It's a photo that was making the rounds on social media recently. The image is of a fully dressed Plains Indian — with headdress — sitting in a small roped off area on a busy sidewalk.
A sign outside the velvet rope reads, "Please do not feed the stereotype". The twist? Everything artist Gregg Deal is wearing in the piece was mass produced in China.
It represents "the inept understanding Americans have, or westerners have, to what indigeneity is and what it isn't," Deal said. "So in essence, I'm a stereotype personified."
Ethnographic Zoo is a performance piece created by Deal, the artist-in-residence at the Denver Art Museum. "The real ethnographic zoos that existed in museum in western culture, [were] basically taking brown people and putting them on display in western cities, gawking at, essentially, the 'other'," Deal said.
Reaction to this latest work, Deal said, was mixed. "Some people laughed, some people were annoyed, some people walked by," Deal said. "One woman, which I have on video, got behind me and was pulling on the feathers on the headpiece."
So much of my work is based on indigenous identity, particularly as it exists in popular culture.
- Gregg Deal, artist
With fashion appropriated from indigenous cultures walking the runways and discussion of team mascots filling the airwaves, Deal said art has a unique ability to address the topic in a different way.