A Certain Cadence of Night

“Coyotes have been in North America far longer than we, they are not going anywhere.”

-  Dan Flores from Coyote America

A Certain Cadence of Night is Duane Slick’s most recent one-person exhibition in Iowa. This is an ambitious showcase of his broad creative output and offers audiences an insight into his new and recent paintings, silkscreen prints, and an exciting video installation produced in collaboration with Martin Smick. Together, Slick’s work draws inspiration from many sources, including Native American storytelling, especially the Coyote character; Pop Art portraiture and multiples, conceptual theories of repetition; and how Native American artists are recontextualizing their work in art museums and collections.

Coyote

The coyote holds a central and multifaceted place in Native American culture and storytelling, appearing in the myths and oral traditions of many Indigenous tribes across North America. Far from being a simple animal figure, the coyote is often depicted as a trickster—a complex character who embodies both wisdom and foolishness, creation and destruction, mischief and transformation. Through written and oral stories, the coyote serves as a cultural mirror that reflects human strengths and weaknesses, while also offering lessons about morality, survival, and the unpredictable nature of life.

In many Native traditions, the coyote plays a foundational role in creation stories by helping to shape the world, bringing fire to humanity, or teaching the people how to live. At the same time, the coyote's antics often get him into trouble, therefore revealing the consequences of arrogance. This duality makes the coyote a powerful figure for teaching values and sparking reflection, as audiences—both young and old—recognize these aspects of themselves in its actions.

Duane Slick (Meskwaki and Ho-Chunk) incorporates the coyote figure into his work as a way of exploring the layers of memory, identity, and myth rooted in Native storytelling traditions. The coyote is not a universal symbol with one fixed meaning; its characteristics vary widely among Native American tribes. In the Pacific Northwest, Coyote may be a cultural hero who brings salmon to the rivers, while among the Plains tribes, he might appear as a comic or tragic figure. In Slick's paintings and silkscreens, the coyote emerges not as a literal character but as a symbolic presence—part ghost, part guide—reflecting the trickster's role in Indigenous narratives as a mediator and a disruptor of fixed meaning.

Slick’s use of the coyote is direct and intentional, but it can also be embedded in dreamlike, monochromatic imagery like the video installation, Coyote and the Constant and Inevitable. By drawing on the trickster’s qualities—ambiguity, transformation, and the subversion of expectations—his work challenges the viewer to engage with Indigenous knowledge systems on a deeper, more intuitive level. The coyote mask projected onto the layers of transparent films is not merely a mythic figure. It is a carrier of memory and cultural continuity, existing between presence and absence, silence and storytelling. In this way, Slick extends the legacy of the coyote as a central figure in Native American oral traditions. By using scanning and projection technology to both preserve and reimagine the cultural power of the trickster, his work suggests that the coyote’s presence, which can be elusive and indirect, continues to shape how Indigenous histories and identities are seen in America today.

This cultural reverence for the coyote contrasts sharply with the historical and ongoing efforts by government agencies to eradicate the animal from the American landscape. Seen as a predator by cattle and sheep farmers, the coyote was the target of extensive campaigns of poisoning, trapping, and shooting throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Yet, like the trickster of Native stories, the coyote is incredibly resilient and adaptable, not only surviving but expanding its range into our urban centers. This uncanny ability to thrive in the face of adversity reflects the very qualities celebrated in Indigenous storytelling—cleverness, respect for nature, and an unbreakable connection to the land. The coyote endures.

Pop Art & Multiples

The use of multiple images and repetitive shapes has had a profound influence on modern art, serving as both a formal technique and a conceptual strategy. These techniques challenge traditional notions of originality and authorship, especially in the context of mass-produced consumer culture. One of the most iconic figures to embrace and elevate repetition in art is Andy Warhol. His silkscreen prints of celebrities like Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley, and everyday products such as Campbell’s soup cans and Brillo soap boxes, exemplify how repetition can blur the line between high art and commercial imagery. By repeating familiar images, Warhol not only critiqued the commodification of culture but also explored the desensitization that results from media saturation.

Slick’s ongoing series of coyote screenprints share intriguing parallels with Warhol’s Pop Art portraits, particularly in their use of repetition and layered meaning. While their intentions and cultural contexts are distinct, both artists utilize screen-printing to explore how quickly repeated images can take on new dimensions and challenge conventional narratives. Slick’s coyote prints emphasize the power of images to create a sense of ritual, presence, and ambiguity. His repetition of the coyote figure goes further because he taps into Indigenous storytelling traditions, where the trickster reappears across narratives, never quite the same, yet always familiar. Each printed coyote, though similar in form, holds a unique presence—an echo of memory as well as transformation.

Screen-printing, which is made with thin layers of ink, is a way to flatten and abstract images, creating a space where viewers are invited to look beyond the surface. For Warhol, this meant revealing the artificiality and commodification of fame. For Slick, the coyote’s ghost-like silhouettes suggest the shifting and layered nature of identity. Where Warhol’s multiples question the value of the image in a consumerist world, Slick’s repetitions reclaim image-making as a form of cultural memory and quiet resistance. Ultimately, the coyote screenprints you see here can be seen as a deeply Indigenous response to the language of Pop Art—taking the tools of modern image-making and infusing them with ancestral meaning.

