Native Pop: Bunky Echo-Hawk and Steven Paul Judd Subvert Star Wars
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22024/UniKent/03/tm.223Keywords:
Native American art, pop art, Star WarsAbstract
Multiple Native American artists work in the genre of pop art as it holds an anticapitalist position and lends itself well to reaching a wider audience in a language familiar to many. This paper explores works of two contemporary Indigenous artists, Bunky Echo-Hawk (Pawnee/Yakama) and Steven Paul Judd (Kiowa/Choctaw), who are expanding the genre of Native pop art. In their works If Yoda Was an Indian and Hopi Princess Leia, they appropriate iconic images of Star Wars as a means to subvert popular culture, re-imagine what it means to be Indigenous in the 21st century, and create affirmative visualization of futurity for their respective communities. Through humorous and clever mashups of Star Wars characters and Indigenous visual languages, the artists explore the complex relationship between Indigenous peoples and film industry, defy stereotypical expectations of the mainstream audience about Native art, and create images that represent their personal experience with contemporaneity. By merging American pop culture with Native experiences, Echo-Hawk and Judd encourage multiple audiences to reconsider Native American history and position Indigenous peoples as active participants in the present.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2017 Olena McLaughlin
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).