INTRODUCTION ( EXCERPT) When discussing aspects of Native culture, a good place to start is at the beginning with the Native peoples themselves. Manhattan or "Manahatta" (a Munsee Delaware Indian word meaning "rocky or hilly island") was the original name for the land on which New York City sits. Manhattan was a place for meetings and gatherings of the various tribal groups of the Lenape/Algonquin peoples. The multiplicity of cultures, ideas and encounters has defined New York City for centuries.

This multiplicity of influences is nowhere more evident than in the various art movements that developed which included abstract expressionism and pop; with traditional Native American design aesthetic having substantially influenced the artists of the New York school who created abstract expressionism and continuing with certain practitioners of pop. There is a continuum, continuity between the earlier generations of Native artists in New York such as Leon Polk Smith, George Morrison and Lloyd Oxendine who were directly influenced by members of the abstract expressionist school, with those of succeeding generations. While artists represented in The Old Becomes the New draw from the legacies of abstract expressionism and pop art, they also draw from succeeding movements and influences from various teachers, art schools and art programs around the country of the present time.

Through the New York galleries, these Native artists bring intuitive expression, their own innate cultural knowledge—ceremonies, foods, plants etc. colors of the earth from homelands etc.—visual language, symbols and experiences of their indigenous heritage, via paint, digital media, performance or other conceptual expression, or sometime references to colliding lights, huge buildings, technological forms, or references of traffic and crowds on the streets. Distillations within the context of abstract expressionist tenets such as the formal nature of the picture plane, color vibration/texture, non-figurative reaction to feeling or psychological reaction to environment can sometimes still be detected...(END OF EXCERPT).

DAVID BUNN MARTINE (CHERICAHUA APACHE/ SHINNECOCK/MONTAUK) is a United States artist and Director/ Curator of the Shinnecock Nation Cultural Center and Museum in Southampton, NY. His visual art practice has focused on mural painting of historical/narrative interpretations of the ancient Long Island Algonquian peoples, the Chiricahua Apache people, and portraiture, book illustration, wood-carving and mixed-media. In the late 1980's, he participated in the "Rider With No Horse" artist's collective exhibitions organized by New York Contemporary Native Art Movement founder Lloyd Oxendine (Lumbee). His work has been exhibited in institutions and is in private collections. David holds a BFA from the University of Oklahoma; a MA in Art Education from Central State University in Oklahoma and; he attended the Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe, NM certificate program. David Martine received a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painting Fellowship in 2008 and an Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Artists Curatorial Research Fellowship in 2012.

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