Destiny Green has been creating art for as long as she can remember, but she struggled to find her place in the First American art realm. Eight years ago, her journey led her to photography. Now, the Chickasaw artist is redefining her creative path and what it means to be a modern Indigenous creator.
In high school, Green wanted to be an actor, and then in college, she wanted to make music videos. She was studying film and video but also had to take basic classes in all the different artistic disciplines for her degree and said she realized she really enjoyed them.
She was working on paper sculptures when she met a photojournalist, Joe Rushmore, who would become one of her best friends. He asked if she had ever thought about pursuing photography, and, at the time, she didn’t really know if she was interested.
Shortly after, she met a photographer who needed an assistant at weddings. Green was tasked with capturing small moments and detail shots. The photographer loaned Green her camera, and everything started to fall into place. Seeing her interest piqued, Rushmore asked Green if she wanted him to show her how to really use the camera. She excitedly agreed.
“I’ve never taken to a medium so fast in my life,” Green said. “I had done some photography in college, but I’d completely forgotten anything I learned. But this was epically quick. I was working professional gigs within three months.”
After experimenting with different types of art throughout the course of her life, Green had finally found the medium she connected with the most. It allowed her to take photographs but also paint with light and stitch different parts of an image together using digital tools.
Green said she never really felt like her forms of expression connected with her own Indigenous culture.
“I’ve been making art for a long time,” Green said. “But none of it was really cultural. I felt like I didn’t have a place in markets because I had a very narrow view of what people show there. I felt like there wasn’t a place for me. And as a result, I was very disconnected from my culture within my artwork.”
Everything changed for Green when she attended a workshop facilitated by Chickasaw artist Dustin Mater.
Green teaches the intermediate level of photography for the Chickasaw Summer Arts Academy, and in the winter of 2023, they had a retreat for instructors. Mater taught a short course in Chickasaw iconography, and it changed something within Green.
“Dustin came in, and he brought his pamphlets from his gorget workshop,” Green said. “There was an image of a gorget that depicted Red Horn Birdman from the Mississippian period. The background had all of these p-shaped swirls, and something exploded in my brain. Dustin was talking about how the shapes were supposed to be wind or water, but what I was seeing was a representation of time.”
Instead of seeing the swirls as wind or water, which Green said most people see, she saw it as a metaphor for the movements of time, which had been a part of her artistic practice from the very beginning. She said it became clear to her that her ancestor had carved this gorget about Red Horn, but there was something more to it.
“The concepts that I saw connected with me, like someone reaching through some sort of window,” Green said. “And I knew there’s a place for me, and there’s always been a place for me, and there always will be a place for me. Because these questions that I’ve been asking myself the whole time about what it means to be alive, what it means to be connected to other people, to lose people and gain people, what our memories mean, what our spaces mean, how we relate to each other — these are all concepts that our ancestors were considering and creating, and have been this whole time.”
Green said the experience reshaped how she viewed her art as an expression of her culture and Indigenous identity.
“You can feel very isolated wanting to make work as an Indigenous artist that doesn’t fit within what most people feel is Indigenous,” Green said. “Sometimes when you’re working in a contemporary field, it doesn’t necessarily feel like it’s connected to more traditional practices. I would argue, now, after having worked really hard on my cultural practice, that they are extremely connected.”
Green’s interest in the concepts of time influenced her approach to one of her latest bodies of work, which is being shown at the ARTesian Gallery & Studios in Sulphur, Oklahoma, 100 W. Muskogee Ave., until March 31.
Green’s exhibit, “Icho'wa: We Who Carry Marks,” features portraits of First Americans with tattoos of their ancestral markings. The portraits are in the style of the 1930s silver screen Hollywood photographs and are 16 inches wide by 20 inches tall, which makes them roughly life-size.
“The people in the portraits are looking out at you as a viewer so you can have a conversation with them visually,” Green said. “You relate to them as other people and not just pictures of people. When you walk into the exhibit in Sulphur, it feels like you are in the presence of a room full of people.”
Green said she decided to do the portraits in the glamorous style of the 1930s for a couple of reasons.
“There is little representation of Indigenous people around that time,” Green said. “And definitely not Southeastern people with their markings. In fact, markings had pretty much disappeared at that point.”
In addition to creating images inspired by the past that represent the previously unrepresented, Green said she wanted to ensure her participants were depicted with dignity and respect.
“When you think about how Indigenous people have been photographed in the past, it’s very much like an anthropological study. It removed the person, and they become like an object. I didn’t want that to happen,” Green said. “I wanted to add glamor and celebration — a celebration of something that was very much a taboo as people were denied their own culture and access to their traditional markings.”
In her latest series, Green explores her own culture and heritage through conceptual photography, contextualizing her images by weaving Southeastern ancestral iconography into her work. These compositions — circular images set within 30-inch square frames — draw inspiration from the gorgets that pushed her forward on her artistic journey. By dramatically increasing their scale, she highlights their significance, presenting subjects as larger than life.
Her new work, titled “Falahá̱ma Bíyyiꞌka: Eternal Return,” will be on display at the gallery Living Arts of Tulsa, Oklahoma, Dec. 4-19.