Gallery C: September 10 – October 8, 2010
CSU Art Gallery, Gallery C
Graphic Work and Installation by Dylan Miner, celebrating Hispanic Awareness Month; co-sponsored by the office of Diversity and Multicultural Affairs.
A Bundle of Twigs (is Strong): Rooting for the Home Team
by Dylan A.T. Miner
Known as the national pastime or America’s game, baseball occupies a central role in our nation’s collective imagination. Phrases derived from the ballpark pepper our everyday speech: in the big leagues, covering your bases, hitting a home run, out in left field, on deck, rain check, right off the bat, stepping up to the plate, striking out, and swinging for the fences, to name only a few. The game has equally been seen as an emblem of our country abroad and has been enthusiastically accepted by fans worldwide, particularly in Latin America and Japan.
Against this diamond shaped playing field, Dylan Miner proposes that a different game is being played, one that reveals truths of our collective past and points toward potential futures. As an artist and historian, Miner discloses that Native peoples are commonly relegated to either the dustbin of history or to the rural marginality of reservation life. Immigrants, particularly those from the global south, are inversely presented as a threat to the future of America. This exhibition challenges conventional notions of what it means to be a United States citizen at a time when even the most basic Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment is being contested.
Bringing together a series of eighteen relief prints created directly from the inventive use of incised Louisville Slugger baseball bats, Miner has composed a full roster of positions that compose two opposing teams: Indians vs. Immigrants. His muscularly rendered compositions of professional baseball players and community leaders unite the contested fields of sports and politics in a singular manner by posing the question of whether you are rooting for the home team. Who is the home team after all?
Artist Biography
Dylan Miner was born in rural Michigan and spends his time traversing the contested and colonial borders of North America. An artist, activist, and historian, his work has been exhibited at the Institute of American Indian Arts, the University of Arizona, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the National Museum of Mexican Art, the Native American Rights Fund, the United Nations, and La Galería de la Raza, amongst countless other spaces. He has had numerous solo shows and was recently awarded an Artist Leadership Grant from the National Museum of the American Indian (Smithsonian Institution). In addition to his fine arts exhibitions, Dylan’s acclaimed illustrations have been included in Studs Terkel’s Working: A Graphic Adaptation (New Press) and Wobblies: A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World (Verso). Engaged in developing new forms of artistic practice, Dylan is a founding-member of the artists’ cooperative Justseeds. Presently, he is an assistant professor at Michigan State University.
He may be reached at dylanminer.com or dminer@msu.edu