Nathan Young
Lives to Make
Delaware Tribe artist and composer Nathan Young moves across sound, video, and metalwork to recast Indigenous life, from a site-specific installation at Santa Fe's Wheelwright Museum to new video work at Oklahoma Contemporary.
BY Jezy J. Gray
Like the living traditions of his ancestors, Nathan Young doesn’t sit still. Through sound, video, animation and more, the visual artist and composer from Tahlequah, Oklahoma—an enrolled member of the Delaware Tribe of Indians and a direct descendant of the Pawnee Nation and Kiowa Tribe—steers his diverse practice toward a recasting of Indigenous life in the cultural imagination.
“I’m telling a very complicated story, and my art often moves across many different mediums to suit whatever I may be trying to articulate,” Young says. “Sometimes sound is the best way to articulate things. Sometimes video is.”
Sometimes the best way is something else altogether. That was the case for Activation/Transformation, his recent site-specific work at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian in Santa Fe, featuring pieces from the museum’s silver jewelry and metalwork collection. In the work pictured below, Young configured existing museum objects into a beautiful Zia sun shape that radiates outward into the four sacred directions, from the central position of horse tack.
Currently, Young returns to video with his Plains Indian Sign Language II installation on view at Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center’s ArtNow: The Soul Is a Wanderer, telling the story of the “lost” settler colony of Roanoke through a Native lens. “We’re subverting a story that has been a part of the great American myth, from our point of view,” Young says. “We’ve kind of flipped it on its head.”
ArtNow will be on view until January 15, 2024 at Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center.