Photo Credit: Yellowstone Art Museum
BILLINGS, Mont. Ben Pease, a Native American contemporary artist based out of Billings is giving an artist talk focused on his sculpture “Future in Our Eyes” at the Yellowstone Art Museum on Thursday, discussing the role of visual arts in cross cultural exchange of ideas.
He said that his culture has always been a direct inspiration and source of knowledge for him to make his art and he uses his creativity as a tool to understand and explore his place in the world as a native.
“Trying to understand who I am is most of what my art is. I use my words to tell stories, to tell experiences…just as artists before me in my community have done for hundreds if not thousands of years,” explained Pease.
Photo Credit: Yellowstone Art Museum
His new sculpture “Future in Our Eyes” was initially inspired by an artwork found at a Goodwill store in Bozeman and that he was immediately intrigued by how an indigenous person was presented in that artwork.
“His gun was painted realistically but then you get to his skin and his skin was a very dark unrealistic red. I wanted to take that sculpture and I painted it white and then subsequently red, and I gave people a marker and I said, “what is an Indian,” explained Pease.
Furthermore, he said that his first ever full-size sculpture production encourages people to take a step back and think of everyone around them as humans belonging to mother earth regardless of pre-conceived notions about their culture or community.
“Because of all this categorization we forget that we all come from the same place, and we might speak different languages and express our culture in different ways, but we all exist here. There’s so much history here and I want to explore it, and this is my way of doing it,” added Pease.
His talk about “Future in Our Eyes” is hosted at the Yellowstone Art Museum in partnership with Northern Plains Resource Council’s ongoing speaker series ‘Cultural Organizers’
The talk is free to the public and the doors open on Thursday at 5 pm.
