A multimedia installation at the National Museum of the American Indian employs new technology to express Iroquois traditions and world view.
Biography
Melanie Printup Hope is of Tuscarora descent and was raised on the Tuscarora Indian Reservation in western New York State. She earned her bachelor of fine arts degree in graphic design at the Rochester Institute of Technology and her master of fine arts degree in electronic arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She lives in Schenectady, New York, where she owns her own graphic design business. She is currently assistant professor of graphic design at The Sage Colleges and has also taught at The Banff Centre for the Arts, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Skidmore College. Her video and installation work has been shown throughout the United States and Canada. She has received a 1995 Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts and was awarded 1995 Artists' Projects: The New York State Regional Initiative from The National Endowment for the Arts, The Rockefeller Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and The Jerome Foundation. Melanie has recently received a Rockefeller Foundation Intercultural Film/Video/Multimedia Fellowship.
Artist's Statement
My work is an exploration of my Native American identity and ancestry. As an artist, I conveyed my own personal experiences of cultural and spiritual growth through the use of drawing, traditional beadwork, sculpture, computer-generated images, animation, digitized sound, video and installation.
As I weave together ancient traditional beadwork with highly advanced skills in electronic arts, I fill each piece with the wisdom of my ancestors while also incorporating present-day struggles within the community. I use my own artistic expression to share with the viewer the story of where my ancestors began and the instructions of how we must lead our lives - maintaining balance, living in peace with everyone around us, respecting and loving nature and all living things.
Please send comments to printup@albany.net
CyberPowWow
This piece was created for an interactive internet show titled CyberPowWow that took place April 5th & 6th, 1997 at www.cam.org/~oboro. You will need the Shockwave Plug-In to view this work. CyberPowWow included work by artists and writers which comment and critque upon Native art, technology and community and the way these factors interact and intersect in their lives.
Online Residency
This piece was created for an online residency that took place July 21 - 31, 1997. The residency began in Rochester, New York at the First Annual Empire State Partnerships Summer Seminar which was hosted by The New York State Alliance for the Arts and The Monroe #1 BOCES. It was directed by The New York State Council on the Arts and The New York State Education Department.
The goal of this project was to engage 125 participants from arts organizations, cultural organizations and schools from all over New York State. They were first introduce to my Web site (http://www.albany.net/~printup) which is a series of computer-generated image and beadwork based on the Iroquois Prayer of Thanksgiving. They were asked to respond to this work, on-line, by giving reason why they are thankful and also to create computer-generated beads. These pieces were sent to me electronically and I translated them to visual form. Here is the final Web page titled Thanks.
A multimedia installation at the National Museum of the American Indian employs new technology to express Iroquois traditions and world view.