Apache Chronicles: The Art of Douglas Miles
November 17, 2016 - May 30, 2017
Columbia University
420 Hamilton Hall
1130 Amsterdam Avenue
New York City 10027
Gallery Hours: 10am-4pm, Monday-Friday
The Apache Chronicles features a rich sample of works by the iconic Apache artist Douglas Miles. The show includes twenty-three works on photographic paper, wood, and the artist’s signature skateboard decks. Born in 1963, in the San Carlos Apache Nation in Arizona, Miles grew up in Phoenix, where he attended school and college before moving back to San Carlos. Miles first painted a skateboard in the late 1990s as a present for his son and, encouraged by the enthusi- astic response, he went on to found Apache Skateboards, the first Native-owned skate- board company, in 2002. Several years later, he helped to create Native Agents, an artists’ collective that organizes exhibits mixing visual arts, music, and skateboarding.
Increasingly indispensable, Miles’s work both envisions Apache freedom, resistance and creativity in the face of centuries of settler colonialism, and poses the urgent question of how to imagine different pasts to make more hopeful futures possible.
Curated by Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Chief Curator of Gallery at the Center.
Teresa Aguayo, Associate Curator
Special thanks to Professor Karl Jacoby for his support.
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