Duane Slick (b. 1961) is a painter, printmaker and educator whose work brings Modernist abstraction into dialogue with Indigenous histories, beliefs and storytelling traditions. Raised between his father’s Meskwaki community in Iowa and his mother’s Ho-Chunk community in Nebraska, Slick learned early to protect cultural knowledge from outsiders. His art became a means of communicating through suggestion rather than explanation, using abstraction and recurring imagery—particularly the coyote—to explore memory, loss, transformation and Native identity. Slick earned his B.F.A. from the University of Northern Iowa and M.F.A. from UC Davis. Since 1995, he has taught painting and printmaking at the Rhode Island School of Design. His first solo museum exhibition, The Coyote Makes the Sunset Better, opened at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in 2022. His work is held by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, UC Davis’ Gorman Museum of Native American Art, and the Milwaukee Art Museum among others.