About the Artist

Forrest Meader at a drawing workshop. Corner sculpture and background painting by Bobby Donovan. Cat on couch is "Sheamus"
--Photo copyright Susan Due Pearcy 2004

I was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, and spent my summers, while growing up, at my grandparent's home in rural Maine. I think that this radical change in location and culture every year gave me an understanding and appreciation of differences and variations in how people live.

My neighborhood in Brooklyn was mixed and my childhood friends were Jewish, Catholic and Protestant. We didn't care about our differences. We were just kids playing together. When my friend had to go to confession on Saturday we would all go up to his church and wait out side for him so we could continue our play.

Maine in the summer was dirt roads, horse drawn hay wagons, swimming holes and my cousin's dog, Mitsy, a collie who went everywhere with us; protecting us from cows and anything else that threatened. My parents had both been born in this same town and my brother and I were accepted as Mainers who happened to live in New York. It helped to have aunts, uncles and cousins living there.

I became interested in Native American culture when my Brooklyn Boy Scout troop was part of a Scout-O-Rama at Madison Square Garden. We were in the Pioneering section and built a bridge out of logs and poles but the section right before us was Indian Lore and I was mesmerized by their costumes, drumming and dancing. I started reading everything I could. I made headdresses and rattles and rooted for the Indians at the Saturday afternoon movies. While in college I worked summers in boys camps. I was the guy dancing around the council fire.

An attitude toward my art started then. I got a degree in anthropology from the University of Maine and an MA at the University of Arizona where I studied what at that time was called, "Primitive Art." I once read that certain Pacific Island carvers chant their own and their tools' genealogies as they carve so their offspring, the carving, will know its place in the universe. This feeling pervades my work, no matter what I'm doing. My materials and I work together to create something. I've never developed a "style" unless it's to have no style. I just take stuff and push it around; be it paint, paper, canvas, feathers, rocks or whatever.

--Forrest Meader