Al Hubbard & Bruce Cook
Al Hubbard
Al Hubbard is a Northern Arapaho and Navajo multi-media artist born in Idaho Falls, Idaho. He studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Central Wyoming College in Riverton, Wyoming.
Al’s range of projects have included painting, installation, and printmaking. The unique mix of materials consisting of image-transfers, acrylic mediums, and collage elements reflect the complexity and multi-levels of living as a Native American in today’s world. His work combines stories, memory, and iconography of the Northern Arapaho and Navajo nations. Connecting these elements into his own visual language creates a direct link to the preservation of the past, living today, and preparing for the future.
Al currently resides on the Wind River Reservation in central Wyoming. He continues to inspire others as he creates and produces bodies of work that challenge and redefine institutional Native American art.
Bruce Cook
Bruce Cook is an artist with a complex ethnicity, Haida and Arapaho. He explores his art through wood carving, painting, drawing, sculpture, and design.
As a Haida artist residing in Wyoming, Bruce is driven to explore and innovate. The woods and natural materials he used that were once abundant in the Pacific Northwest are now scarce. This scarcity of resources has led to a creative drive which has been vital to his survival as a Haida artist in the high plains desert.
Bruce’s subject matter is Haida; both traditional and contemporary. As a Native artist capable of inhabiting both forms simultaneously, Bruce is free to create without the confines of being bound to one or the other.
His favorite mediums are yellow cedar and fresh red alder. Their suppleness, delicacy, strength, and willingness to be transformed in both form and texture make them perfect mediums for exploring Haida art.
Each day brings with it a new desire to practice the forms of those who have come before him and a push to innovate in the forms that are yet to come. This inspiration is his daily spirit to create. For many artists who work in traditional mediums there is a difficulty in telling the story of their artwork to a larger audience. The items that we toil over for endless hours move into the hands of the recipient only to be seen on special occasions or never to be seen again. Sometimes this is part of an ethereal ethic but many more times it is simply because there was no way to capture the project in imagery and push the story forward. That is certainly the case with Bruce’s wood carving, drawing, and painting.
