Harry Fonseca, Two Coyotes with Flags

(upbeat jazz piano Music) - [Male Narrator] We're in the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa Oklahoma looking at a large playful canvas by Harry Fonseca called, "Two Coyotes and Flags". - [Female Narrator] In this painting, we see two coyotes as human figures. One sitting, one standing, very cartoonish in nature and whimsical. They are wearing Plain style headdresses holding tomahawks and drapes over the shoulder with American flags. They're both wearing Converse sneakers style shoes and they're against this flat bright pink backdrop. What's significant to note here about the headdress is it's a war bonnet, it's given in ceremonial practice, it's sacred. And yet it's often used as a symbol to homogenize Indigenous cultures as one. Fonseca is Maidu and Maidu would not traditionally wear a war bonnet. So he's just playing on this stereotype of this homogenized Indigenous image. - [Male Narrator] That bright bubble gum pink background feels so artificial. This is an image that we can recognize as being part of this larger movement that we call Pop Art. - [Female Narrator] He's also purposely using this to express his Queer identity, and that is seen in the Converse sneakers, which calls back to the Castro Clone, which is a super hyper-masculine style worn by men both hiding and expressing their Queer identity and Fonseca is from Sacramento So he would've been privy to this particular style. And it's shown in a lot of his work where his coyote is usually wearing leather jackets, the white tank top jeans. - [Male Narrator] He's replaced the leather jacket with the American flag. - [Female Narrator] He's draping these figures in the flag in a way that wouldn't be appropriate according to the U.S. Legion Flag Code. Flags are not to be worn, they're not to be touching the ground. It's draped over him like it's part of the Indigenous dress; like it's a blanket. These stereotypes of the Plain's headdress and the tomahawk. He is saying that America is wrapped up in an idea of what Indigenous identity is. - [Male Narrator] So the flag here is being used as a subversive tool. - [Female Narrator] The average American has no idea what the life and experience of the Indigenous person is. I think he does well to remind Americans of that, but he's still placing himself here. He is struggling with his own identity as an Indigenous person, as somebody who has served for the U.S. Navy, as somebody who has to be both an American and an Indigenous person. - [Male Narrator] And that idea of overlapping identities is referenced in a subtle way in the identity of the coyote as a trickster figure in Native traditions. - [Female Narrator] In oral traditions, the coyote is both a helper and a trickster in that he's ready to fool everyone but he ends up fooling himself. - [Male Narrator] Fonseca does present himself as coyote in the large series of paintings. - [Female Narrator] Coyote takes on a lot of different roles in his paintings. Coyote could be anywhere from an opera singer to a piano player. You know, he's up to something. - [Male Narrator] Fonseca's coyote is a performer. He is here staging his complex identity. - [Female Narrator] The headdresses are frenetic compared to the solid background. - [Male Narrator] That activated brushwork is set against these broad pools of color, the pinks, the blues, the lavenders, the reds and whites. Often overlapping on outlines creating this liquid quality to those surfaces. Then there are these drips which have to remind anybody who's looking at this painting of earlier Mid-Century Abstract Expressionism and exactly what this painting is not doing in its Pop orientation. - [Female Narrator] And I think the drips are also trying to make it seem like an antique photograph referencing Edward Curtis and the way he posed Indigenous people for his photographs in this stereotypical way. - [Male Narrator] Curtis asked his sitters to don traditional regalia even if it wasn't the clothing that they would normally wear. And those photographs became powerful references throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, even though they were misleading. - [Female Narrator] Fonseca here is using the stereotype of Indigenous identity as a commentary on Curtis and making people think about the complex identities that go beyond just Indigeneity. There's American identity, there's Queer identity and then there's personal identity. And he identifies with the coyote because he can take this stereotype and fool the average viewer who isn't going to assume these identities. (upbeat jazz piano Music)