Author Description

Frohawk, artist and storyteller, paints and writes stories about battles, conquests, and the cast of characters that makes it all happen for his imaginary Republic of Frengland. In ink, acrylic and tea, on paper and on canvas, Frohawk, born Umar Rashid in 1976, creates a fictional world that looks quite a bit like our real one. This volume chronicles the final episode in the artist¿s series on Colonial America, his successful combining of art, history, and sometimes wicked but always fun-to-read commentary on people ¿ Europeans adventurers and explorers, North American Indians, freed and enslaved blacks, and ravishing women who love, laugh, and die on the banks of the Hudson from Manhattan up to Lake Oneida. The action begins in 1791 and continues through 1793, real time for New York City just flaunting its new identity on the southern tip of the island of Manhattan, and thriving under English rule. The city¿s first denizens, the Dutch, are ¿has beens,¿ unwillingly departed from the city they called New Amsterdam, and now skirmishing with their Iroquois allies in the Hudson Valley nearby to the north. Real and not real, fact and fiction, Frengland (a combo of France, England, and Ireland) and Batavia (the Netherlands) fight the climactic Battle of Yonkers, recorded and viewed for the first time at the Hudson River Museum, situated by the river in the very countryside that inspired the 19th-century Hudson River School painters. Umar Rashid (Frohawk Two Feathers), an Illinois native who now lives and works in Los Angeles, California, first studied photography, film, and writing at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. His recent solo exhibitions include the Wadsworth Athenaeum (Hartford, CT), Wellin Museum of Art (Clinton, NY), the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey (Summit, NJ), the Nevada Museum of Art (Reno, NV), and the Museum of Contemporary Art (Denver, CO). The exhibition is organized by the Hudson River Museum and curated its Deputy Director Bartholomew F.