Curators Statement
John Hitchcock is a Wisconsin-based artist and musician of Comanche, Kiowa and Northern European descent. Raised in Oklahoma on Comanche Tribal lands, he draws on his personal history to create works that fuse frenetic abstraction with layered allusions to indigenous traditions. Along with the artist's characteristically exuberant prints and drawings, Blanket Songs features neon, video, and audio recordings. Taken together, they recall the patterns of his grandmother's beadwork, aspects of intertribal powwows, the Wichita Mountain landscape of his youth, and the symbols and languages of Great Plains Native populations. Embracing contemporary materials and creative practices while paying homage to his ancestral heritage, Hitchcock puts forward a celebratory aesthetic of cultural hybridity and survival.
Blanket Songs draws us in with a dazzling convergence of image, light, sound, and movement. Its visual abundance is matched by the depth of referential content that the artist weaves into each element of the exhibition, including its title. He grew up watching the various ways that his Kiowa grandfather and Comanche grandmother used blankets to honor others: wrapping them around the shoulders of venerated guests, giving them as gifts of respect and friendship, or laying them on the ground to collect food and donations to offer visitors. With Blanket Songs, Hitchcock engages in a respectful act of honoring not only the family and history that shaped him, but also each viewer who enters the gallery.
Leah Kolb
John Hitchcock Bio 2023
John Hitchcock is a Wisconsin-based artist and musician of Comanche, Kiowa, and Northern European descent. Raised in Oklahoma on Comanche Tribal lands, he draws on his personal history to create works that fuse frenetic abstraction with layered allusions to indigenous traditions. He earned his MFA in printmaking and photography at Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas and received his BFA from Cameron University, Lawton, Oklahoma. He has been the recipient of The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Artistic Innovation and Collaboration grant, New York; Jerome Foundation Grant, Minnesota; the Creative Arts Award and Emily Mead Baldwin Award in the Creative Arts at the University of Wisconsin. He is currently an Artist and the Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he teaches screenprinting, relief cut, and installation art.
Hitchcock’s artwork has been exhibited at numerous venues including the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Arts & Design, New York; Exit Art, New York; The Rauschenberg Project Space, New York; International Print Center New York; The Print Center, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon; Missoula Art Museum, Missoula, Montana; North Dakota Museum of Art, Grand Fork, North Dakota; Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico; Eiteljorg Museum, Indianapolis, Indiana; Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma; Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, Minnesota; Kumu Art Museum of Estonia, Tallinn, Estonia; London Print Studio, London, England, UK; South African Museum, Cape Town, South Africa; Museu de Arte de Brasilia, Brasilia, Brazil; Museum of Contemporary Art, Santiago de Chile, Chile; American Culture Center in Shanghai, China, and Air, Land, Seed” at the Venice Biennale 54th International of Art at the University of Ca' Foscari, Venice, Italy. Hitchcock recently completed artist in residencies at the Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts, Pendleton, Oregon and the Plains Indian Museum at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, Cody, Wyoming.