Bunky Echo-Hawk, painter, poet, DJ, graffiti writer, etc. is above all a great activist in the Native American art community. Is there anyone alive at this point who hasn’t received an email from Bunky about some cause or another? Is there anyone left on myspace or facebook that isn’t Bunky’s pal? I get his news everywhere I go. Within days of joining a new social network, he finds me, as does whatever he’s promoting or involved with. Like the other day, when I got this announcement that Bunky will be donating a live painting to Red Ink, a student publication from the University of Arizona:
Nawa Tsatiks-si-tsatiks . . .
I am very proud to be able to offer this opportunity. My art is being featured again in the upcoming issue of Red Ink Magazine, a student publication produced at the University of Arizona. The issue release party is coming up, on November 9, in Tucson, AZ.
Here’s the goodie. At this premiere party, I will create a ‘live’ painting…48″ x 60″. This is a big painting, needless to say. This size canvas sells, off of my easel, for $4,300.
HOWEVER…I am donating this painting to Red Ink Magazine. They are pre-selling raffle tickets (online, too!), as a fundraising effort to sustain the publication. You DO NOT have to be present to win!
So, please consider purchasing AT LEAST ONE raffle ticket, for $5.00. Your generosity will empower artists, the students, the future of the magazine, and ALL who read it. You can have a hand in the Native Art Movement!
You can purchase online at: www.redinkmagazine.com
Ta’Tura Tsiksu (With Much Respect),
Bunky Echo-Hawk
(Pawnee/Yakama)
I first met Bunky Echo-Hawk thanks to America Meredith, who told me I had to meet this crazy artist activist from Colorado. If America thought he was cool, he probably was, and so I sought him out at Indian Market 2005. We shot the shit over drinks at Evangelo’s in Santa Fe, and I found out about a few of the things that Bunky was into, including NARF (the Native American Rights Foundation) and NVision, the youth arts organization that he co-founded and currently serves as the Executive Director. Bunky is a cool guy and his enthusiasm for Native America’s art and people is infectious.
As a painter, Echo-Hawk uses a bright, almost flourescent palette that is reminiscent of rock’n’roll silk-screen artists like Frank Kozik and others. His style reveals his skills as a graphic designer, and most of his paintings are like wild cartoons, each of which has a “punchline” that tends to comment on Native issues. Echo-Hawk style de guerre is to deliver the meme within the punchline and spread it far and wide through whatever the medium, be it paint or poetry or through his activist existence.
As Echo-Hawk says on his myspace profile, “I live to be a voice. I live to see, in my lifetime, change for the better. I live for proactive action. This is how I’m living. How are you living?”
To own or collect Echo-Hawk isn’t really so much to cultivate a great fine artist as it is to assist and support a master propagandist with what I’d call a damn righteous agenda. Buy a raffle ticket and support the cause – of Native art, and Echo-Hawk. He may never win any grand prizes for his paintings, (thought he certainly paints better than I do) but for his unending support of everything and everyone Native, Bunky Echo-Hawk is in a class by himself. And that makes an Echo-Hawk in the living room an utterly priceless objet d’art. (I don’t yet own one – but I bought three tickets for $10.)
For more Bunky Echo-Hawk paintings, click.
