Jim Denomie: A Brush With Greatness

The self-described "old-fashioned painter" took his time becoming one of Minnesota’s foremost visual artists. First, he needed to hang some drywall.

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Jim Denomie’s painting studio, on the second floor of his garage, sits amid 10 acres of thick hardwood forest in Shafer, Minnesota, five minutes from the St. Croix River and the Wisconsin border. When I make a trip there in early fall, all the happy little trees on his property are serving up the bright reds, golds, and tangerines of peak fall foliage. But up here, surrounded by canvases depicting figures from his dreams, a dramatically different color palette prevails: artificial fluorescents, chemical greens, psychedelic violets. 

“As soon as I started painting, I knew that I didn’t want to paint natural colors,” Denomie says. “I didn’t want blue sky and green grass; I wanted purple sky and orange grass.”

Denomie, 64, has been painting professionally for 24 years, long enough to earn the McKnight Foundation’s prestigious Distinguished Artist Award. This honor—which comes with a $50,000 award—typically recognizes an artist’s career-long contribution to the state’s cultural life. This year, for the first time, it will go to an artist of Native descent.

This winter will also bring Denomie a high-profile appearance in a large drawing show, titled The Expressionist Figure, at the Walker Art Center. The show, pulled from the recently donated collection of museum patrons Miriam and Erwin Kelen, includes a pantheon of 19th- and 20th-century all-stars: René Magritte, Willem de Kooning, Andy Warhol, Chuck Close, David Hockney, Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, Sigmar Polke. (The show opened last month and closes in April.)

That’s some prestigious company for Denomie to be in, although Denomie doesn’t seem to feel the gravity of art-world convention. “I don’t have any specific influences,” he says, nodding at the work crammed into every corner of his studio. “This is all original.” 

And he doesn’t seem eager at this point to rest on any sort of lifetime achievement. “Twenty-four years isn’t very long,” he says. “I’m being recognized for the strength of my work, not because I’m Native, and not because I’m a drywall finisher by day.”

Denomie has been committed to painting for a long time, and he wishes it could have been even longer. Denomie wanted to become a painter ever since he was a six-year-old child living on the Lac Courte Oreilles Reservation, near Hayward, Wisconsin. His family eventually moved to Minneapolis, and it was a school counselor at South High who ultimately discouraged him from his creative pursuit. “She said there was no future or money in art,” he says.

Denomie wasted 20 years partying, by his own account, until, at age 40, he enrolled at the University of Minnesota to study health sciences. His initial goal was to get out of construction work. “But I started taking art courses,” Denomie recalls.

These classes awoke something within him. At the same time, Denomie was connecting with the history of Native people, which he’d never learned. He read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and started hanging out at the American Indian Student Cultural Center on campus. 

His artwork started to explore his identity. When I ask what he means when he talks about “we,” he responds, “I guess it varies: From Ojibwe to Lac Courte Oreilles, my reservation; to Minnesota, Midwest, Ojibwe; to national Native American communities. I even identify as a person of color with Black Lives Matter issues, Colin Kaepernick, border issues.”

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After that long gestation period, Denomie feels like he can describe himself as an “old-fashioned painter,” with a “brush, easel, and canvas, and nothing else.” He looks like a painter, too. In the studio, he’s wearing a black T-shirt, black sweatpants, and black socks, with Teva-style sandals. The single, tight braid that peeks out over his shoulder exhibits a touch of gray. So does his goatee. 

His left knee is sore from 43 years of construction work, and he moves gingerly when he gets up from a La-Z-Boy to pull out postcard versions of his most popular works from a small metal cabinet. 

A characteristic painting would be Oz, the Emergence, a large-scale Bosch-like fantasia in oil from 2017. The piece is based on the sinister apple tree scene from The Wizard of Oz. Except in this Oz, Kim Jong-un can be seen eating Sony-brand popcorn, and a cop is choking Eric Garner to death. 

“All of my work comes from my memory and my dreams,” Denomie says. He never paints from photographs, but, he adds, “I will access imagery from magazines or the internet.” 

Denomie starts with a drawing. “I sketch prolifically in ink,” he says. “I make hundreds of sketches, and then I paint from them and they evolve on the canvas even further.” 

In 2017, the Walker bought its first Denomie work, one of the many studies that eventually developed into Oz, the Emergence.

“It’s based specifically on the scene from the movie,” he says, “where they’re going through the forest, and they come to the apple trees, and the apple trees come to life, and they become mean and start throwing the apples at them. So I created this scene where there’s intense content. I fed that tension with issues of Standing Rock, nuclear bombs, missiles.” 

That sense of tension extends to the way Denomie talks about the Walker. He says he felt hurt by the Scaffold incident, in which the museum *installed an outdoor sculpture of historically significant gallows, including the one used in an 1862 mass hanging of Dakota people, in Mankato. (The executive director of the museum, Olga Viso, resigned in the aftermath.) 

“It was horrific and insulting,” Denomie says, “to make it a playground.” 

And he’s not sure that the institution can ever be redeemed. “I doubt it,” he says. “They’ve created a commission for Native artists to install sculpture in the sculpture park. I think that’s just trying to make amends. I don’t think that’s educating their staff or learning cultural history.”

Denomie sees his role as illuminating the culturally specific stories that make up our nation’s true history. Yet he reiterates, “I’m not a social activist; I’m an old-fashioned painter.”

The resulting art—narrative, satirical, almost faux-naïve, and a little psychedelic—resists categorization. Mainstream collectors may not get it; Native communities don’t always accept it either, he added. 

And that’s another reason Denomie kept his day job all these years: to cultivate an immunity to the market. “It was a vehicle that allowed me to paint what I wanted to paint and not what needed to sell,” he says. “So I was able to access more challenging and more innovative imagery.” 

He continues, “I normally use nice colors and humor to tone down the tension in some of these subjects and topics,” he says. “Because I don’t want to put my thumb in people’s eyes. I don’t generalize and say, ‘All white people are assholes.’ Specific ones are! And I identify them.” 

In two years, Denomie plans to finally retire from the construction game. 

And he says the goal now involves getting more of his work into large cultural institutions. He understands the power that comes with being included in art centers and museums and big international shows like the 21st Contemporary Art Biennial, held in Sao Paulo in October. 

And with that, after about 90 minutes, Denomie says he’s enjoyed our conversation, but he has to prepare for that trip to Brazil. But first, he asks a favor. Evidently, he left his truck seven miles across the river, at a garage in Dresser, Wisconsin. 

“Would you mind giving me a ride?” he says.

Wherever Denomie plans to go next in his career, he’ll be getting there in an old Ford pickup.

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