Brian Jungen facts for kids

Brian Jungen (born April 29, 1970) is a famous artist from Fort St. John, British Columbia, Canada. He is part Dane-zaa (an Indigenous group) and part Swiss. Brian Jungen lives and works in the North Okanagan area of British Columbia.

He uses many different materials to create his art, both flat (like drawings) and 3D (like sculptures). Many people see him as a top artist among new artists from Vancouver. While his art often explores Indigenous identity and related topics, Jungen also has many other interests. His work helps people understand that Indigenous artists can create art about all sorts of things, not just their heritage. His artworks are often poetic and don't fit into just one category.

Brian Jungen's Life Story

Brian Jungen's father was an immigrant from Switzerland, and his mother was from the Dane-zaa Nation. They met in British Columbia and got married in the 1960s. Because of a government rule called the Indian Act, his mother lost her official "Indian status" and treaty rights when she married someone who was not Indigenous. This rule meant that only fathers could pass on this status.

Brian was born in 1970 and grew up in Fort St. John, a small town known for logging. He went to public school and discovered he really liked visual art. Sadly, his parents died in a fire, and his aunt raised him after that.

Jungen moved to Vancouver for college. He graduated from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in 1992 with a diploma in visual art. After that, he studied art history at Concordia University in Montreal. In 1993, he moved to New York City, where he became friends with artist Nicole Eisenmann, before returning to Vancouver.

In 1997, Jungen showed his art in a group exhibition called Buddy Place. He created wall drawings that looked at how Indigenous people were often shown in a stereotypical way in British Columbia. He wanted to understand what people thought "native art" was. He asked people on the street to draw what they thought, and then he turned their drawings into large wall art.

In 1999, Jungen had his own show where he displayed more wall drawings and his famous series, Prototypes for New Understanding (1998-2005). This exhibition got a lot of attention from art critics and experts across Canada. When the Vancouver Art Gallery bought some of his sculptures, it showed how important his work was.

For his Prototypes for New Understanding, Jungen took apart Nike Air Jordan sneakers. He then put them back together to look like traditional masks from the Northwest Coast Indigenous cultures. These sculptures cleverly showed how Western ideas about fancy products are similar to how some people view Indigenous cultures as something to collect or admire.

Prototype for New Understanding #8, 1999
Nike athletic footwear, human hair

In 2000, Jungen had another solo show. He created Shapeshifter, which was the first of three whale skeletons he built using white plastic lawn chairs. He hung the 30-foot-long sculpture in the gallery, making it look like something you'd see in a natural history museum. This artwork made people think about how museums display things, natural resources, and global trade. Jungen also thought about how a whale in a museum is like how Indigenous people are sometimes seen by society – both are put on display, and there's an idea that they might disappear.

In 2002, Jungen won the first-ever Sobey Art Award, which came with $50,000. In 2004, he created Court for an exhibition in New York. This was a life-size copy of a basketball court, but it was made from sewing machine tables from factories. This artwork made people think about global trade, unfair labor, and how much we love sports.

In 2005, a big show of his work traveled from New York to the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Musee d'art Contemporain de Montreal. Brian Jungen became famous around the world very quickly. This meant he had to travel a lot. To balance this, he started spending long periods each year "up north" with his relatives on the Doig River First Nation.

His exhibition in 2010-2011 included animal hides. He got these hides during his visits up north, where he started hunting again with his family. Jungen used the hides in many ways, like making prints from them or stretching them over car parts and furniture to create his own drums. One artwork, Tomorrow Repeated (2011), was a moose hide stretched over green car fenders, tied like a corset, and placed on top of a white freezer. Jungen explained that in the communities up north, you see freezers, car parts, and animal parts everywhere.

In 2012, Jungen worked with artist Duane Linklater on a film called Modest Livelihood. This hour-long film quietly shows the two artists on a hunting trip in Northern British Columbia. The film's title refers to a 1999 court decision that said First Nations people have hunting and fishing rights, but only to earn a "moderate livelihood." The film was shown at Documenta 13, a major art exhibition in Germany.

Jungen also showed his work at Documenta 13 in Germany. He created a dog park with sculptures that were tunnels and platforms for pets, and benches for their owners. A local dog school even used the park for training sessions. Also in 2012, Jungen's Prototypes for New Understanding and one of his whale skeletons, Cetology, were shown at the Shanghai Biennale.

In 2016, Jungen had shows where he went back to using Nike sneakers. These new sculptures were different – more open and abstract. They had a modern feel and showed his great understanding of materials. These new shoe artworks were less about directly showing faces and more about suggesting animal or human shapes. They challenged people who expected to see his famous masks.

Couch Monster: Sadzěʔ yaaghęhch'ill, 2022. Bronze.

