SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Think of street art and what might come to mind is city buildings with giant murals, subway cars tagged with spray paint or stenciled sidewalks. Well, Chip Thomas creates street art in rural places - large-scale photographs on abandoned buildings across the Navajo Nation. This year, the MacArthur Foundation gave Chip Thomas what's known as a genius grant. KSUT's Adam Burke has this profile.
ADAM BURKE, BYLINE: North of Flagstaff, Arizona, the ribbon of highway disappears into a sea of sagebrush and yellow grasses. Chip Thomas steers his hatchback off the road to an abandoned cinder-block building.
CHIP THOMAS: This is the natural evolution of a piece on the desert. It's breaking down.
BURKE: Lean, bearded, dreadlocks tucked inside a canvas cap, Thomas approaches the tiny structure, which might have been a storage shed at one time. The roof and the door are gone now.
THOMAS: This is part of a sight-and-sound installation. Looks like the sound may have stopped.
BURKE: Inside, a 10-foot-wide black-and-white image covers the back wall. It's an art piece, spotlighting the devastating health effects of uranium mining among Navajo workers during the Cold War.
THOMAS: My images of Kee John, who died at a young age from a cancer related to his work in a uranium mine.
BURKE: In the photo, a young Navajo man wears a hard hat with a headlamp and operates uranium mining equipment, but the image is fading. Pieces of the installation are peeling off the walls.
(SOUNDBITE OF GEIGER COUNTER)
THOMAS: Oh, here we go. The sound loop is working.
BURKE: Then suddenly a solar-powered speaker kicks on, and we hear the garbled sounds of a Geiger counter. This is what's left of the installation's audio.
THOMAS: This is on its last leg (laughter). But it's impressive. It's been running 3 1/2 years now nonstop.
BURKE: Since 2009, Chip Thomas has been putting up artwork in places like this across the Navajo Nation, working against the unrelenting wind and sand.
THOMAS: The work is ephemeral, you know, is paper versus the elements, and the elements - Mother Nature always wins.
BURKE: On a landscape of disorienting scale and inscrutable distances, his black-and-white installations offer outsized visions of daily life on the rez - men on horseback, grandmothers herding sheep, the delighted faces of children playing. And for Thomas, any building is a canvas - deserted gas stations, old trailers, water tanks.
THOMAS: Structures that are close enough to the road that are big enough where I can put an interesting, hopefully engaging piece.
BURKE: Twenty-five minutes down the highway, we stop at a roadside stand where vendors are selling table loads of turquoise and silver jewelry.
TORREY CHARLEY: Good to see you, friend.
THOMAS: Yeah. You too.
CHARLEY: Nice to see you.
BURKE: Torrey Charley (ph) is working one of the stands. She's 29 and first started seeing Thomas' artwork as a teenager.
CHARLEY: I was like, oh, wow, you know, there's somebody that's interested in livestock and kids or, you know, the elders within the community.
BURKE: Charley is Navajo, or Dine, as Navajo people call themselves.
CHARLEY: I think, as a teenager, I was like, dang, I wonder who this is. And I probably assumed that it was a young Dine artist doing photography and finding out that he was a doctor. That was interesting. That was cool (laughter).
BURKE: Born and raised in North Carolina, Chip Thomas moved to the Navajo Nation in 1987 to work as a family physician in a remote, underserved region.
THOMAS: I had thought because of the isolation, I would just be there initially for two years, but my two years turned into 36.
BURKE: He spent time with patients outside of the clinic, helping them haul water, stack firewood and shear sheep. And as he grew closer to Navajo people, Thomas started photographing them.
THOMAS: There was, you know, a degree of trust, and I could stick a camera not literally in someone's face, but I could get closer physically than a stranger could and tell a more intimate story.
BURKE: Then in 2009, a friend showed him the work of the French street artist JR, who covered the walls of urban buildings with giant images. Thomas was 52 at the time.
THOMAS: It was like, oh, my God, this is it. This person has figured out how to take a documentary black-and-white photograph, blow it up to scale and to use it as street art. My mind was blown. It's like, I have to figure this out.
BURKE: This was the era of Banksy, Shepard Fairey and countless masked anonymous street artists who put up work in public spaces without permission.
THOMAS: It's getting away with something.
BURKE: At first, Thomas worked in secret too.
THOMAS: Sneaking around usually at night is a rush, and I was living the life of my street art heroes.
BURKE: For outsiders, this is a landscape that holds points of interest, like Monument Valley, Lake Powell and the Grand Canyon. But Thomas is concerned with the spaces in between and the community life that's often invisible to tourists.
KEVIN MOORE: People tend to look at a landscape like that as just bleak and empty and worthless.
BURKE: Art historian Kevin Moore curated a retrospective of Thomas' work in Cincinnati a few years ago.
MOORE: To drive across the desert and see a black-and-white photograph pasted to a building of a smiling girl or an old couple, it's striking. It's surreal. It's actually haunting.
BURKE: Moore says it's notable that Thomas' artwork is not for sale and free to everyone.
MOORE: It feels mysterious. It's sort of like who did this? Why did they do this? You expected to try to go to work on you in a way. But as you sit with it and contemplate it, you realize you don't understand what it's trying to do to you, and then you start to understand that maybe it's just trying to exist, maybe it's just trying to get you to exist with it. Maybe that's a good place to be with art.
BURKE: Every photograph is a window, every camera, a mirror. Chip Thomas uses his lens, his work to reflect the beauty and resilience of the people who live on this land. And at 69, he says he's not done yet.
THOMAS: It's still a passion play for me to create new work, tell new stories, and I like to do it in a way that engages people. My primary audience for the work on the Navajo Nation is Navajo people, and I'd like to think that there will be continued growth reflected in the work I create.
BURKE: That work will almost certainly be big and bold, like the land itself, visions that materialize for a short while and then gradually dissolve again into the desert.
For NPR News, I'm Adam Burke.
(SOUNDBITE OF GITKIN'S "ALTER EGO") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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