JamesLuna: Identity

James Luna is known for pushing boundaries in his installations, where he engages audiences by making himself part of a tableau. James Luna is a Luiseno Indian who lives on the La Jolla Indian Reservation.  Luna has stated that "art work in the media of performance and installation offers an opportunity like no other for Native people to express themselves without compromise in the Indian traditional art forms of ceremony, dance, oral traditions and contemporary thought.  "His installations have been described as transforming gallery spaces into battlefields, where the audience is confronted with the nature of cultural identity, and tensions generated by cultural isolation, and dangers of cultural misinterpretation- all from a Native perspective." Said by,  Walter Phillips.  I think he addresses the mythology of what it means to be “Indian” in contemporary American society and exposes the hypocrisy of the dominant society.