Yatika Starr Fields

Yatika Starr Fields (Osage, Cherokee, and Creek) is a painter known for his vibrant, large-scale murals saturated in pop-art colors along with graffiti style mark making. His painted canvases usually feature explosive all-over compositions, moving the viewer’s eye through swirling colors and dynamic patterns. Often working at a large scale, his oil paintings range from pure abstraction, to images with abstract components interlaced with symbolic narrative elements, and into figurative representative painting. In 2016 Fields joined the water protectors at the Oceti Sakowin Camp in North Dakota to protest the proposed Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) on sacred land. Many of his subsequent paintings have addressed the struggle and hope that permeates the complexities of Indigenous Survivance.

Fields was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to parents who were both practicing artists. His mother is a ceramicist and his father is a photographer. From an early age Fields was exposed to a great deal of art. As a youth he entered work into the Red Earth arts festival in Oklahoma City, and by high school he had his own painting studio which he funded by working at a restaurant. After high school, Fields attended the Oklahoma Summer Arts Institute at the University of Oklahoma, and went to Sienna, Italy to study Landscape Painting. In 2001 he moved east to pursue a degree in Painting at the Art Institute of Boston (2004). In 2009-10 he was a fellowship recipient for the Urban Artist Initiative in New York City. He received a “Native Creative Development Grant” in 2015 from Evergreen State College, and in 2017 was the recipient of Tulsa Artist Fellowship, in Tulsa OK, where he currently lives.