Paula Gunn Allen Mininterprets Ric Gendron's Art

    Ric Gendron is a Spokane-based artist whose work can be seen any time you fancy. This is in part a measure of his excellence and in part a measure of his abstraction: any gallery seeking to expand its cultural inclusivity finds an excellent metonymy in Gendron, who is (Thank God!) both a member of the Confederated Nation of the Colville and a popular painter. His work occupies a fascinating interstitial space between tribal identification and pop art. It is interesting that his work is described as an attempt to negotiate a hybrid identity between Colville tradition and American amalgamation, but then, this seem to be the only conversation allowed Native American artists. Anzaldua might have been a remarkable mestiza in her time, however, all blended identities that follow are, it seems, doomed to dialectical discourse (Gendron has a Colville father and an Umatilla mother! Fascinating!).
    The interpretation of Gendron’s work is far more interesting. In an article from the Spokesman review published on May 15, a reviewer said absolutely nothing, and in an article from 2011 following the cancellation of Gendron’s largest show to date, a reviewer said nothing again. Nothing except for a description of Gendron’s working method and objective content. In an especially bold move, one critic wrote: “Gendron’s work involves bluegrass music, with which he is also involved.” The trouble, it seems, is that while Gendron draws upon tribal design and iconography in his painting, no one seems willing to point out the fact that Gendron is almost entirely separated from a Colville Tradition, living instead outside the Colville reservation. Since it is the case Gendron is not, in fact, portraying cultural narratives, and he is not, in fact, articulating hybrid identities, the critical discussion around his work is forced to focus on the formal elements of his painting.
    Nevertheless, Gendron is marketed as a tribal artist. It seems to be a reinvention of Paula Gunn Allen’s interpretive difficulty. In the first place, a tribal narrative is marred by the interpretive framework imposed upon it. In the second place, out of the desire to understand personal identities in terms of communal histories, a tribal framework is imposed on a work of non-tribal art, therefore obfuscating the actual identity of the artist.