JONATHAN
GITELSON
Jonathan Gitelson’s work – across photography, video, books, radio, and public art – endeavors to look underneath every overturned stone, and in doing so he reveals the poetry, humor, and strangeness of the everyday. His most recent project, Indian Chief No. 53, examines a landmark from his hometown of Mount Kisco, NY. The photographic series upends the ways in which society thinks about and images revered objects. In Gitelson’s hands, a 1907 statue erected in his hometown of Mount Kisco, NY, featuring an Indigenous tribal chief who the town is supposedly named for, is revealed to be nothing more than a symbol. In his research, Gitelson found that the figure is entirely fictional and that replicas of the statue exist throughout the United States, with different names. Some are painted in full color, but perhaps the most startling image is of “Chief Kisco,” now wading in water in Muscatine, Iowa (there renamed the “Muscoutine Indian”), with a bright orange life vest across his shoulders, a hauntingly apt image for our current political climate. In photographing these different locations, Gitelson asks us to reconsider how local stories spread and, regardless of truth, become attached to monuments. He also points to the clumsy colonialist attempts at attribution in the United States, where one tribal leader can stand in for all. In the last few years, the reckoning with monuments across the country and the increasing complexity of democracy provide a platform for Gitelson’s work to remind us to always interrogate the world. -Denise Markonish, Guest Juror
ARTIST BIO
Jonathan Gitelson received his MFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago in 2004 and is a Professor of Art and Design at Keene State College in NH. He works in a variety of mediums that include photography, artist books, video, installation, and public art. Jonathan's work has been exhibited at institutions throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe including MASS MoCA, the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, the Milwaukee Art Museum, and Galerie f5,6 in Munich. He has received public commissions from the Chicago Transit Authority, the deCordova Sculpture Park, For Freedoms, The Current, and more, and his artwork is in the permanent collection of numerous institutions, including the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the Fidelity Investment Collection. Jonathan’s work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, Art in America, and Art New England. His recent project Sonic Blanket received grant funding from the Vermont Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Arts Council of Windham County.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Over the past twenty years, I have created a series of photographs, artist books, videos, installations, public artworks, works on paper, and web-based projects that explore the wonder and the strangeness found in the seeming ordinariness of everyday life. The attached images are from my current project, “Indian Chief No. 53.”
A primary landmark in my hometown of Mount Kisco, NY, is a statue featuring our namesake, “Chief Kisco.” The statue was erected in 1907 and soon became a central part of the town’s identity. The Chief’s image has appeared on municipal vehicles and uniforms and has been a source of regional folklore for generations.
It wasn’t until I was an adult that I learned that “Chief Kisco” was actually a fictional character and that the statue was one of an estimated 25 replicas that were created as civic statues and distributed throughout the United States. The statue that we called “Chief Kisco” was originally sold by the title, “Indian Chief No. 53.”
While identical, the statues were attributed to a wide variety of Indigenous tribes including the Cherokee, Chippewa, Pawtuxet, Hackensack, Mohawk, Delaware, Shawnee, Algonquin, Seneca, Mingo, and Incan. Statues were often named after specific individuals, though as in the case of “Chief Kisco,” many of these Chiefs were fabricated myths. Over the years, a number of these statues have been damaged and repaired with slight modification. There are currently 22 “Indian Chief No. 53” statues still on public display.
My project consists of a series of photographs that I have made of these statues. The contemporary political moment is ripe with a nostalgic longing for a past that oftentimes never actually existed. I’m interested in how the construction of cultural mythologies continues to persist and impact our understanding of our national and regional identity and history.
PORTFOLIO
