0:00
My name is John Pepion and I’m from the Blackfoot reservation and the kind of
art I do is pictographic plains art and bringing it to the forefront, more
contemporary.
0:10
Ledger art is a form of art amongst plains Tribes that is over a
hundred years old. And the period that we’re currently in is considered
the contemporary ledger period. In every piece I do, the designs and the colors
actually mean something and there’s always a story behind it.
0:26
Like this piece - right here it’s called Native Superman and he’s doing the
Superman trick on his bike. It’s kind of showing like, “Oh we still have a
culture and how we’re still dealing with mainstream America and how we are
bridging our two worlds together like the Indian world and the new world that we
live in, with the computers, the bytes, the cell phones. So I’ve been kind of
bridging that gap with my art being in those two worlds together with a little
bit of humor just like storytelling.
0:55
To me, it’s sharing and preserving our cultural ancestry. Going to ceremony - so
I sit there and observe, I watch the movement, everything, the designs, and I
sit there, paying attention, and all these ideas are going in in my mind. And that’s
how I come up with the images I do.
1:10
When I do my ledger art, I’m continuing to find out who I am as a person, who my
family is, especially being Blackfeet in Montana. And that’s what I kind of
appreciate. But I also like to tell the world but who we are in our story, from
our perspective.