Crafting a Consequential Narrative

Duane Slick is a painter of Meskwaki and Ho-Chunk descent. His work incorporates elements of Native American oral and visual traditions and blends them with forms characteristic of modernist and post-modernist painting. Slick created the print “Crafting a Consequential Narrative” as a visiting artist at Island Press. Its imagery, combining expressionist brushwork, minimalist lines and color fields, coyote heads, flora and a symmetrical, ornamental pattern, is consistent with the artist’s recent work drawing upon traditions of woodland nations of the northeast United States. The coyote, which appears often in Slick’s paintings, is a trickster character in many Native oral traditions. Though Slick created the image at the printshop in Fall 2019, Island Press completed the edition of sixteen a year later during the global COVID-19 pandemic. This period of great social and political strain changed the way Slick thought about the work. His title—"Crafting a Consequential Narrative”—refers to the uncontrollable state of the present moment and the artist’s recognition that meaning can be fluid. As an example, foxtail grass, depicted in two places on the left side of the print, spreads easily and is difficult to control, making it an apt metaphor for disease and disinformation.