In 1982, for an exhibition in the New York East Village, Jimmie Durham produced what is described as his first work of institutional critique: Manhattan Festival of the Dead. It consisted in a wooden shelf on which a variety of objects were on display, including several skulls and bones. The work put together decorated human animals bones without a precise hierarchy as a form of respect towards the animal, but was also a way of ironically comment on the notion of ‘genuine’ American Indian art as a category. From that work, a series of assemblages featuring one single skull at a time derived. In New York Gitli the skull of a dog is embellished with paint and - as also in other pieces - a seashell resting in a eye socket, recalling the mixture of American identity with a Cherokee vocabulary indeed Gitli means dog in Cherokee. The body/pedestal of this and the other work is a structure incorporating natural material and man-made industrial elements such as plastic.