Traditions: Ohio Heritage Fellows; 102; Judy Sacks interview with Edwin George, part 2 of 2

Q:

Judy: Folk art is a distinctive type of art that is made by people who represent their own communities’ values, tastes, and esthetics. So, it differs from fine art, in that it’s not just one person’s vision divorced from how other people see things. But, a folk artist shares with the world what he or she has learned from community, from their family, even from within an occupation. It’s the kind of art that happens when people transmit what they know in an oral informal way, say, an apprenticeship between a master artist and a younger person or even within a family.

Q:

Judy: Edwin George is almost a textbook example of what a folk artist is. He grew up in the Cherokee culture and community. He grew up in—using Cherokee language which is it now a rare form of language that very few practitioners use. And Ed is filled with the stories, the visual images uh, and the feeling of Cherokee culture. So, when we see what Edwin does, we meet the Cherokee culture. So, he signifies a community of folk art.

Q:

Judy: Edwin George was a perfect selection to win the Material Culture Recognition from the Ohio Heritage Fellowship people. And that is because material culture is the physical objects that we see uh, that relate to a specific culture. It can be music, it can be a craft, and in Edwin’s case it’s in recognition of his really imaginative painting that symbolizes Cherokee culture.

Q:

Judy: The Eastern Band of Cherokees is one of the United State’s oldest cultures. Uh, there’s research that says that people lived in North Carolina, which is the original home of the Cherokee’s as far back as pretty much the ice age. And the people that we know of as Cherokee’s have been there for centuries. Of course, they had a tragedy happen within their history when they were re-located from North Carolina in great numbers to Oklahoma. And it is what we know of as the Trail of Tears. But there still is an intact longstanding Cherokee community based in North Carolina.

Q:

Judy: What I think is fascinating about Edwin George is, in my experience, he’s one of the few people I know who essentially had a spiritual calling to start creating art. He came from an art community. He came from people within his own family who were master crafts people, such as his mother’s sister who was a basket maker. And Ed was filled with stories from his Cherokee family. But, something happened inside of him that made him just one day say I have to put this in visual form. And pop, out came his art work, which makes it very powerful, very immediate, and amazingly organized for a person who didn’t learn in an apprentice fashion.

Q:

Judy: It’s very typical within folk communities for people to learn in this casual way, perhaps by meditating on stories that they’ve been told their whole lives... or images that they’ve seen. But, the point of folk culture is to let your history, your society pass forward to the future. So, when we meet a folk artist, we meet someone who has been stewing in a lot of old cultural information. Now, that can be translated into the doing of art uh, on a sort of sudden way, the way it happens with Edwin, or it can be, well, I sit down with my mother and I learn how to weave. Uh, his is a slightly different situation, but the process of being enriched by Cherokee ideas and having listened to Cherokee language his whole life, makes it not surprising that he would one day want to represent it in symbols on paint.

Q:

Judy: What is exciting to me about Edwin’s painting is his remarkable use of color and design. He is extremely interested in what a field is. A field is something that we can consider the background for a subject. Edwin dissolves the difference between a subject and a field. Everything is happening together in the same plane at the same time. So, it’s a jam packed visual. Um, the subject could be a folk story about an Indian saving thunder. I’ve seen a painting like that. But all the images that you see are really fairly crowded together and very, very vibrant. They’re crowded together, but they’re beautifully colored and this motion that he builds into it makes for just a very exciting visual experience.

Q:

Judy: We are very lucky to know that Cherokee culture is a living tradition. I think a lot of people uh, who don’t know enough yet about native American society think that it’s something from the past. What Edwin George teaches us is that not only is it alive inside of him, but it’s alive. And we who don’t yet know enough about it are introduced to a living American ancient and important tradition.

Q:

Judy: I feel that when I look at Edwin’s work and let’s say he meets people at festivals who see him for the first time. What they see is several things. They see the distinctness of a culture. We aren’t just Ohioans, but we are Ohioans with deep ethnic and cultural roots. In Edwin’s case it’s Cherokee. In another case it might be Japanese or African. And so we have an enriched understanding of Ohio as a place with people of great wealth of culture that may be different one from another and that we give value to that by understanding it and enjoying it. The other aspect with Edwin that I personally find important is he’s a senior who’s making art. And he came to art pretty late in life. And we need to look at our own families and say, you know what, my grandma does something and it has value. My grandpa, today, paints or drums, or builds boats, and it has value. We learn to value the work of a range of Ohioans.

Q:

Judy: Edwin does something rather interesting in his painting and that is he represents the Cherokee Syllabary, its language which is different from what United States American alphabet is. It actually has eighty six letters and it’s a rare language these days to—so to see the representation of Cherokee letters is really rather thrilling. And it’s—those are meaningful to Edwin because they relate to his earliest memory as a Cherokee speaker. So, we have this interesting sense of painting as a way of preserving language. And interestingly, this is something that many of today’s contemporary Native American painters also do. There are Hopei painters who have reproduced Hopei language in the painting. And in doing so they’re saying not only am I a Cherokee or a Hopei, but my language is really crucial to my identity.

