Picture by Kelly Waller
America Meredith
Swedish-Cherokee artist America Meredith blends traditional styles from Native America and Europe with pop imagery of her childhood. Her influences range from the Bacone school of painting, the Arts and Crafts movement, 60s cartoons, to Mississippian shell engravings. As an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation, the Cherokee language and syllabary figure prominently in her work. She works in pen and ink, serigraphy, monotype printing, and beadwork, but her primary focus is painting in acrylic, egg tempera, gouache, and watercolour.
America earned her MFA in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute and her BFA from the University of Oklahoma. She has shown throughout the United States and in Canada and Europe in the last 15 years and has won awards at the Heard and SWAIA’s Indian Market as well as at numerous competitive shows. She was a 2009 Artist Fellow of the Museum of the American, won the IAIA Distinguished Alumni Award for Excellence in Contemporary Native American Arts in 2007 and was voted San Francisco Weekly’s Painter of the Year in 2006.