In 2022, the Art Gallery of Ontario showed its first public artwork by Jungen, called Couch Monster: Sadzěʔ yaaghęhch’ill. The Dane-zaa part of the title means "my heart is ripping." Jungen was inspired by the famous elephant, Jumbo, and wanted to show that sometimes there is cruelty in entertainment and art. This large bronze sculpture is in downtown Toronto. It looks both playful and sad. It's made from pieces of couch materials and has different textures, so people are encouraged to touch it.

What Brian Jungen's Art is About

Throughout his career, Brian Jungen has created art that explores many different ideas. His work can be understood in many ways and avoids being put into simple categories based on race. Jungen's art connects his First Nations background with Western art history and the global economy. His well-known series, Prototypes for New Understanding, gave people clues to link ideas like global trade, Nike factories, and Canada's history of unfair treatment towards Indigenous people.

Some main ideas that Jungen often explores in his art include:

• How museums display things
• Shopping and global trade
• Identity and politics
• Animals

How Museums Display Things

From his early Prototypes for New Understanding (shown in clear boxes) to his newer sculptures (using freezers as bases), how Jungen displays his art is very important to its meaning.

In Canada, there was a rule called the Indian Act of 1876 that banned Potlatches, which were important ceremonies for Indigenous people. The government took many cultural items like masks and blankets that were used in these ceremonies. These items were then put on display in museums. Jungen says, "a lot of my exposure to my ancestry is through museums."

Jungen understood that the way things are displayed in museums can affect how people think about them. He noticed that museums often showed Indigenous culture as something from the past, which helped the colonial government keep control. By chance, Jungen visited a Nike store where sneakers were displayed in glass cases, just like artifacts in a museum.

Jungen combined these two ideas in his Prototypes for New Understanding. He showed his Nike Air Jordan masks, which looked like Northwest Coast masks, "as if they were anthropological artifacts – on metal armatures inside plexi-glass vitrines." This made people think about how both sneakers and Indigenous cultural items are sometimes seen as valuable objects to be collected and admired.

Jungen also used the idea of museum display in his sculpture Shapeshifter (2000). He turned plastic lawn chairs into a whale skeleton and hung it like a display in a natural history museum. He felt that showing whales in museums was similar to how Indigenous people are sometimes put on display and admired, but also kept separate from mainstream society. Through his display choices, Jungen's sculptures show how the way something is displayed can change how valuable it seems.

Shopping and Global Trade

Jungen often uses everyday products in his art. He also uses "raw materials of economic production" to talk about shopping and global trade.

In 2001, Jungen made Untitled, which looked like a stack of wooden pallets, like you might see at a loading dock. But if you looked closely, you'd see that Jungen had carefully handcrafted them from red cedar, a wood often used by Northwest Coast Indigenous carvers. Pallets are used to move goods around the world, so they represent global trade. But Jungen turned them into special, handmade art pieces. This is almost the opposite of Nike sneakers, which are made in factories under global trade conditions and then become popular consumer items.

In 2004, Jungen created Court, a huge sculpture made from 231 sewing machine tables from factories. He arranged them to look like a basketball court. These tables had hundreds of holes where sewing machines would have been. This artwork made an uncomfortable connection between rich athletes who play on basketball courts and the people who make their shoes in unfair factory conditions. The difficult conditions of global trade are a common theme in Jungen's work.

Jungen is interested in everyday products. He often changes things like baseball bats, chairs, shoes, and gas cans into sculptures. He says, "I like using things people can recognize and that they see around them everyday." His most famous series, Prototypes for New Understanding, makes us think about the value of products and the value of culture. Nike shoes have economic value, while the Northwest Coast masks Jungen's sculptures look like have cultural value. Jungen's art shows the connection between how shoes are sold and how Indigenous art has also been treated like a product. He shows how people sometimes try to understand Indigenous culture by turning it into something they can buy or own. Jungen continues to explore how products are valued and how this relates to Indigenous identity. His 2011 sculpture Tomorrow Repeated takes a car, a very popular product, and stretches a moose hide over it. This sculpture again explores the space between a product and culture, mixing the idea of admiring Indigenous art with the idea of admiring a car.

Identity and Politics

Jungen's personal background, being Dane-zaa and living in Canada (a country with a colonial past), has given him many ideas for his art. He often works "between native and white cultures." Jungen's art often questions common ideas about Indigenous culture and how people try to make Indigenous art fit into mainstream art.

Jungen said he was interested in how common Indigenous designs were, especially in Vancouver, and how they were sometimes misused or copied for commercial purposes. His art explores this global problem of stereotypes. He sometimes uses images from Indigenous groups that are not his own. For example, his Prototypes for New Understanding look like masks from coastal BC groups like the Haida and Kwakwaka'wakw. Since Jungen is from the Dane-zaa Nation in the interior of BC, his masks use designs from coastal groups. This is similar to how Indigenous coastal designs have been used by non-Indigenous people and are now linked to the whole province.

