Jim Denomie, internationally known Native American artist from Minnesota, dies at 67

ST. PAUL -- Internationally known Native American artist Jim Denomie died Tuesday morning at his home near Scandia, Minnesota.

Denomie, an Ojibwa of the Lac Courte Oreilles Band, was known for his powerful, beautiful, whimsical, satirical paintings and murals -- narratives built on his heritage. His work is in every major Twin Cities museum and is on display throughout the United States and in Germany. He was born in 1955 in Hayward, Wis., and grew up in Minneapolis. He died of cancer.

In a Facebook post Tuesday morning, his wife, author Diane Wilson, said: “My beloved husband, Jim Denomie, began his spirit journey early this morning. Jim has been the love of my life from the night we first met at a Solstice party 27 years ago. He was at the beginning of a painting career that would ultimately bring him national and international acclaim. But what attracted me to him was his kind, gentle, funny nature, his passion for art, and his deep commitment to family.”

When Denomie was named the McKnight Foundation’s 2019 Distinguished Artist, he talked about his career during an interview in his studio located in a rolling, wooded area near his house and a writing studio for his wife.

Denomie said he dropped out of South Minneapolis High School at 16 after he told a school adviser that he was either going to study art or drop out of school. She told him there was no future in art.

It was a 20-year struggle to get to his art, he said in the 2019 interview. Denomie worked in the construction trades and fell into a lifestyle of “partying and addiction,” he said.

“In 1989, I got sober,” Denomie said. He enrolled at the University of Minnesota (he’d earned his GED during his years away from art) and found inspiration in his involvement with Native American student groups.

He said he found a history that wasn’t available in grade school: Native people pushed to reservations, broken treaties, massacres.

“It kind of angered me, this history, so I started to paint about it,” he said in the Pioneer Press interview. People associate Native art with spirits, eagles, teepees and buffalo, he says. “I grew up in South Minneapolis. We didn’t have that there.

“I needed to be true to myself — true to my culture.”

In 2005, Denomie did a painting a day. Every day. The portraits he created that year were mostly small, 8 by 10 inches he says, with a few as large as 18 by 24 inches.

He was inspired the previous year by a visiting artist at the university who had a bookshelf filled with sketchbooks. The visiting artist did a sketch every day.

“I came up with this notion probably in September or October (2004),” he said. He gathered supplies and — most important, he said — he told people he was going to do a painting a day, so he couldn’t back out.

St. Paul Pioneer Press file photo

He remembers one night in 2005 when he got home late and wanted to skip that day’s painting. “I thought, ‘I’ll do two tomorrow,’ ” he says. “But I knew that would be cheating.” He sat down to paint on that late night and did one that was “fast, careless and carefree.”

“I wowed myself with the looseness and expression,” he says. He did two more paintings that night.

“If I had waited until morning, I would have had three completely different paintings.

“Creative energy is like a river. It depends on where you dip into it.”

The painting-a-day year “really elevated my development as a painter. I learned so much. It’s where my career started to take off.”

Denomie’s work was featured in an art biennial in Sao Paulo Brazil in 2019. He was also part of a major show later that year at Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center, “The Expressionist Figure: 100 Years of Modern and Contemporary Drawing.”

The Walker’s Henriette Huldisch, chief curator and director of curatorial affairs, said in an email: “In Jim Denomie, the Twin Cities arts community has lost of one of our most original and incisive artists. I am honored to have met Jim, and have experienced his generosity, wisdom and brilliance.”

The Minneapolis Institute of Art has four works by Denomie in its collection. “The Delegation” (2008, oil on canvas) is currently on view in Mia’s Gallery 301.

A new exhibit at Minnesota History Center features Denomie’s mural “Off the Reservation (or Minnesota Nice).”

Wilson, is an award-winning writer, speaker and educator. A former head of the Franconia Sculpture Park near Taylors Falls, her current endeavor is protecting ancient seeds.

Denomie’s wit shows in the image that graces the cover of Wilson’s “Spirit Car: Journey to a Dakota Past,” winner of a Minnesota Book Award. Titled “Manifold Destiny,” Denomie’s cover painting shows a car surrounded by Indians on horseback. “Spirit Car” was followed by “Beloved Child: A Dakota Way of Life” and “The Seed Keeper,” her 2021 novel based, she says, on her “awe (of) the brilliance in that single seed that holds the spark of life.”

Wilson has served as executive director of the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance, a national coalition of tribes and organizations working to create sovereign food systems for Native People.

There was no information about memorial services.