Alex V. Cipolle

This is how the American artist Ed Bereal, 82, recaps preparing for his first retrospective at the Whatcom Museum here.

Creating new work for his politically charged exhibition “WANTED: Ed Bereal for Disturbing the Peace” raised some eyebrows in this predominantly white coastal city 20 miles from Canada.

There was the foundry, Bereal said, where the staff was hesitant to serve him until a friend who happened to come in vouched for Bereal’s artistic intentions. And that was before Bereal had explained that the grenades would stand in as testicles in an installation about the apocalypse.

Then there was the print shop. Bereal said that when the owner realized the images the staff were printing for him likened President Donald Trump to the Antichrist, the cost of services quadrupled. Bereal found another printer.

None of this surprised the artist. The Riverside, California, native described Bellingham as conservative, preserving a 1950s way of life, albeit with a small but vocal left-wing contingent.

What did surprise Bereal was that Patricia Leach, executive director of the museum, approached him to do the show in the first place.

“Patty was very conscious of the fact that I’m edgy for them,” Bereal said. “I kept asking her, ‘Are you sure?’”

Leach laughed when she heard that. “We’ve been wanting to do something about Ed for a long time,” she said. “Part of our mission is to provoke and promote curiosity on a variety of issues.”

Leach said that Bereal is well known outside of Bellingham — perhaps most so for when he was living and working in Los Angeles, a time that included his assemblage pieces using bones, pipes and Nazi imagery; the 1961 exhibition “War Babies”; and the radical activist performance troupe the Bodacious Buggerilla, which performed in places that included laundromats and Richard Pryor concerts.

In Bellingham, however, people primarily know him as a retired Western Washington University art professor. In 1993, Bereal and his wife, the artist Barbara Sternberger, moved to Bellingham. They live on a farm with an art studio in Whatcom County.

His current exhibition runs through Jan. 5 at the Whatcom Museum, a Smithsonian Institution Affiliate, featuring six decades of work, much of it new or never seen by the public.

The oeuvre of Bereal, a self-described political cartoonist, is painterly, sophisticated and explosive. Over the decades, it has only become more confrontational, grotesque and darkly satirical, exploring themes of gun violence, racism, police brutality, corporate greed, complicity, the military industrial complex and, most recently, climate change.

Bereal said a woman at the exhibition opening described him as an anarchist Boy Scout, a grand compliment. The observation is apt as one of Bereal’s greatest influences since he was a child is Norman Rockwell, the de facto illustrator of white nostalgia.

“He was probably the most political artist that I have ever known and maybe that is still true. He was showing a kind of America that was really kind of alien to me,” Bereal said. “He was on the sunny side of the street, and I was on the shady side.”

“Wanted” can be seen as a lifetime of Bereal answering the question provoked by Rockwell: What does America look like from my side of the street? Or, as the artist has personified it, what does “Miss America” look like?

Bereal’s answer is a grim, industrial spin on Lady Liberty, with skeletal metal fingers, sneering teeth and a nail crown. Miss America is Bereal’s puppet master and appears frequently, such as in the installation “Miss America: Manufacturing Consent (Upsidedown and Backwards),” where docile Americans queue to have their heads nailed on upside-down and backward by the matriarch.

Leach said that when she was planning the retrospective, she conferred with David Doll, the Bellingham police chief, the city’s mayor, Kelli Linville, City Council, the museum board and other community leaders.

“It wasn’t so much convincing the community that we had to do this show,” Leach said. “It was very important that we prepare people, especially policymakers and community leaders.”

Preparation also included partnering with the Whatcom Dispute Resolution Center to train staff in how to work through conflict. The museum’s curator of art, Amy Chaloupka, said that this level of training is unusual for the museum.

“I can do some gallery talks, but it’s really the docents and our front line staff who are going to come across that person who walks in the door and doesn’t know what they are getting into and maybe feels confronted,” Chaloupka said.

The training was to help the staff feel equipped to talk with museum visitors about pieces like “Exxon: The Five Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” a 40-foot holographic and mirrored installation reimagining the Bible’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

In Bereal’s version, five figures stand at attention, each with a top half constructed from a mirrored letter and an oil spill at their feet. Together, they spell Exxon. Viewers are confronted with Donald Trump as the Antichrist, holding a Bible with an inverted cross; War wears a Nazi uniform; Plague and Famine take the shape of Ronald McDonald; Death is the Grim Reaper, and Bereal’s fifth addition, Predatory Capitalism, is in business attire. Here the bronze grenades hang with gas nozzles as male genitalia.

There is also the graphite drawing “Miss America Presents Domestic Terrorism,” featuring a New York police officer with scrawled words calling him proud, courageous, loyal and racist imposed over newspaper headlines about Freddie Gray’s death.

“We’ve just set up, in that gallery, a battlefield,” Bereal said. “Our docents come in as medics.”

Weeks after the show opened, Chaloupka and Bereal said the public response had been positive. The museum hosted “Art, Politics, and Community: A Conversation Inspired by Ed Bereal’s Work” on Sept. 21, with a panel including the police chief; the mayor; Vernon Damani Johnson, a Western Washington University political science professor; and Bereal. Panelists and community members were prompted with questions about which pieces of art provoked them and what it has taught them about their own values.

“The level of honesty in the conversation and the heartfelt response from people was so true,” Chaloupka said. “It felt very natural, and urgent.”

“People were acknowledging the fact that the show is uncomfortable, and in many cases, kind of frightening,” Bereal added.

And another surprise for the artist?

“They didn’t blame the messenger,” he said. “They dealt with the message.”

