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In early interviews Durham claimed to have been born to the Wolf Clan in Nevada County, Arkansas. As Jerry, an oil industry worker, searched for construction jobs, the family moved around rural Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana and Oklahoma. Jimmie was born in Houston, Texas, to Ethel (nee Simmons) and Jerry Durham. Self-portrait, 1986, using canvas, cedar, acrylic paint, metal, synthetic hair, scrap fur, dyed chicken feathers, human rib bones, sheep bones, seashell and thread. When Durham was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2019, the curator Ralph Rugoff praised him for “art that is at once critical, humorous and profoundly humanistic”, work that a critic had dismissed two years earlier as “cartoonishly crude pseudo-Indian artefacts”.
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In a later series of sculptures, he attached further animal skulls and horns to assemblages of furniture in body-like arrangements that he referred to as “animal spirits”. Tlunh Datsi (1984) drew attention to the oppression of Native Americans by attaching a puma skull decorated with feathers and beads to a police barricade. Pocahontas’ Underwear (1985), a pair of red knickers with feathers, shells and beads attached, was critical of the fetishisation of Native American imagery. Much of his artwork over the ensuing decades played on facets, motifs and cliches of North American indigeneity. In 1973 he protested against the poor treatment of American indigenous populations at the Wounded Knee Occupation, a standoff between activists from the American Indian Movement (AIM), some armed, and the police. There he helped establish a working group on indigenous populations. In the 1970s, before finding fame as an artist, Durham was the UN representative for Indians of the Americas, an umbrella group for organisations including the Shuar Confederation of Ecuador, the Mapuche Confederation of Chile, and various North American indigenous groups.
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Elsewhere he said: “I’ve been accused of not being part of any Indian community. Jimmie Durham is not a Cherokee in any legal or cultural sense.” While Durham had previously spoken of his Native American heritage, he also dismissed tribal enrolment as a “tool of apartheid”. When his touring retrospective At the Center of the World opened at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, in 2017, an editorial in Indian Country Today complained: “No matter what metric is used to determine Indigenous status, Durham does not fulfil any of them. The sculpture prefigured what would become an enduring controversy and mystery – whether Durham was of Cherokee descent or not. Durham dismissed tribal enrolment as a ‘tool of apartheid’.