HMM, The issue here is that there are no screenprints in this exhibition. Everything is painting with one large collograph that incorporates one screenprint. It could say the work could be interpreted through screenprint processes or is informed by screen print techniques? The coyote paintings are made from outlining the shadow of a coyote mask, painting it, then layering more shadows on top of shadows.

Repetition

Contemporary artists have continued to expand on Pop Art, especially the use of multiples and repetition in portraits and self-portraits, to explore the instability of identity and memory. Gilles Deleuze’s theory of difference and repetition offers a powerful lens through which to view modern and contemporary art. Rather than seeing repetition as duplication, Deleuze argues that each repetition always contains difference—there will always be variation and transformation. This concept resonates strongly with artists like Warhol, Hank Willis Thomas, and Cindy Sherman, who use repeated forms not to replicate sameness, but to explore themes of identity, perception, and cultural critique. For them, repetition is a generative force, emphasizing the subtle shifts that make each instance perfectly imperfect. This is a challenge for viewers to look beyond the surface and question the nature of originality and change.

In textile-based art, repeated woven structures may appear uniform at first glance. But when you look closer there are subtle shifts (in color, texture, material, and technique) that emphasize how repetition produces meaning through variation rather than sameness. Repetition, especially when it’s done by hand, is never pure replication—it is always accompanied by transformation. Have a look at Slick’s paintings Stacked Horizons in Blue and Multiplicities of Sunrises. They embody the idea that repetition is never pure replication. His compositions may appear minimal and uniform, much like the surface of a woven textile. As you look more closely, pay attention to the subtle shifts in tone and lines.

In the same way textile artists work with repeated motifs to build complexity through nuance, Slick layers his patterns with subtle variation and shifting textures. His paintings and their titles often hover between presence and absence, much like a woven fabric that simultaneously reveals and conceals. Even though they’re hand-painted, the machine-like repetition in his work functions more as a spiritual or narrative rhythm. Not what is the same, but what is slowly changing.

Joseph Beuys, a German conceptual artist, was deeply inspired by the figure of the coyote, most famously in his performance I Like America and America Likes Me (1974). In this work, Beuys spent several days in New York’s René Block Gallery with a live coyote, sharing the room, interacting with the animal, and performing ritual-like gestures. He entered and exited the space without ever touching American soil—symbolically wrapped in felt and transported by ambulance—emphasizing both his separation and ceremony.

For Beuys, the coyote represented a powerful symbol of America’s indigenous spirit, one that had been suppressed and wounded by colonization, violence, and modern materialism. The performance was a kind of healing ritual—part protest, part mythmaking—in which Beuys attempted to reconcile European culture with the primal, spiritual forces he associated with Native American traditions and the natural world. The coyote, in its trickster nature and historical resilience, embodied for Beuys both the wounds and the potential for transformation in American society.

Slick, like Beuys, sees art as a means of social change and spiritual renewal. His engagement with the coyote is not simply about animal symbolism but about confronting American history and opening a dialogue between cultures, species, and worldviews. This is why the coyote continues to serve as such a powerful avatar, echoing its role in Native American storytelling as a figure of intelligence and creative chaos.

Indigenous Art World

Native Americans are actively reshaping and decolonizing the art world, reclaiming narratives, aesthetics, and cultural sovereignty that have long been marginalized or outright erased. This powerful movement is not simply about inclusion within existing systems of power—it is a reclamation and redefinition of what art is, who gets to make it, and how it is valued.

For centuries, Native American art was viewed through a colonial lens—sometimes categorized as “anthropological artifacts” rather than recognized as the living and sophisticated creative expression it truly is. Indigenous artists were often excluded from the fine art markets, their work siloed into natural history museums rather than contemporary art spaces. This erasure was compounded by cultural appropriation, where non-Native artists and institutions appropriated Native symbols, techniques, and stories without credit.

Slick’s work resonates strongly with a broader movement among contemporary Native American artists who are engaging critically with the legacy of art history and institutional collections. His paintings, as discussed earlier, reflect not only personal and cultural memory but also a subtle resistance to the dominant Western narratives that have historically marginalized Indigenous voices in the art world.

Like many Native artists today, Slick challenges the Eurocentric framework of art history that has long excluded or misrepresented Indigenous perspectives. By referencing Native storytelling—especially through figures like the coyote—he re-centers Indigenous knowledge systems within the space of contemporary art. His work does not merely occupy the museum; it redefines what it means to be seen within those spaces.

This approach aligns him with artists such as Wendy Red Star, Jeffrey Gibson, and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, who also confront the history of museums and collections that have treated Native culture as artifact rather than living tradition. These artists often use irony to critique the colonial foundations of institutions while simultaneously asserting Indigenous presence and agency. They are also blending archival research and traditional practices with contemporary media, reasserting Indigenous identity in bold, dynamic ways. Their work speaks not only to Native audiences but also to the global art world, demanding that it reckon with its colonial past and present.

Slick’s work contributes to this dialogue in a more contemplative and poetic register, offering an invitation to reconsider how memory and myth can be forms of reclamation. In doing so, he helps expand the conversation about what contemporary Native art is and what it can do—not only for Indigenous communities, but for the benefit of all art audiences and for reimagining art history as a whole. Slick and his cohort are creating art that is rooted in land, language, ceremony, and resistance. This work not only reclaims Indigenous narratives—it imagines new futures.

Duane Slick: A Certain Cadence of Night is organized by Sioux City Art Center Curator Christopher Atkins