Nia Lova

hummingbird woman 1106 - Nia Lova digital collage

marilyn & pangolin 7597 - Nia Lova digital collage

Indigenous venus 0841 - Nia Lova digital collage

butterfly duchess 8327 - Nia Lova digital collage

nyc funk 1189 (flowers) - Nia Lova digital collage

love guns 1003 - Nia Lova digital collage

Nia Lova artworks are available as archival quality inkjet (giclee) prints on stretched or unstretched canvas.
For inquiries & orders please email Winter@Winter-Brown.com

During earlier years creating my new body of abstract paintings, for a period time I sold artworks in the streets and outdoor art markets in NYC. Of course there is a rather romantic history of some very well known artists doing the same in this notoriously art-centric city, including such iconic artists as Jackson Pollock and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

I met some lovely artists & vendors during this period & some told stories of how artists were effortlessly making thousands of dollars a day selling work on the street during the economic boom of the 80’s. But by the time I was doing it, the city streets and economy had changed & street vending had become a challenging endeavor for artists. Though there were certain individuals who added to that challenge with cutthroat territoriality & other unsavoriness, I’m grateful for the general air of support, kindness & camaraderie amongst most of the vendors. It made things easier.

I also quickly learned how mainstream the mind frame of the street ‘audience’ predominantly was. What sold most easily there was sad; low-quality, commercial imagery devoid of much real artistry or meaningful content.

But at the time I felt determined to somehow make it work. I decided to create a series specifically for the street and think of as a day job I’d do in conjunction with working on my ‘real’ paintings. I wanted the series to have imagery more accessible to the general public, including figurative & street art elements & a much more pop art tone than anything I’d done.

I created the series under the alias Nia Lova, in part thinking to protect my professional integrity and in part to just have some fun while doing something pretty challenging (if street sales doesn’t toughen an artist up nothing will!). Plus I get kind of tired of myself sometimes and enjoyed the idea of a really different kind of alias.

So, in addition to creating different kind of artwork, Nia Lova’s persona is different than Bebonkwe. The name itself is equally playful. Nia (pronounced nee-ah) means ‘me’ in my language (Plains Cree). Whereas my alias is pronounced ‘Nuy-ah’.. so she both is and isn’t ‘me’. Initially, I saw Nia Lova as a non-Native artist, creating rather colorful, mindless but eye-catching, kinda wild n crazy stuff that’d be an easier sell than anything more subtle, cultural or sophisticated.

But, thankfully or detrimentally (situation or perspective depending) apparently I’m just not built to purposely commercialize my creative works or dumb myself down. I found myself unable to follow through on my ‘day job’ series intentions. Although the Nia Lova series are different than my other work, they also turned into something with more complexity and personal andprofessional merit than I’d intended. Despite the difference from my existing body of work, they are fully ‘me’ and became a series that I’m proud of.

Nia Lova’s tricksterish energy also unfolded in other ways. At first glance neither she nor her work might be recognizably Native (not to those with a racial stereotype in their head, anyway). But she still started to include cultural signifiers in pieces that don’t look overtly ‘Indigenous’ – and yet are at heart. Though in ‘Indigenous Venus 0841’, Nia Lova did out herself as a more ‘obviously’ Nehiyow esweyow (Cree woman).

Despite the ways this series represents a departure from my other work, it still contains elements and issues present in other series and throughout my practice. They are just presented in a different manner, where I’m playing with things in that more pop and street art aesthetic.

Like other series, the background images for most of the Nia Lova artworks are my photographs of urban walls or surfaces in NYC, which I call the Urban Skin. This has been a strong thread running through my multimedia work, beginning when I came to New York over 15 years ago (see the Indigenous Metropolis/Immigrant Wilderness series from 2006) and continuing in my painting practice. Much like my Spirit walls series, some of these photographs are completely abstract, while others are compositions incorporating street art, ripped posters, tags, signage & urban decay. Just as in the Spirit walls and nikihk series, I think of these wall photographs as part of my painting practice. Like the nikihk series, many of these photos were shot with my iphone and the numbers in the titles are the digital photo numbers.

Onto these painterly walls I collage a variety of figurative imagery, including pop culture icons, elements of famous artworks, vintage zoological & botanical drawings, spiritual and/or cultural symbols/sacred geometry, crop circles, animals, animal skin & floral patterns, flowers, emojis, tribal patterns, etc. Aside from the people, much of this imagery & iconography is all part of pre-existing visual language and is also present in previous series, such as the wahkohtowin series. Again, just in a different way.

In most Nia Lova pieces, I incorporate images of very iconic women (mostly from in/famous paintings, but also the odd celebrity) into new, much more fem-centric narratives than the eras and/or environments they are from, when sexism was overt. Whatever their skin color, I reposition them in ways, environments and energies in which I now I think of them all as ‘Indigenous’, because they’re now of and living the ways of Earth-loving, Spirit-connected cultures with the deepest respect and love for their Ancestors and Animal Relations. In this way also, they align with the rest of my arts practice.

Most of their animal ‘familiars’ are endangered and some are even extinct. Often the women, rather than being in their former passive or more socially superficial roles within male energy-dominant society, are now repositioned in more active, empowered, mystical, connected and/or esoteric relationships with these animals and the environments and elements they exist in.

I call the Nia Lova artworks remixes, as they give new life, look and meaning to the variety of existing artworks & iconography they’re composed of. They revisit subjects and issues that are familiar in my work as both Bebonkwe and Jude Norris, but in a more overtly playful way. And yes, sometimes its just good to try on a new skin for awhile.

These collages are created digitally and are available as archival/exhibition quality inkjet prints.