...Some People Get Obsessed is what I call a transparent book intended to go on a shelf; viewers are invited to pick it up. The piece was intended for an Indian audience, not a white audience, since only Indian people would understand the history of the image that reoccurs in the piece. Specifically, the piece was intended for the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, a two-year junior art college, where I was a faculty member for three years. There was incredible community instability, caused by forms of Indian nationalism or internal racism. ...Some People Get Obsessed was inspired by this situation and also by a comment bell hooks made, in a talk at the Institute, about the 1992 Whitney Biennial. While she applauded the museum’s efforts at inclusion, she pointed out that there was never a point in any of the work where ‘whiteness’ was not at the center of discussion. She led me to think in terms of conducting an internal critique, one that would be specific only to the Native community. As a Native person, I saw this piece as a process of externalizing my own sense of internal rage and yet desiring the sense of coyote consciousness that would allow me critical distance.”D.S.

1961	born
1986	B.F.A. University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls
1990	M.F.A. University of California, Davis
	Associate professor, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; lives in Providence, RI