Q:

Judy: In Edwin’s painting there is a lot of symbolism. He is not like grandma Moses uh, there’s not representation of farm scenes or going to church, they’re not as literal as some folk painting is. In Ed’s its almost entirely symbolic, so that the images we see could be a plant that he knows to be a healing plant. And this is part of folk knowledge too. The natural world is not just we walk in grass and it’s pretty but, this plant signifies a woman’s fertility. This plant signifies a way to feel better from a cold. So, it’s in his paintings is embedded all this folk knowledge that, for Edwin, is very important and is a typical task in creation of folk art is to bring all the elements of your culture right with you right visibly.

Q:

Judy: I guess, if someone sees an Edwin painting for the first time, the first thing they see is the exciting color. It is vibrant. It’s not very mixed down, so you’ll get a yellow that’s really yellow, you won’t get a pastel yellow. The same thing with your oranges and your reds. And the way he juxtaposes the colors is surprising and very striking. He makes a lot of use of black as an outlining color and in doing so he makes everything pop. I guess you’d say there’s a lot of pop to the work. And, how he came to understand how to do color... coloration in that way is mysterious to me because it’s as if he knew it from his dream state. And in fact, he talks about a lot of this as representing, sort of, spiritual interior parts of who he is. The color must be in his mind.

Q:

Judy: We need artists like Edwin to understand what it means to be a person of history as you are ih—an Ohioan. In Ohio, there—we’re all here as migrants and immigrants in some fashion or another, but you know, my grandmother might have come from Russia. His grandparents came from North Carolina. We have a sense of history being enriched when we meet an artist who lets us see a little bit more toward the past and toward the future.

Q:

Judy: When we think of literacy or when we think of being verbally articulate, we think well, we’re talking about my language, aren’t we? You know, if you can’t speak English, what’s going on with you? And actually, that’s a funny sort of centric way of thinking of things. Edwin comes from a very deep rich Cherokee language tradition. In which he excelled. And the interesting thing about the Cherokee’s is that they were one of the very first literate peoples in the United States. They became literate in the 1820’s when a Cherokee invented a way to write and people began writing and reading very fluently. While, a lot of other people in the United States were technically illiterate, the Cherokee’s were literate. Edwin uses his Cherokee language to communicate visually. Uh, because for him, speaking English is, in fact, a second language experience. But we must not confuse that with a problem of literacy. He speaks visually and verbally in his own beautiful way.

Q:

Judy: Edwin won the Ohio Heritage Award because he’s a clear master. There is no other person that I know of in the state of Ohio who does Cherokee art as beautifully, as competently as Edwin does. Um, he came to it late in life, that’s a fact, but he came fully blown. Um, just like Venus out of the clam shell from mythology, Edwin had been thinking Cherokee thoughts and Cherokee images his whole life. So, he started out rather masterfully, which is a surprise because, say, in fiddle tradition it takes years to build expertise. Edwin has expertise, he’s got importance as a bearer of a specific cultural tradition, and he shares it broadly with the public. And that is what the Ohio Heritage Award recognizes.

Q:

Judy: Edwin was as fitting a recipient of the Ohio Heritage Fellowship Award as anyone I can imagine because of his mastery, his talent, his representation of his own culture, and his giving it forward in the community.

Q:

Judy: What I think is especially fascinating about Ed’s art is that while it’s perfectly appropriately considered folk art, it represents a deep tradition, it’s related to his ethnic background, he also relates very strongly to what we might consider fine modern art. This is why museum people are interested in him. In the early 20th century the great modern art masters, let’s talk about Picasso or Jackson Pollock or Joseph Albers, people like that, famous modern artists were deeply interested in Native American symbolism and forms. And they looked at images that looked a lot like Ed’s paintings, so that we see a connection between what fine, modern artists do and Native American forms.

Q:

Judy: It used to be that there weren’t very many Native American people doing easel art. That’s what we can call when it’s flat and goes on the wall. Let’s say that’s easel art. There weren’t too many when Ed started being active. Although, it’s a very ancient Native American tradition because there were people doing what was called ledger art in the 18th century and the 19th century. Plain zindios were drawing and painting. But, interestingly, there’s a renaissance today of Native American younger artists doing paintings. So, I think i—it’s fair to say there are more people doing Native American painting now than ever.

Q:

Judy: Edwin is very well known in the state of Ohio. He is not as much a promoter of himself as some other professional artists are. But in terms of the quality of what Edwin does, he’s absolutely top tier.

Q:

Judy: Edwin is a perfect reflection of what a folk artist is. He learned his visual sense and all the stories from his childhood in North Carolina in the Cherokee community. And he absorbed what his community thought was important to talk about, whether that’s folk stories or plants and herbs that were relevant to their daily life. So, he used all of that material to create paintings. So he, as a folk artist, we know he brings forward memories of his own ethnic and cultural background. And he pr—his interest is in sharing it down the road, which is exactly what folk artists are interested in... connecting the past to the future.

Q:

Judy: People who see Edwin’s art are always struck by their visual beauty. You don’t have to know anything about the stories in them to say they are exciting. They’re filled with color. There are forms that come together. And what I think is really telling about Edwin as an artist is that he’s very conscious of the use of space. So, on some paintings, the background is more simple, it’s not as crowded with images. But his tendency and his preference is to really pack in a lot of visual information. That’s just how he sees things and that how—how he feels things. So, what it means for the viewer is that you have many things to look at. There might be a little alligator looking creature here and then a letter form that you don’t recognize because it’s actually Cherokee. So, there’s an awful lot to look at that is exciting.

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