Planning A Giveaway A MONA Moment By Ron Roth Director Museum of Nebraska Art

In Roger Broer's color monoprint--Planning a Giveaway--we see a haunting, troubling image of an Oglala Sioux in profile. There is a strong horizontal thrust left of an outstretched arm under his cloak, his clenched hand shoots out at the edge of the sleeve like a cannonball. This thrust left is reinforced by the triangular shaped profile of the face, again, facing left. A sharpened pencil behind his ear adds peculiar force to the urgency of this leftward rhythm. The pencil is straight as an arrow, but, well, it is a pencil. Perhaps a pale remnant of an arrow--the hunter's tools replaced by the bookkeepers.

Profound sadness infests the head. The feathers of his headdress are tattered, frayed, unkempt. It is slipping off the back of his head, revealing the Indian's gray, thinning hair. The pencil points directly to his eye which stares vaguely to the side--the look is distant, passive, but most of all, resigned--so close to the eyes of a dying animal--entirely disengaged from the rest of the body. As if to say the brain and the spirit are dead--the compulsive knee jerk action of the body--chillingly-- as the title suggests, more than ready to give away the soul spirit.

The spirit is implied by the gray, shaded profile of a Buffalo, hovering in the center of the print--it too, facing left, in the line of the out-thrust "giveaway arm", but halted in a kind of perfect equilibrium, resisting the leftward flow of the giveaway, and the just distinguishable penciled line of an arrow across its body pointed in the opposite direction, toward the heart of the Sioux.

The artist, Roger Broer, is one of America's leading Native American artists and received his formal art training at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. His work is frequently exhibited at MONA.