Jean LaMarr or Pahime Gutne (Purple Flower) is a multimedia artist, best known for her printmaking, paintings and mural installations. Over the course of her 50-year career, she has used her art to depict Native American life.
J. LaMarr was born in Susanville, California and moved to San Jose, California as a young adult. Her move to the city was sponsored by the United States’ Relocation Program, which sought to assimilate Native Americans into dominant society by moving them from reservations to urban centres throughout the country. J. LaMarr earned her BFA from San Jose City College in 1973 and her MFA from the University of California, Berkeley in 1976.

While attending university, European abstraction and modernism dominated the art scene. The artist painted abstract landscapes to pass her assignments and then superimposed depictions of her family and friends over them. She avoided showing these pieces to faculty members for fear that they would dub the works as simply “folk art”. This is a style she would replicate throughout her career. Works such as Going Back to the Rez (1974) utilises both abstract landscape and realistic depictions of people to reflect on contemporary Native American life. Urban Indian Girls (1982), done in pencil instead of paint, is another work that depicts late 20th-century Native American experiences while rejecting racialised stereotypes. Later in her career, J. LaMarr also experimented with photographic collage. In Lena, 1922 and Now (1985), the artist rescued a photograph of her great aunt taken by field anthropologist Edward W. Gifford, which was meant to demonstrate Lena’s physical and racial inferiority. The artist juxtaposes E. Gifford’s photograph with one from her family’s personal collection. With this artwork J. LaMarr demonstrates Lena’s wisdom and vibrancy as a tribal elder and seeks to rescue her from the original image in which she was depicted as a scholarly specimen.

During her college years the artist became involved with the budding Chicanx and Red Power movements. She learned mural making from Chicano/a artists and became increasingly interested in the political purposes of art. Since then J. LaMarr has tried to make her work widely accessible by creating public murals, prints and posters. She lent both her artistic skills and support to Indians of All Tribes’ occupation of Alcatraz Island (1969-1971) and the Pit River occupation in Shasta County, California (1970). The works she created during this time included murals and event posters such as Support Wounded Knee (1973).

In 1994 she founded the Native American Graphic Workshop in her hometown of Susanville. The workshop is dedicated to teaching printmaking and other art forms to both Native American youth and elders. In 2022 the Nevada Art Museum held a retrospective of J. LaMarr’s work that included over one hundred of her paintings, prints and mixed media works from the 1970s to 2022. She has exhibited widely and her works are held in the permanent collections of such institutions as the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC and the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, California.