keith secola: the uncompahgre

The Uncompahgre people are a tribal band/community from the Ute Indian Tribe that reside on the Uintah & Ouray Indian Reservation in Northeastern Utah. Before the tribe was created, Ute people were eleven communal bands stretched across the Western Slope of the Colorado Rockies. Utes lived a life of movement and oneness with nature, summering in the high mountains and spending winters in the low valleys. Due to ongoing wars and westward expansion, the Uncompahgre were relocated by military force to the Utah Indian Reservation hundreds of miles from their original homeland, in the hopes that the Uncompahgre would assimilate to farming and give up their hunter-gatherer lifestyle. During these times the people did what they could to survive and hold on to their cultural and spiritual practices.

The photographic archives in this exhibition are of the Uncompahgre people after their forced removal to the Utah Indian Reservation. They were collected by the artist from archival albums from his grandparents and represent his Ute Indian and Uncompahgre heritage. 

Keith Secola’s recent body of work involves the reinsertion of the American Indian image onto collaged and deconstructed book covers of American colonial history, creating a new surface for printing and painting. The use of archival photography on the textbooks allows Secola to create a layer between the past and present and to form new narratives that question Native identity through the fusion of image, text, and memory.