Patrick Dean Hubbell

Diné, b. Navajo, NM, 1986

Patrick Dean Hubbell is originally from the Navajo Nation, located in the Southwest region of the United States. Hubbell’s work has been exhibited at galleries, museums and institutions nationally and internationally and can be found in numerous public and private collections including The Perez Art Museum Miami, The Speed Art Museum, The Art Institute of Chicago, and the Denver Art Museum. In 2017, Hubbell was awarded the Pollock-Krasner grant. He is the recipient of the New Artist Society Award (SAIC, 2019), The James Nelson Raymond Fellowship (SAIC, 2021), and is a MFA graduate from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2021).

His work is an exploration of his Diné Indigenous identity and journey within the contemporary moment. The foundation of his practice is inspired by cultural methodologies, references to traditional Indigenous art, Diné cultural philosophy and the abstractness of language, nature, time, and place. Through a multidisciplinary and multimedia approach, his practice challenges the impositions, categorizations and colonial constructs of Western and European ideologies within contemporary art. By amplifying aspects of Indigenous identity and cultural knowledge, the active intent of pushing the parameters of painting and drawing within an art historical context is achieved by including natural earth pigment collected from his Diné homelands, two-dimensional painting and drawing mediums, deconstructed stretcher bars, collage elements and draped canvas. Accompanying this fundamental approach within his work, is the expansion of narratives surrounding land and place, holding space, modes of presentation, value, and Indigenous inclusion. The physical, mental, emotional and spiritual aspects of his life are translated through a combination of intuitive, gestural mark making, automatic drawing, and design. Using both elements of traditional substrate and incorporating sculptural elements of display, the two dimensional surface format recontextualizes entities of abstraction. By expanding the principles and aesthetics of the western canon, his work seeks to redefine the visibility of the Indigenous experience. He currently lives and works on the Navajo Nation.