Frank Big Bear is an Anishinabe artist whose paintings, drawings, and collages explore themes drawn from both his personal life and his cultural heritage. His images, which arise from keen observation of his environment as well as from his dreams and memories, are rendered in a unique figurative style that blends elements from traditional Native American art, Cubism, and Surrealism with references to history, religion, pop culture, and science.
Background, Education
Big Bear was born in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, and raised on Pine Point on the White Earth Indian Reservation in Northern Minnesota. His family moved to Minneapolis in 1968, where he attended North High School and the University of Minnesota. During these early years, three people in particular provided crucial early encouragement for his work as an artist: Katherine Mattson, his high school art teacher; Wallace Kennedy, the director of the Urban Arts Program; and the renowned Native artist George Morrison, with whom Big Bear studied briefly at the university.
Personal and Political Themes in Drawings and Prints
Big Bear is best known for drawings made with Prismacolor pencils in which faces, figures, and abstract shapes completely fill the picture space with a riot of color and activity. During the 1980s and early 1990s, his work explored personal themes such as family and cultural identity, as well as political issues affecting Native people. In the drawing, Chemical Man in a Toxic World (1989–1990), for example, a throng of fantastic figures and objects stands in for the visual and aural pollution of the urban environment, which threatens to overwhelm a tattooed man (perhaps a self-portrait) who sits at a bar, poisoning his body with alcohol and tobacco. The screenprint Broken Hearts, Broken Dreams (1992) shows a crowd of people smoking and drinking around a table in a shabby, starkly lit room. The central figure is a woman who holds a beer in one hand and a swaddled infant in the other—an updated Madonna and child who embody both despair and hope.
Move to Duluth, Paintings
In 2006, Big Bear retired (he had been a cab driver for three decades) and in 2010 he moved to Duluth, Minnesota. The serenity of life along the shores of Lake Superior brought about a shift in his artwork. A series of half-length portraits of Native “types” such as Suicide Chief and Indian Artist (both 2012), for example, use a limited palette and simplified pictorial space. In 2016, he used a palette knife to create a group of semi-abstract paintings inspired by the Dakota Access Pipeline protests.
Collages and Time Zones (Red Owl)
After Big Bear’s move to Duluth, a completely new body of work also emerged: large-scale collages made from images cut out of magazines and art books. Time Zones (Red Owl) (2012), in the Walker’s collection, is a 13-foot-long work composed of 170 small collages made on discarded gallery invitation cards. Combining portraits of artists, writers, musicians, activists, Native warriors, and film stars as well as dozens of historical artworks and even a self-portrait, Time Zones is a tour de force exploration of the complex issues that arise at the intersection of American popular culture, art history, and Native traditions. A larger collage on 432 panels—The Walker Collage, Multiverse #10 (2016)—was the first installation in the Walker’s Target Project Space.
Recognition
Big Bear’s work has been collected and shown by the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Plains Art Museum in Fargo, and the North Dakota Museum of Art in Grand Forks, among others. He has received grants from the Jerome Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, and United States Artists. In 2008, he was awarded the Bush Foundation’s Enduring Vision Award for his contribution to the arts in Minnesota.
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