Artist Talk

Duane Slick, Professor in the RISD Departments of Painting and Printmaking, is a member of the Sac and Fox Tribe of the Mississippi in Iowa (Meskwaki). He is a painter and storyteller, whose acrylic paintings blend the subjects of oral and visual Native American traditions with a focus on trickster strategies and modernist/post-modernist painting histories.
His black and white series of American flag-based paintings (2010-2012), titled The Untraceable Present, explored the contradictions and legacies of Native identity in the grand narratives of American history.
Slick shares his process and discusses his paintings on view in the exhibitions The Phantom of Liberty and Former Glory.
Danforth Hall