Duane Slick, M.F.A. ’90, will be among the artists to exhibit when K Art, a new gallery devoted to Native American contemporary artists, opens its doors in Buffalo, New York, on Dec. 11. Slick, of Meskwaki and Ho-Chunk descent, is known for his monochromatic paintings and storytelling. The new gallery will show two paintings and a print. 

One of the paintings is the result of a 2018 project that took him behind the scenes at Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology at Brown University, where the collection numbers one million objects — and less than 1 percent can be exhibited at a time. “For me, part of the takeaway, I became interested in the shelves themselves and this idea of objectifying these objects,” said Slick, who is also a professor at the Rhode Island School of Design. After his undergraduate studies at the University of Northern Iowa, Slick attended a summer artist’s residency program at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, where he learned about UC Davis. “Everyone was talking about the best programs,” he said, adding that he had a good experience studying art under Robert Arneson, Roy De Forest and others. He returned to campus to exhibit in a two-person show in 2002 at the C.N. Gorman Museum. His work is now part of the collections at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York, the Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis and the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts, among others. The opening of K Art, he said, is trailblazing because the gallery is also Native American-owned. “The founder said the idea was to not be concerned with the mainstream market,” Slick said. “This may allow them to possibly be more content-driven. I think it’s great. It’s going to accommodate new forms outside of painting and printmaking.”