User:Khawklessard/sandbox

Gregg Deal (born March 16, 1975) is an indigenous artist and activist. An enrolled member of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe, he is best known for his visual and performance art examining the contemporary realities of the American Indian experience.

Background
Born in 1975, Deal grew up in Park City, Utah. As a contemporary artist/activist and resident of the Denver, Colorado metropolitan area, Deal’s work concerns itself with indigenous identity and pop-culture, touching on themes of race relations, historical trauma, microaggression, and stereotype.

Artwork
A multimedia painter and muralist whose work is grounded in street art, critical theory, and satire, Deal's work interrogates relevant discourse within Indian Country on topics ranging from decolonization to cultural appropriation to social and environmental justice. In recent years, Deal has explored the controversy surrounding use of Native names and likenesses as sports mascots. This is perhaps best expressed in his "Blood Painting,", debuted during his artist talk at the National Museum of the American Indian on December 7th 2014 and which features the Washington, D.C. NFL team’s logo constructed of paint, gold leaf, and the artist’s blood on 41x31” canvas.

As creator of the performance art piece, “The Last American Indian on Earth,” Deal exposes and plays with the tensions between the romanticized version of the American Indian experience and the harsher contemporary realities understood by indigenous people themselves. Returning to the subject of indigenous mascots, Deal presented "REDSKIN" at the annual Art All Night: Nuit Blance in Washington D.C.'s Shaw District. In this pop-up solo installation, Deal anchored a series of paintings and murals with a 4-hour long performance piece subjecting himself to a variety of abuses intended to mimic and interrogate the daily microaggressions experienced by Indigenous people.