Jay Carrier

A succinct description of Jay Carrier, for his solo exhibition, The City is Clean, held at Eleven Twenty Projects in Buffalo in 2016, states: "Jay Carrier is a landscape artist—both in the traditional sense, where the natural world is depicted in rhapsodic fashion, but also in the interior sense, as an artist who often paints psychological terrain with verve and dynamic juxtapositions. His paintings reflect this duality of experience, as Native American living in the city of Niagara Falls and as someone deeply connected to that region’s physical landscape."

Jay Carrier is a visual artist born on Six Nations to Onondaga and Tuscarora parents, who currently lives and works in Niagara Falls, NY and holds a B.F.A. from the University of Illinois-Champlain. Carrier studied painting at The College of Santa Fe, New Mexico As well as participating in the MFA program from the University of Illinois. Carrier has exhibited in many solo and group exhibitions including Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Buffalo, NY, The Castellani Art Museum, Niagara Falls, NY, The Wheelwright Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico, The Institute of American Indian Arts Museum, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Fenimore House Museum, Cooperstown, New York,  Burchfield Penney Art Center, Buffalo, New York,  Woodland Cultural Center Museum, Brantford, Ontario, Canada, Chautauqua Center for Visual Arts Gallery, Chautauqua, New York and the Everson Museum in Syracuse, New York. His work can be found in numerous private and public collections. (From the Eleven Twenty Projects website: http://eleventwentyprojects.com/carrier/)

Guest curator G. Peter Jemison chose Jay Carrier to be part of The Pan-American Exposition Centennial: Images of the American Indian held at the Burchfield-Penney Art Center in 2001. The works by Carrier and other WNY artists explored their identities as Haudenosaunee to contrast vintage images of the prejudiced way Native Peoples were represented in 1901. His work then, as now, confronts the dualities of contemporary living. He combines prideful memories and scenes from nature with imagery from advertisements and other sources that blatantly critique industries that cause environmental pollution and destructive addiction, such as smoking and alcoholism that permeate the society.

In 2018, BPAC’s Collectors Club provided funds to purchase a mixed media work from Carrier’s compelling Healing Series that express grief over the loss of his brother. He literally adhered dried plants from the Niagara Gorge to a painted landscape to reflect both a shared physical and metaphysical experience, much like Anselm Kiefer has done in his works representing the wounds of post-World War II life. Viewers situated near foreground foliage gaze toward a river and distant hills, while sorrowful thoughts float in the upper right resembling abstracted symbols from a wampum belt that represents the unity of the Six Nations people.

Jay Carrier earned a BFA and participated in the MFA program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champlain, and he studied painting at the College of Santa Fe, New Mexico. His work can be found in numerous private and public collections and has exhibited in many solo and group exhibition including at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Burchfield Penney Art Center, and Eleven Twenty Projects in Buffalo; Castellani Art Museum in Niagara Falls, NY; Wheelwright Museum and the Institute of American Indian Arts Museum in Santa Fe, NM; Fenimore House Museum in Cooperstown, NY;  Woodland Cultural Center Museum in Brantford, Ontario, Canada; Chautauqua Center for Visual Arts Gallery in Chautauqua, NY, and the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, NY.