Reporter Volume 25, No.16 February 10, 1994

By MARK WALLACE
Reporter Staff

Artwork made in her community helped Jolene Rickard learn to
understand the world and her place in it.
	Rickard, a lecturer at UB with a dual appointment in the
departments of Art and Art History, and a photographer whose work has
been shown around the country, is part of the Haudenausanee, native
people in Western New York who historically have been referred to as
the Iroquois Confederacy, or the Six Nations. But the Haudenausanee do
not call themselves that, Rickard says, and the right of people to
speak about themselves and their communities in the way that they want
is crucial to her activities as an artist, an intellectual, and a
member of the Tuscarora nation.
	The art of the Haudenausanee first gave Rickard the
perspectives on community, the world, and the value of creating that
are central to her work, she says. For Rickard, the things that people
make say a lot about who they are.
	"Whether through baskets, pots, storytelling, song, or dance,"
Rickard says, concentration on art and the making of art can be a
"site of renewal" in Native American communities, and a way of
"retraditionalizing" their relationship with each other and the rest
of the world that brings their original teachings into the twentieth
century.
	During the past 15 years, Rickard's photography has appeared
in galleries and shows around the country, including the prestigious
Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, and a show called "Message Carriers"
that originated at The Boston Photographic Resource Center housed at
Boston University. The show will travel around the country in 1995.
Her work will also be shown at an exhibit opening in April at the
Menshel Gallery at Syracuse University. She is currently planning two
Western New York exhibits of the work of native artists, "Sky Woman"
at the Castellani gallery at Niagara University, and "Keepers of the
Western Door" at the SEPA Gallery in Buffalo. 
	"I have used photography to work with my experience as an
indigenous person," she says. Her work is community-centered, she
says, and attempts to "reclaim a cultural space" where the
Haudenausanee can discuss and represent the world from their own point
of view.
	"My work isn't about finding an identity," she says. "I know
what my identity is, inasmuch as anyone does. So I'm trying more to
establish a relation between my reality and that of the rest of the
world--my work is about trying to reinvent what being Indian means."
	This reinventing is something that Rickard does not do solely
through her artwork, but also as a teacher and an intellectual in a
university environment. To be both an artist and a cultural critic in
a university is rare, she points out, adding that her culture does not
share the distinction between artist and critic that is typically made
in western culture.
	The fact that she is both an artist and a cultural critic has
led to her dual appointment at UB in Art and Art History. Tyrone
Georgiou, chair of the Art Department, and Jack Quinan, chair of Art
History, agreed that Rickard could serve both of their departments
well, she says.
	"I have a right to be a indigenous maker as well as to
articulate what it means to be an indigenous maker," Rickard says.
"I'm glad that they share my belief in that possibility, and that they
are making the effort to redefine such boundaries."
	Rickard has lectured at numerous conferences, as well as at
arts and education institutions around the country, including the
Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Last winter she spoke at
Syracuse University on "Matrilineage: Women, Art, and Change," and
last spring she was a participant in the conference on "Aesthetics of
Community Based Artmaking," co-sponsored by the Getty Center for the
History of Art and the Humanities, which, Rickard says, is at the
forefront of contemporary work on community based art.
	Rickard will also be speaking on "Land and Our Survival" at
the upcoming conference on "Women and Photography" sponsored by the
Houston Photographic Center. The talk will be about "identifying our
survival as indigenous people to our various relationships with land,
and demonstrating this photographically," she says.
	Rickard's activities have not been confined solely to an
academic context, however. At a meeting arranged through the Kellogg
Foundation, she recently shared her art-marketing skills with members
of the Ojibwa people in Michigan.
	"Native American art criticism is still an emerging area,"
Rickard says. "It's important to find many ways to empower yourself
and others in a field that's just coming to the foreground."
	At UB, Rickard teaches an undergraduate course in "Indigenous
Art Past and Present," as well as a graduate seminar on indigenous
art. She has also taught a general education course in "Cultural
Dynamics," which she says, is currently being redesigned as a required
course in the Fine Arts Department which will be called "Visual
Theory, Aesthetics, and Criticism."
	She calls her approach in these courses, which cover 19th and
20th century art, "comparative integration," in which students look at
the relation of indigenous art to the art of other cultures.
	Rickard's success in artistic and intellectual environments
outside her own community has, however, only strengthened her belief
in the importance of community, she says. "I feel it's my
responsibility to maintain dialogue with the leadership of my
community, and at the grass roots level," she says. "My feeling is
that it's essential to give something back to my community, as well as
to work in an academic environment.
	"I'm glad to be able to teach curators, administrators,
students and others how to deal with issues of cultural equity. Even
though my work at UB sometimes is not directly linked to the community
in which I grew up, it nonetheless creates a space for discussion
about those issues.
	"When exposing students to indigenous art, I try to welcome
them to this part of the world, because this part of the world is my
world. It's important that a Haudenausanee person is working in this
academic environment and representing a body of knowledge that's
essential to where we are in the late 20th century. The world I show
them no longer remains such a foreign place, and it connects students
to the art and to the communities that the art comes from.
	"I'm by no means the first Native American to work in an
academic environment, but it's very satisfying because it gives me a
chance to contribute on so many levels. I was brought up believing
that it was necessary to think and plan for seven generations of
people after you. I feel that opening the arts up in this way is an
essential part of that work."