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Review: Frank Big Bear paintings inaugurate new Indian gallery
Friday, February 11, 2011
Filed Under: Arts & Entertainment


"For more than a decade Frank Big Bear was the artist/poet of E. Franklin Avenue, the guy with the amazing colored pencils whose intricate drawings captured the shabby street's decay, the drink and drugs and hard times that so often burdened its people. There was never hard-luck whining in the drawings, just keen-eyed attention to the way life might play out if you were an urban Indian living in a hardscrabble neighborhood, as Big Bear was.

But Franklin Avenue has changed and so has Big Bear's new work, which is on view in "From the Rez, to the Hood, to the Lake" at All My Relations Gallery through Feb. 28. Some of the differences are artful -- bolder colors, bigger canvases, a switch from pencil to paint. Others are more personal. Instead of observing what's outside his window, Big Bear has turned to what's on his mind.

Most of the show's 15 paintings are stylized portraits in bright Pop hues and mosaic patterns that dazzle the eye with curvaceous stripes and ornamental ribbons of rainbow colors. As if consciously testing his own prowess, the artist has taken on such 20th-century masters as Picasso and Matisse without compromising his independent vision. The new work also includes references to his family and to the North Woods and Lake Superior, near which he settled last year."

Get the Story:
A bigger canvas (The Minneapolis Star Tribune 2/11)

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