A Sun that Never Sets: Eastern Cherokee Tattoo Artist John Henry Gloyne and the Aesthetics of Reimagining

Abstract

Abstract: This article examines a selection of work by contemporary tattoo artist John Henry Gloyne (Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians) to understand how tattooing functions as an Indigenous creative practice that can imagine alternative realities and reestablish connections to Native pasts and presents. Gloyne's work redefines contemporary Native tattooing by highlighting its continuing significance and artistic innovations in the present. In doing so, Gloyne's work challenges the settler notion that Native cultural practices are static and stuck in the past. The authors' analysis includes Gloyne's reinvention of Cherokee symbols (water spider and Booger mask tattoos), early/mid-twentieth-century Americana tattoo flash, and his tattoo-inspired painting Sacred Realms: Tobacco Offerings to the Picture Machine . Honma and Francoso employ an analytic of "reimagining" to investigate how Gloyne's work embraces an ethos of experimentation and innovation that moves beyond settler frameworks of comprehension. In order to understand how he challenges various modes of representation and ways of looking that normalize the settler project, they historicize the symbols and motifs found in Gloyne's work. They incorporate interdisciplinary methods of visual analysis, historical recontextualization, and interview data to center Gloyne's unique aesthetic approach, which foregrounds renewed ways of envisioning and embodying Indigenous worlds.