactly what this painting
is not doing in its Pop orientation.
- [Female Narrator] And I think the drips are also
trying to make it seem like an antique photograph
referencing Edward Curtis and the way
he posed Indigenous people
for his photographs in this stereotypical way.
- [Male Narrator] Curtis asked his sitters
to don traditional regalia even if it wasn't the clothing
that they would normally wear.
And those photographs became powerful references
throughout the 19th and 20th centuries,
even though they were misleading.
- [Female Narrator] Fonseca here is using the stereotype
of Indigenous identity as a commentary on Curtis
and making people think about the complex identities
that go beyond just Indigeneity.
There's American identity, there's Queer identity
and then there's personal identity.
And he identifies with the coyote
because he can take this stereotype
and fool the average viewer who isn't going to
assume these identities.
(upbeat jazz piano Music)