Athena LaTocha


Athena LaTocha is a Hunkpapa Lakota artist focusing on unique ways of making landscape paintings and the relationship of man-made and natural landscapes. Her work is featured in the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts along with one of her works Inside the Forces of Nature and she had a solo exhibition in the CUE Art Foundation in New York in early 2016 as well as Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, New York State Museum, Artists Space, South Dakota Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, the Ice House gallery in New York, and the International Gallery of Contemporary Art in Anchorage, Alaska. She was born in Alaska and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. She along with six other artists used Wave Hill's Glyndor Gallery's winter workshop program.

Academics

She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the School of Art Institute of Chicago then continued on to received her Master of Fine Arts from Stony Brook University in 2007 in New York. She followed that with an apprenticeship at the Beacon Fine Art Foundry in Beacon New York. She also took printmaking classes at the Art Students League of New York. She has a background in oil painting.

Creative process

Her background in oil painting gave way into using other methods of her art. She has said that, "Over the years, I started removing my hand more and removing brushes and all of the proper tools we’re trained with as painters. It’s been years of finding other ways to look at the process, and other ways to look at and interact with materials." She is often using sumi ink mixed with earthy material and gathered objects such as bricks and tire shreds to paint. She'll use the tire shreds to pull the ink over the canvas, or move the canvas itself in "wavelike undulations" to guide the ink. In her time at Wave Hill, she also made use of a "root ball," a mass of roots at the base of a plant that has soil surrounding it. She usually works with her canvases on the floor with her working over and on top of them. She has said that, "Working aerially with my images on the floor, I am interested in being inside the image rather than the outside as an easel painter."

Message

LaTocha tries to bring attention to the idea that landscapes are an active thing as opposed to objects. She embodies the belief that humans are part of the landscape rather than separate from it by literally standing within the scenes she paints. She has said that, "For a number of years now I’ve been working with land motifs, land imagery. All of my work is about being immersed in these spaces, these environments. Sometimes I’m reluctant to use the word ‘landscape’ because there's a certain kind of genre, a certain kind of concept or ideology when you think about the idea of landscape. It connotes a kind of reverence or allusion to something. It's usually something that you're looking at or looking upon. It's this view or window into another world, a natural world or an industrial one." While bringing attention to this she tries to have the observer and artist be a part of the piece itself as she herself has stated, "In the aboriginal sense one is actively moving through the landscape. Humans are part of the landscape, not separate from it."