Jungen also points out how a general "Indigenous" identity is sometimes created, ignoring the differences between groups. He made Furniture Sculpture (2006), a Teepee built from leather stripped off sofas. Teepees have become a general symbol for "Indianness," but they are actually specific to Plains nations. One journalist asked, "what is he doing erecting a teepee if not to provoke such essentialist presumptions about his ethnicity?"

In British Columbia, Canada, images from Northwest Coast First Nations have been used in advertising and made into a myth, even becoming part of the province's brand as "supernatural British Columbia." Indigenous images have become so common in public awareness that they are almost expected. Jungen explored this "predictability" in some of his recent sculptures from 2016. He went back to using Nike sneakers, but these new sculptures are more abstract. Some hint at masks or animals, but they are mostly hard to recognize. His earlier Nike sneaker sculptures were very successful, but these new abstract ones challenge what people expect. They don't give us a clear "meaning." Since many non-Indigenous people want to understand Indigenous culture (and sometimes try to make it fit their own ideas), these new sculptures purposely reject stereotypes of Indigenous images.

Animals in Art

Animals appear often in Jungen's art. Sometimes they are the main subject, like when he built a whale skeleton in Shapeshifter (2000) from plastic chairs. It looks like a real sculpture! Other times, animals are used as materials, both living and not. He uses different animal hides, and he even used live cats in Habitat 04: Cite radieuse des chats/ Cats radiant city (2004).

Habitat 04: Cite radieuse des chats/ Cats radiant city was a temporary home for homeless cats. Jungen built it to look like the famous "Habitat" building in Montreal, designed by Moshe Safdie for Expo 67. Jungen's interest in animals often leads him to think about pets and the places we build for animals, like aquariums or zoos.

For his 2005 project Inside Today's Home, Jungen used materials from IKEA to create an "indoor aviary" for six zebra finches. To avoid disturbing the birds, viewers could only see them through small peepholes in the gallery walls. This made people think about how we often watch animals in captivity. Jungen sees a connection between how people watch captive animals and how they look at Indigenous cultural items.

How Brian Jungen Creates Art

Brian Jungen's art is inspired by a style called found object art, used by artists like Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp. But instead of just showing objects as they are, Jungen often changes them. He reworks them without completely hiding what they originally were or what they were used for.

For example, Jungen's series Prototypes of New Understanding (1998-2005) features Indigenous-style masks. He made these masks by taking apart and hand-sewing pieces of Nike Air Jordan shoes. Jungen explained that it was interesting to see how simply changing the Air Jordan shoes could make people think of specific cultural traditions. At the same time, it showed how culture can be changed or copied. He felt the Nike mask sculptures showed a surprising connection between a consumer product and an "authentic" Indigenous artifact.

The Nike shoes Jungen used often have colors like red and black, which are also common in traditional First Nations artwork and wood carvings. Other projects, like a series of wooden pallets carefully made from red cedar (a wood used by Northwest Coast Indigenous carvers), or a First Nations tent made from "11 leather couches," or his large "whale-bone" sculptures made from plastic chairs (some still with Canadian Tire price stickers), make familiar objects seem strange. This helps people who might not know much about First Nations themes see everyday things in new ways.

Some of Jungen's other projects are more about politics. For example, in his "Isolated Depiction of the Passage of Time," he used plastic food trays. The colors of the trays matched statistics about jail sentences given to First Nations people. Inside the sculpture, hidden from view, was a television and a DVD player quietly playing the movie The Great Escape. Jungen was inspired by a prison-break exhibit he once saw.

In 2004, he participated in a major art show in Gwangju, Korea. A show of Jungen's work was held at the Vancouver Art Gallery in Canada from January to April 2006. Later that year, he also had an exhibition at the Tate Modern in London from May to July 2006. In 2008, he showed his artwork called Crux at the Sydney Biennale in Australia.

Jungen is the first living Native American artist to have a show at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in Washington, D.C.. His exhibition, called "Strange Comfort," was on display from October 2009 to August 2010. Jungen also won the 2010 Iskowitz Prize for visual arts.

In 2011, Jungen revealed three public sculptures at the Banff Centre called The ghosts on top of my head. These were white steel benches, each shaped like an antler from an elk, moose, or caribou.

His sculpture called Carapace was inspired by Jules Verne's stories of giant mythical animals. It was shown in the Loire Valley, France, where Jules Verne was from. It was also shown at the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton in 2011. Jungen grew up in a remote community in the Peace River area, and he believes this helped him become very creative.

Where You Can Find Brian Jungen's Art

Brian Jungen's work is part of the permanent collection at the National Gallery of Canada. Some of his pieces there include:

• Shapeshifter (2000), bought in 2001
• Star/Pointro (2011), bought in 2011
• Court (2004), bought in 2012
• People's Flag (2006), bought in 2014

Images for kids

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  Couch Monster: Sadzěʔ yaaghęhch'ill, 2022. Bronze.