Jimmie durham artist biography

Jimmie Bob Durham (July 10, 1940 – November 17, 2021) was an.
Jimmie Bob Durham (July 10, 1940 – November 17, 2021) was an American sculptor, essayist and poet.
Jimmie Durham worked with both natural and artificial materials, and was particularly drawn to the intrinsic qualities of those that have been used throughout.

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Jimmie Durham

Jimmie Durham was an artist, performer, poet, activist and essayist of Cherokee origin. After graduating from university in Texas in the 1960s, he studied sculpture at the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Geneva. In 1973, he returned to the Unites States to join other Native Americans in protests against the American government’s violation of their human rights. Two decades later, after a series of disappointments on this front, he decided to become a full-time artist. After a voluntary stint in exile in Mexico, he returned to Europe in 1994, where he eventually settled. Political and social commitment are the connecting threads in Durham’s life and work. His art was not just an expression of his Native American identity but also a form of cultural commentary. His ethnically charged visual language immediately found a place in the art world of the late 1980s, which had shifted its focus from gender to cultural diversity.

Durham combined found objects, such as old car parts, with natural materials, including branches, skulls, feathers and animal hides. He would sh

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Jimmie Durham

Jimmie Durham was an artist, poet, writer, and activist whose work deconstructs the stereotypes and prejudices on which Western culture is based. Durham's work analyzes the relationships between history and environment, architecture and monumentality, and critical attitudes towards political structures of power and narratives of national identity. In his sculptures, drawings, texts, and film and video works, Durham described behaviors and norms of coexistence in different social and cultural formations.

Durham's career as both a sculptor and a political activist began in the early 1960s, exploring the relationships between people and the architectures, both physical and societal, that surround us. He worked in a range of traditional and unique media, resulting in both small sculptures and large-scale installations. In the 1970s Durham co-founded the International Indian Treaty Council at the United Nations, where his work led to the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Durham's 2017 Grants to Artists award supported the fabrication of new s

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Jimmie Durham

Jimmie Durham was born in 1940 in the US.

In 1963 Durham’s strong interest in the civil rights movement led him into performance, theatre and literature. Encouraged by the African American playwright and Pulitzer Prize winner Vivian Ayers, Durham held his first performance at the Arena Theatre in Houston in 1963. He also started to publish poetry in progressive magazines and alternative newspapers. After these first forays into the arts Durham enrolled at the University of Texas in Austin, where he exhibited his work in 1965. Hemoved to Geneva in 1969 and enrolled at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, where he focused on performance and abstract sculpture.

In 1973 Durham moved back to the US and became a full-time organiser for the American Indian Movement and, a year later, a member of its Central Council. In 1974 Durham was appointed Executive Director of the newly established International Indian Treaty Council and moved to New York. From 1975 to 1980 he was co-editor of the Council’s monthly newspaper, the Treaty Council News. He also served as t