Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie

Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie
Tsinhnahjinnie at a panel in 2015 in San Francisco, California
Born	(1954-08-26) August 26, 1954 (age 70) Phoenix, Arizona, United States of America
Nationality	American and Navajo Nation
Education	Institute of American Indian Arts
Alma mater	California College of the Arts University of California, Irvine
Occupation(s)	photographer, museum director, curator, professor
Employer(s)	University of California, Davis, C.N. Gorman Museum
Known for	photography, videography
Works	Mattie Goes Traveling, Mattie Looks for Steven Biko, Grandma and Me, Aboriginal World View
Awards	Eiteljorg Fellowship for Native American Fine Art, Chancellor's Fellowship at the University of California Irvine, First Peoples Community Artist Award, Rockefeller artist in residence
Website	www.hulleah.com

Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie^{[pronunciation?]} (born 1954) is a Navajo Nation photographer, museum director, curator, and professor. She is living in Davis, California. She serves as the director of the C.N. Gorman Museum and teaches at University of California, Davis.

Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie was born into the Bear Clan (Taskigi) of the Seminole Nation and born for the Tsi'naajínii Clan of the Navajo Nation. Her mother, Minnie June Lee McGirt-Tsinhnahjinnie (1927–2016),^[1] was Seminole and Muskogee and her father, Andrew Van Tsinajinnie (1916–2000), was Navajo.^[2] Her father was a painter and muralist who studied at the Studio in Santa Fe, New Mexico.^[3] Tsinhnahjinnie was born in 1954 in Phoenix, Arizona.^[4] She grew up outside of Scottsdale; at age 13, she moved to the Navajo Reservation near Rough Rock.^[5] She is an enrolled citizen of the Navajo Nation.^[6]

In 1975, she began her art education at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. When she was age 23, Tsinhanahjinne moved to the San Francisco Bay Area for school. In 1978, Tsinhnahjinnie enrolled in the California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts) in Oakland, where she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting with a photography minor in 1981.^[7][8]

She earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in Studio Arts from University of California, Irvine in 2002.^[8] During her time at Irvine she focused her work toward digital photos and videos. In that same year, she was awarded the First Peoples Fund Community Spirit Award.

She has self-identified as lesbian.^[9][10]

She served as a board member for the Intertribal Friendship House, Oakland and the American Indian Contemporary Art Gallery in Oakland. Tsinhanahjinne chooses to display her art and passion through things like newsletters, posters, t-shirts, and photos. She taught her skill of photography and media to younger students.

Currently, Tsinhanahjinne works as a professor of Native American Studies at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis). While she has been working there she holds organized conferences that hold the purpose of bringing together native American photographers like herself to discuss topics such as "Visual Sovereignty". Along with being a professor for the university, Tsinhanahjinne is the Director of C.N. Gorman Museum at UC Davis.^[11][8][10]

Tsinhnahjinnie began her career as a painter, but "turned to photography as a weapon when her aesthetic/ethnic subjectivity came under fire."^[12] Her body of work "plays upon her own autobiography and what it means to be a Native American."^[13] Her work uses photography as a means to re-appropriate the Native American as subject. Although she is a photographer, Tsinhnahjinnie often hand-tints her photographs or uses them in collage.^[7] She has also used unusual supports for her work, such as car hoods. She shoots her own original photographs, but also frequently retools historical photographs of Native Americans to comment upon the ethnographic gaze of nineteenth-century white photographers. Tsinhnahjinnie also works in film and video.^[14]

Using a combination of photography and digital images with a contemporary Native American photography style, she overcomes stereotypes, challenges political ideas, and creates a space for other Natives to express their ideas as well. Her goal with her art is not aimed at the non-natives but instead it is to document her life experience and share it with the world. In a statement on "America Is a Stolen Land", Tsinhnahjinnie says, ".. the photographs I take are not for White people to look at Native people. I take photographs so Native people can look at Native people. I make photographs for Native people". The Damn Series which she wrote in 1977 is Tsinhnahjinnie's most widely known piece. Throughout the piece she works in Native knowledge (including humorous jokes) to repurpose images of Natives from colonialist history by shifting them back into a rightfully Indigenous context.

