Duane Slick is a Meskwaki painter, storyteller, and educator of Winnebago descent. Originally from Waterloo, IA, he now resides in Providence, RI. His visual work includes black-and-white photorealist paintings, monochromatic text work on linen, and multidimensional coyote portraits. His work has been described as “dream paintings whose aim is the exploration of matters spiritual, not physical.”
In 2022, Slick received notable praise in the New York Times for his solo exhibition, The Coyote Makes the Sunset Better, at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, CT. This was his first-time exhibiting solo at a museum, and featured over 90 works Writer Dawn Chan writes, “The paintings are terrific. […] For one, they suggest the textures of modern life, whether in the perfect curves of prefab furniture or the glitching screens and grids of early video games. But they also seem to get at the experience of bereavement amid nature: the experience, maybe, of pausing to look at a night sky and letting an unfamiliar new solitude sink in.”
Duane Slick
A Certain Cadence of Night. #2, 2022
“Night is often thought of as an absolute absence, yet in these paintings, the night is filled with movement and a sparkle that is an iridescent medium mixed into the paint. In previous works, I have used the title, "There are No Endings." this idea addresses the anxiety of nothingness, where consciousness and the known no longer exist.”
Duane Slick
Slick received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting, a Bachelor of Arts in Arts Education from the University of Northern Iowa in 1986, and a Master of Fine Arts in Painting from the University of California—Davis in 1990. From 1992 through 1995, he was a professor of painting at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and since 1995, he has been a professor of painting at the Rhode Island School of Design.
In 1993, Slick was awarded the Rockefeller Foundation Travel Grant from the College Art Association and a Painters and Sculptors Grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation. In 2010, he was the Ronald and Susan Dubin Native Artist Fellow at the School for Advanced Research. His work is in institutions such as the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, MA); Missoula Art Museum (Missoula, MT); Eiteljorg Museum (Indianapolis, IN); National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution (New York, NY); and many more public and private collections.
Grey Salish Coyote, 2022