Plains Art Museum – Artist Talk: Inkpa Mani

Starion Gallery

In this exhibition, Inkpa Mani reclaims Indigenous names and self-representation through portraits of himself and his community. There is a longstanding tradition of non-Native artists representing Indigenous people and culture in romanticized and stereotyped ways. Inkpa Mani began painting portraits of people in his community, because he saw the need for accurate, everyday representations of Indigenous individuals from an Indigenous artist’s perspective. Each portrait emphasizes the individual’s Indian name to explore the cultural meaning of Indian names and their impact on identity formation. From the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, hundreds of Indian boarding schools were established to ‘civilize’ Native children, which involved forcibly stripping them of their names, languages, and cultures. Now there is a growing movement to revitalize Indigenous naming practices. In making Native names a focal point of this series of portraits, Inkpa Mani resists this erasure and shows us the power of Indian spirit names.