Upper Sioux Community artist's 'deceptively simple' works capturing attention

Oct. 20—GRANITE FALLS — An emerging artist is attracting attention for his portrayal of traditional Dakota stories in what have been described as "deceptively simple" and appealing works that reveal themselves as multidimensional.

A crowd of 30 gathered for the opening of his exhibit by the Granite Falls Arts Council in late September at the K.K. Berge Gallery in downtown Granite Falls. Attention has followed: Local newspaper stories and an online blog post by author and writing coach Jessie Hennen celebrated the artist and his exhibit. An arts collector from Chicago paid a visit, while another inquired about dates for his next exhibit.

There's another reason the works of Dacian Sungcinca Cavender-DeMuth are capturing attention.

The artist is 6 years old.

He was only 3 years old when his parents, Autumn Cavender-Wilson and Scott DeMuth, knew: "Like wow, he's really creating art here."

That was his father's reaction when Dacian came home with the works he produced in a children's art class taught by Karen Odden, a local artist.

The students were to make animal tracks for a small booklet. Dacian produced a very intentional work in which he mixed different colors and handprints with the tracks of two animals. "A self-portrait" is how he described his work of bear and wolf tracks and handprints. His mother's maiden name in Dakota is "Two Bears," and the wolf is the animal of his father's family.

Dacian's not the only artist in the family, either. His mother is a Certified Professional Midwife and arts program director at the Upper Sioux Community. His father professes not to be an artist, but produces graphic designs.

They've exposed Dacian from a young age to both art and his culture, taking him to art galleries and sharing their heritage in the home. Dacian is a student in the Wildwood Montessori School in Montevideo, and his parents provide a similar environment focused on his growth and learning at home.

"As a Dakota midwife, I spend a lot of time talking about traditional parenting and philosophies on children: that children are whole people, with their own thoughts, motivations and spirits; that their experience is just as valid and relatable as those of adults; and that a child's vision of the world often includes that which we as adults forgot or have been trained not to see," stated Autumn in an email. "My kids are my greatest teachers, and the experience of being Dacian's mother in particular is a constant exercise in practicing what I preach. "

Dacian produced the artwork that opened his parents' eyes to his abilities on a rainy day that confined them and their son to a cabin. His youthful energy was proving to be too much, and his father said they called a timeout. They gave him options to either work on art, do chores or meditate.

He created a work with two oval lines and star-like spots, and put it away, telling his parents he had created a "circle." Scott said they questioned the description. One year later, going through his growing collection of works, they came across the work. Scott said they asked him again how he could term the image with two lines a circle.

Dacian explained that the image is intended to be replicated three times, and each copy turned on the other so that the four panels make a whole. They did as instructed. The result: A now untitled image depicting the Dakota legend of the running man and the bison. It tells of a race between humans and animals that circled the Black Hills.

The red circle or trail of blood surrounding the hills depicted in his work is true to the story. The oval lines join to form a true circle. The star-like dots emerge when the images are together as the Big Dipper as it progresses through the four seasons around the North Star.

"We have learned to take what he says about his work at face value — believing him, when he says that this one finger-painting is actually three paintings, or that two black lines is really a circle, or that a slightly crumpled up mass of color in his backpack uncovers a map of the human brain, is sometimes half the battle for adults who are used to dismissing a child's thoughts as mere silly expressions," Autumn explained. "Adults forget the ways in which children hear our every word, process the stories we tell them, relate them to their lived reality, and then produce material to repeat back to us."

Watercolor, acrylics, digital images, colored pencils and clay — Dacian's parents have encouraged their young artist to experiment with all, and he has. Most recently, they've taken Dacian's idea to produce a video from his line drawings of teepees, bison and Dakota images. Using a digital program to color and replicate the images, the stream of more than 2,000 still images tells a story of the Dakota in a progression through time in a river bluff landscape like that found in the Upper Sioux Agency State Park.

Scott said their son's interests are many, and they do what they can to expose him to many different opportunities. They've taken him to museums and galleries and watched as he's raced through some portions, and been captivated by others.

At home, he loves to draw maps. With Dacian, they've created a map of the Nile River Valley that is nearly the size of their home, said Scott. Everything from marine biology to the fate of the Titanic have been subjects that absorb his interest as of late.

"I really don't know why, but I'm really interested in Alaska right now," Dacian said. He said he enjoys having his work on exhibit. He said he also appreciated the opportunity to talk about his work at the artist's opening, but quickly added that the food treats were his favorite part of the event.

The exhibit is titled "Running Boy Wolf." He explained at the opening event: "I am a boy, and I am a wolf, and sometimes I run fast."

Where his journey will lead is impossible to know, but the importance may be in knowing where it started:

"Dacian's work is, for me, a testament to the power of traditional storytelling, something that was once a cornerstone of Indigenous parenting philosophy," Autumn shared. "He knows the places in the Dakota stories we tell him are real, even if he's never seen them. Therefore, the places in his paintings are also real, an active conduit between myth and lived reality, story-telling technologies in their own right. In my opinion, this is the heart of Dakota artistic methodology across mediums, and it is both marvelous and completely expected for that to appear in a young child."

The exhibit continues through Oct. 31.