This article originally appeared in

Artist Ed Bereal Brings Edgy to Bellingham

BELLINGHAM, Wash. — The year is 2019, the place is the United States, and a black man walks into a foundry wanting to cast some bronze grenades.

The Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts, known as CSIA, is a nonprofit on the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation and has become a hub for contemporary Native American artists nationwide.

For more than 25 years, some of the biggest indigenous names in contemporary art — Rick Bartow, Marie Watt, Jeffrey Gibson, Kay WalkingStick, Wendy Red Star — have flocked to its printmaking residency program, housed in the ground floor of an old Catholic mission schoolhouse.

“The fact that it exists in this rural indigenous community is sort of extraordinary and part of its magic,” said Watt, a member of the Seneca Nation, who has attended the residency five times since 2002. “Conversations by artists are important everywhere, and they’re happening in rural areas, too. It shifts the paradigm.”

The conversations include breaking down stereotypes about indigenous art, especially the notion that it’s less art than artifact. Many prints made at Crow’s Shadow now hang in the collections of the Whitney, the Library of Congress, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Portland Art Museum.

In 2010, the Hallie Ford Museum of Art in Salem, Oregon, became the conservator of the institute’s print archive. Last year, Crow’s Shadow received its first grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, providing $35,000 in matching funds for three residencies in 2019.

This year’s residents include Raven Chacon, Yatika Fields, Yoshihiro Kitai, Yoonhee Choi and Natalie Ball. In the coming years, the institute plans to expand its space to accommodate the growing residency program, as well as its traditional arts workshops that serve the reservation and local community.

“Crow’s Shadow is based on what artists need,” James Lavadour, a founder of the institute, said. Lavadour, 68, a renowned expressionist landscape painter and member of the Walla Walla tribe, grew up on the reservation. “Artists need money, space to work, technology, networking, access to collections and education.”

These needs are directly related to Lavadour’s own experience as a self-taught artist in rural America. He said he was clueless in the 70s and 80s about how the art world operated, but was fortunate to be mentored by Betty Feves, a ceramic artist whose husband was the reservation’s doctor. Without her mentorship, he may never have gained access to some of the top contemporary galleries in the Pacific Northwest, he said.

“I wanted to institutionalize the help Betty gave me,” Lavadour said.

He started CSIA with the artist and scholar Phillip Cash Cash in 1992 with the mission of fostering the development of emerging and established Native American artists through educational, social and economic opportunities.

Crow’s Shadow hosts about three to seven artists a year for two weeks each. Inside the Spanish Colonial-style schoolhouse, past a gallery featuring prints from the likes of Bartow, Avantika Bawa (who did the residency in 2018), and Edgar Heap of Birds, is a bedroom for the artist, decorated with textiles from the nearby Pendleton Woolen Mills.

The bedroom opens into a studio packed with four massive presses (two for lithography and two for etching), papers, inks and printing stones, all lit by a wall of windows.

Artists work closely with a master printer, which was Frank Janzen until his retirement in 2017; Judith Baumann now fills the role. Both Janzen and Baumann trained at the Tamarind Institute, a leader in fine art lithography and a model for CSIA.

The artist and master printer produce an edition of about 20 prints. The artist, master printer, CSIA, and the Hallie Ford museum each get a print, and Crow’s Shadow promotes and sells the remainder to fund the program and pay the artist. The plates or stones are destroyed to ensure the value of a limited edition.

Lavadour chose printmaking as the focus of CSIA after doing a Rutgers printmaking fellowship with master printer Eileen Foti.

“The outcome was this formal edition, which was easily absorbed into museum collections,” he said. Printmaking “had the potential of creating access for artists that didn’t have any access to that kind of world. It seemed, in a lot of ways, to short-circuit traditional art development for independent artists.”

Prints run the gamut from abstract to figurative, minimalist to maximalist.

Red Star, an Apsaalooke (Crow) artist who has done the residency twice, said the institute dismantles the “othering” of Native art. “They have the right mission of really promoting Native artists as contemporary artists and not as this silo.”

Her prints juxtapose the old and new ways of reservation life in a style reminiscent of pop art, both in color and repetition. One of her prints features pickup trucks draped in Pendleton blankets on parade for the annual Crow Fair.

Crow’s Shadow also hosts non-Native artists to foster exchange and educate others about contemporary Native American life. Visiting artists lead community workshops, and Pat Hall Walters, a founding board member who is Umatilla-Walla Walla, gives reservation tours and brings artists to long house feasts and the annual pow wow.

“The whole idea is getting creative people together with creative people. It’s good for everyone,” Lavadour said.

For so long, the institute operated on a shoestring, he said. But because of its growing archive and reputation, grant funding has increased. Before Bartow died in 2016, he donated all his prints back to Crow’s Shadow. In selling these, they have created the Rick Bartow Memorial Endowment Fund.

With this newfound stability, the institute is planning to move to a larger space, perhaps even build a new center, but it will never leave the reservation.

“Morally, this organization needs to be on the reservation,” Lavadour said. “It needs to be a gift to the world, to artists everywhere, from the indigenous community.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/arts/crows-shadow-institute-native-american-art.html" id="1748e63d-aef6-339a-a3cb-2b3d07b3a190">The New York Times</a>.

PENDLETON, Ore. — In the foothills of the Blue Mountains in Eastern Oregon, a short drive from the rodeo town of Pendleton and about 200 miles east of Portland, is the only professional print house on an Indian reservation in the United States.

Increasing Exposure for Native Artists

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Alex V. Cipolle

Articles written by the author

Artist Ed Bereal Brings Edgy to Bellingham

Increasing Exposure for Native Artists