Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts (CSIA) is honored to announce the selection of Yatika Fields as CSIA’s national Artist-in-Residence for the 2019 season. Funded by the generous support of The National Endowment for the Arts, this award supports a significant national visiting artist at Crow’s Shadow. Fields will spend two weeks at Crow’s Shadow developing limited-edition prints, which will be hand pulled by Crow’s Shadow’s collaborative Master Printer, Judith Baumann. Most artists-in-residence at CSIA create two images for editioning, which is typically completed in the following months. Crow’s Shadow Press specializes in fine art lithography, a labor-intensive printmaking process where each color is created with a different lithography plate, and represents an additional run through a traditional manual press. Depending on the complexity of the image and the number of colors, an edition can take months to complete. Upon completion, the prints will be available for sale and one copy of each edition will enter CSIA’s permanent collection, which is frequently lent to various cultural and learning institutions around the region and nationally. At the end of Fields’ artist residency the public is invited to Crow’s Shadow for an artist talk and studio visit, on Thursday, April 11, 5:00-7:00 pm.
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.
Murals and public art commissions by Fields can be seen in many cities including Denver Colorado; Miami Florida; Brooklyn New York; Phoenix Arizona; Santa Fe New Mexico; Portland Oregon, San Juan Puerto Rico, and Victoria Australia. He has also been featured at many galleries and cultural institutions including: Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA; Philbrook Museum, Tulsa, OK; Wilmer Jennings Gallery, New York, NY; House of Bricks Gallery, Melbourne, Australia; Orenda Gallery, Paris, France; and Atticus Gallery, Barcelona, Spain.
Fields is represented by BlueRain Gallery in Santa Fe, NM; Joseph Gierek Fine art in Tulsa, OK; and Rainmaker Gallery in Bristol, UK. This will be Fields' first time working at Crow's Shadow.
