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Richard Ray Whitman

Euchee/Muscogee (Creek), b. 1949

Birth PlaceClaremore, Oklahoma, United States, North America

BiographyRichard Ray Whitman (born 1949) is a multidisciplinary visual artist, poet, and actor. He is enrolled in the Muscogee Creek Nation and lives in Oklahoma. His Euchee name is T'so-ya-ha. He grew up in Gypsy, Oklahoma and attended Bristow High School. For college, he attended the Institute of American Indian Arts and the California Institute of the Arts. Whitman also studied at the Oklahoma School of Photography in Oklahoma City. Whitman began his art career as a painter but also expanded to photography, installation, and video art. In 1973, he participated in the People’s Struggle at Wounded Knee and created art during the struggle. Whitman is known for his black-and-white photography portraying contemporary Native realities, especially his "Street Chiefs Series" from the 1970s and 1980s. "Street Chiefs" features images of homeless Native men, primarily in downtown Oklahoma City. "The contemporary Indian in the isolation of the city canyons and rural reservations is avoided. The boredom, pain, frustration, poverty of the reality-counterbalance of our lives is harsh, unattractive, and unmarketable." His photographic portraits are compassionate and empathetic to the lives of homeless natives and places them in the larger context of Indian Removal, which forced tribes from all over the country to Indian Territory.

From the 1980s onward, Whitman has incorporated text and computer graphics in his photography to create collage or mixed media. His socio-politically informed work often deals with the issues of homeland and dispossession

Person TypeIndividual