vita

America Meredith
Visual Artist

My work negotiates the space between the Native and non-Native, the urban and rural worlds, as well as the interactions between humans, animals, plants, and spirits. I am an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation and a hereditary member of the Red Paint Clan, but also am of Swedish and Celtic descent, so my art reflects these different influences.

Very little of early Cherokee painting remains, so today the most compelling visual expression of Cherokee culture is its syllabary, a unique writing system developed by Sequoyah. I include the syllabary in many of my paintings, not only because of its aesthetic value, but because language is central to our continuance as a distinct people. It is often said that if everyone who claims Cherokee descent learned the language, then Cherokee would become the official language of the United States!

My paintings are inspired by mediaeval manuscript illumination, the Arts and Crafts movement, Mississippian shell engravings, 60s television cartoons, and the Bacone school of painting. Common threads run through these schools of art – a love of nature and beauty, an awe of the unseen world, a flattening of space and time, and bursts of quirky humor. I endeavor to incorporate these different traditions and connect them to my own life and times. And, incidentally, Cherokees do have a word for art: ditlilostodi.

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