Bio

As a Swedish-Cherokee artist, America blends traditional styles from Native America and Europe with pop imagery of her childhood. Her influences range from the Bacone school of painting, the Arts and Crafts movement, 60s cartoons, to Moundbuilder shell engravings. She is an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation and a hereditary member of Aniwodi, the Red Paint Clan. The Cherokee language and syllabary figure prominently in her work, as they are the strongest visual imagery unique to her tribe. She works in pen and ink, serigraphy, monotype printing, and beadwork, but her primary focus is painting – in acrylic, egg tempera, gouache, and watercolor. Splitting her time between Oklahoma and San Francisco, America earned her MFA in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute and her BFA from the University of Oklahoma. She has shown throughout the United States and in Canada and Europe in the last thirteen years and has won awards at the Heard and SWAIA's Indian Market as well as at numerous competitive shows. She won the IAIA Distinguished Alumni Award for Excellence in Contemporary Native American Arts in 2007 and was voted SF Weekly’s Painter of the Year in 2006.