Rain 1, 1993 

Narrator: Rain I is part of Smith’s “Custer Series”. In all of these prints, she riffs on a photograph of General George Armstrong Custer standing with his arms crossed. During the 1860s and 70s, Custer was a leader in the U.S. invasion of Native American lands. He is perhaps best known for his death at the Battle of Little Bighorn, a major U.S. loss known as “Custer’s Last Stand.” The photo became well known when his wife circulated it in an effort to promote him as a great patriotic hero. 

Andrea Carlson: The thing that strikes me right away about this is that it's General Custer laid out flat horizontally on the ground. 

Narrator: Artist Andrea Carlson.

Andrea Carlson: He, in this state, is in maybe a post-murdered state, but he maintains the pose, the kind of widespread stance and the folded arms of a petulant child or someone with authority. We're very familiar with that, you know, if you see any portraiture of kings or nobles or military people, you'll see this stance. And so seeing it on its side, seeing Custer on his side in that stance is wonderfully hysterical. It is just absolutely brilliant to have it toppled like a statue or a monument.

There's all these figures that are almost raining down on him, taking him over. Clearly you think of things like the dripping of the blood. But there's also humor in her work even when it's talking about things like violence and genocide against Native people. And in this particular case, he didn't get to write the end of the story. He didn't survive. So that also belongs to Indigenous people, belongs to our forms of imagery. So this is, I think, just an absolutely interesting and also humorous and also just a gutting work of art.