Angelica Trimble-Yanu is a visual artist, designer, and creative project manager based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is an enrolled member of the Oglála Lakȟóta Sioux Nation from Pine Ridge, South Dakota. Angelica’s practice is deeply rooted in a her families history of Native leadership, having descended from Albert Trimble, former President of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, and great-niece of Charles "Chuck" Trimble, founder of the American Indian Press Association and Executive Director of the National Congress of American Indians. Their lifelong commitment to tribal sovereignty and the preservation of Lakota culture informs every dimension of her studio practice.
Her work spans disciplines and scales, with commissions and exhibitions for leading organizations including Google, Gemini Ai, Nike, and major cultural institutions such as the De Young Museum and MarinMOCA. In 2023, she was nominated for the SECA Art Award by SFMOMA following her debut solo exhibition, BLACK SUN.
Angelica holds a BFA in Fine Art from the Pacific Northwest College of Art and works at the intersection of contemporary art, design, and culture.
Interview with Creative Director, Emily Bolles For ARTBUDS in Portland Oregon 2020
Photographs by Emily Bolles
Emily Bolles: Who are your inspirations?
Angelica: “James Lavadour, A painter and Printmaker from Walla Walla, Washington. Lavadours landscapes introduced me to a new perspective of landscape. how landscape can serve as a vessel for communication and tradition, how can landscape serve as visual language. I am influenced by his first collaborative sculpture with the Walla Walla Foundry. “Ruby Lift” I am interested in Lavadours process in this particular piece. Lavadour took his paintings and translated them into 3D forms through digital process. He photographed and scanned his painting through a digital architecture program. He then rendered a 3D map through the painting. Lavadour’s brush strokes from the black and white abstract painting transformed into a three dimensional topographic reality of the Columbia River. The Columbia is a sacred space for him and his ancestors. I am interested in this reflection of intuitive and collective memory Indigenous nations have to their ancestral homelands. The marks transformed physically into who he is and where he is from. the mark making he used reflected his sacred homelands in Walla Walla, Washington. James experienced an unexpected phenomena with the uncanny reflection of his tribes homeland within the physical dimensions of Ruby LIft.”
