BIO
Dylan Miner was raised in rural Michigan and spends his time traversing the contested and colonial borders of North America. An artist, activist, and historian, his work has been exhibited at the University of Arizona, the National Museum of Mexican Art, the Native American Rights Fund, the United Nations, the Institute of American Indian Arts, La Galería de la Raza, and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, amongst countless other spaces. In 2010 Dylan has had five solo shows and was recently awarded an Artist Leadership Grant from the National Museum of the American Indian (Smithsonian Institution). Next year, his solo show “Provisional…” will be at Urban Shaman Gallery in Winnipeg, Manitoba. In addition to gallery exhibitions, Dylan’s acclaimed illustrations have been included in Studs Terkel’s Working: A Graphic Adaptation (New Press) and Wobblies: A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World (Verso). His writing has appeared in Third Text, CR: The New Centennial Review, Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, The International Journal of the History of Sport (forthcoming), as well as numerous books, edited volumes, and encyclopedias. He is presently completing a book addressing the radical potential of indigenism within Mexican-American art. Engaged in developing new forms of artistic practice, Dylan is a founding-member of the artists’ cooperative Justseeds. He is Métis and presently an assistant professor at Michigan State University.

ARTIST STATEMENT
In a never-ending world of late-capitalist consumption, where mass-produced commodities and highly designed products are naturalized, the creation of hand-made objects becomes an overt act of resistance. By using the language of anti-capitalist activism and Indigenous visuality, I make intentionally unrefined objects that, if nothing else, challenge the ambiguity of the elite visual artworld by operating within a tradition of political didacticism. Through the production of relief prints, I evoke the tangibility of the printed form in an attempt to narrativize a particular anti-colonial and anti-capitalist desire. As a printmaker, I have become a storyteller whose images narrate stories in a uniquely visual fashion based in an anti-authoritarian tradition.

Printing onto found materials, such as re-used grocery sacks, a material that is becoming increasingly rare with the abundant utilization of plastic bags, I see my artmaking practice as the embodiment of my own radical politics. The printed image and the materials that I work with remain a quotidian expression of the day-to-day realities in which I find myself. While society has moved toward a consumer-based model, the print becomes a small (yet productive) expression against the alienation I feel. My objects mark my existence and declare that I am alive. Just like ancestral petroglyphs and cave paintings, these small printed acts make similar marks on the worlds. As Métis martyr Louis Riel so powerfully articulates: ‘My people will sleep for 100 years, and when they awake, it will be the artists who give them back their spirit.’