Derek No-Sun Brown
Biography
Derek No-Sun Brown is an artist who is blessed to be carrying on ancestry from the Shoshone-Bannock, Klamath, and Ojibwe people. He was raised with a strong traditional foundation and continues to maintain indigenous ways of prayer and philosophy that is evident through his art.
No-Sun grew up on the Fort Hall Indian Reservation in Idaho and the Boise Forte Reservation in northern Minnesota. Traveling back and forth to his maternal and paternal homelands is how the young artist began to expand his mind and see things from an alternate perspective. No-Sun has been quoted as saying “being exposed to different cultures at an early age made me appreciate and love all my people because we are connected to the same source, we all fight the same war and share the same struggle.” The source is our ceremony and the struggle that is shared between all native people are issues of identity, poverty, degradation of indigenous culture, and land. The war is the ways in which native people fight against these issues, today we fight using education, legislation, music, art, and many other facets other than non-physical solutions. No-Sun says “art for me was a way to combat the negative aspects of reservation life because a lot of things are out of your control at a young age, and art was something I could control, it eased my anxiety and gave me an outlet for my energy.”
No-Sun has received his B.F.A in 2013 from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico and plans to further his education. No-sun has also expanded his love for art, apparel and music into an online business that sells his paintings, sculptures, prints, apparel, and music all under the one name War-Medicine Art. Currently the artist known as No-Sun is making his way into the future with a positive outlook and desire to make change for the better in the world and in Native America.
Images copyright: Derek No-Sun Brown