Bridging Old Ways With A New View with Amber Dubois Shepherd

This week on Beyond the Art, host Cray Bauxmont-Flynn Flynn meets with Navajo Nation citizen Amber Dubois Shepherd. Ambers gives us an insight on how she grew up in a home immersed with the different Native American tribal cultures and languages, her mother’s people, the Navajo, as well as her father’s people, the Sac & Fox and Prairie Band Potawatomi.

Amber’s own artistic path has given her the ability to work with old and new artistic practices in various ways to create a bridge for viewers to see these traditions differently in a visual way. She wants to invite the viewer to be a part of her world and see the traditions the way she sees them in her everyday life. Amber wants her artwork to reach out and connect with others; to let them know we may be different, but to know we are all human beings. Her hope is that her artwork will give the viewer a perspective of what it looks like to be a Native in America and in Oklahoma today. Amber's pieces have an illustrative and narrative quality with them as she bridges traditional Native American subjects with a more modern contemporary style.

Her mixed media pieces and oil paintings reference an illustrative quality. She has an Associates of Art from Seminole State College and completed her Bachelors of Fine Arts in Spring 2016 at Oklahoma State University. DuBoise-Shepherd is the Manager of Education and Outreach at the Mabee-Gerrer Museum of Art in Shawnee, OK since April 2019.