20 years later, in 1994, Tsinhnahjinnie created a series called "Memoirs of an Aboriginal Savant". She uses fifteen pages of an electronic diary to reflect on life with her family, politics, and other life experiences. The diary is all written with the idea in mind that she will take the viewer on a "journey to the center of an aboriginal mind without the fear of being confronted by the aboriginal herself". The book begins on the page "1954" (her birth year) and continues to look deeply into her personal life experiences. Through the book she writes herself from a first person point of view in order to convey herself how she sees herself instead of others views.

In many of her key works from the 1990s, Tsinhnahjinnie examined the notion of beauty. Her interest in this subject should be viewed in the context of the "return to beauty" that established itself in art historical discourse in the same period^[16] At the time, critics were addressing the taboos which had developed around beauty in Western art over the 20th century and the resurfacing of beauty towards the 1990s. While debated among scholars, these taboos were often characterized as a postmodernist reaction against the past notion of beauty as represented by a passive female body. Artists at the time were navigating a "return to beauty" that took these critiques of beauty into account.

Meanwhile, Tsinhnahjinnie was working from a cultural background where beauty had never been a taboo. She defined the beauty of women in terms of their empowerment, grounded in her own perspective as an Indigenous woman. Tsinhnahjinnie's collage When Did Dreams of White Buffalo Turn to Dreams of White Women? (1990) raises questions about Native women's internalized definitions of beauty.^[17] According to Lakota lore, White Buffalo Calf Woman was an exceptionally beautiful woman who introduced the pipe ceremony to the Lakota people. The title of this work addresses the historical shift from an indigenous definition of beauty before colonization, represented by White Buffalo Calf Woman, to a neocolonial one.^[16]

• Lidchi, Henrietta and Tsinhnahjinnie, H. J., eds. Visual Currencies: Native American Photography. Edinburgh: National Museums of Scotland, 2008.
• Tsinhnahjinnie, H. J. and Passalacqua, Veronica, eds. Our People, Our Land, Our Images: International Indigenous Photographers. Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2008. ISBN 978-1597140577.
• Tsinhnahjinnie, H. J. "Our People, Our Land, Our Images." Native Peoples Magazine. Nov/Dec. 2006
• Tsinhnahjinnie, H. J. "Native American Photography." The Oxford Companion to Photography Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004
• Tsinhnahjinnie, H. J. "When is a Photograph Worth a Thousand Words?" Photography's Other Histories. C. Pinney and N. Peterson. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003: 40-52

• Fowler, C. (2019). Aboriginal Beauty and Self-Determination: Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie's Photographic Projects. In 1331626408 976937976 D. K. Cummings (Author), Visualities 2: More perspectives on contemporary American Indian film and art. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press.
• Heard Museum. Argus: Native American Artists resource collection. Retrieved April 23, 2021, from Argus: Native American Artists Resource Collection
• Lester, Patrick D. The Biographical Directory of Native American Painters. Norman: The Oklahoma University Press, 1995. ISBN 0806199369.
• Reno, Dawn. Contemporary Native American Artists. Brooklyn: Alliance Publishing, 1995. ISBN 0964150964.
• Tsinhnahjinnie, H. J. and Passalacqua, Veronica, eds. Our People, Our Land, Our Images: International Indigenous Photography. Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2008. ISBN 978-1597140577.
• Celia Stahr. "Tsinhnahjinnie, Hulleah." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press. Web. 6 Mar. 2016. Tsinhnahjinnie, Hulleah.
• Rushing III, W. Jackson. Native American Art in the Twentieth Century: Makers, Meanings, Histories. London; New York: Routledge, 1999. ISBN 978-0415137485
• Paul Apodaca, et al. "Native North American Art." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press. Web. 6 Mar. 2016 http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T061112pg1.

• Official site