Phillip Cash Cash

(American | Cayuse | Nez Perce, born 1960)

Phillip Cash Cash (Cayuse and Nez Perce, also known as P.Y. Minthorn) creates abstract paintings, drawings, and prints. Dream, memory, and experience are combined in his paintings and poetry. Cash Cash sees art as a quest for knowledge, "filling the vacuum that exists when traditional methods of inquiry are forgotten or left behind."

Phillip Cash Cash grew up in Oregon and New Mexico. As a teenager, he studied creative writing with poet Joy Harjo at the Institute of American Indian Arts High School in New Mexico. He published his first book of poetry at age 21. He went on to study art and writing at the university level in Colorado, the Institute of American Indian Arts College in New Mexico, and Oregon. Cash Cash is a fluent speaker of Ni·mi·pu·tímt (the Nez Perce language) and holds a PhD in Anthropology and Linguistics (2018) from the University of Arizona. He has served his tribal community through his work in language preservation, oral history collection, archaeological field work, repatriation, and cultural research.

In 1992, Phillip Cash Cash co-founded Crow's Shadow Institute of the Arts, a non-profit printmaking studio on the Umatilla Reservation, near Pendleton, Northeast Oregon. The institute provides artist residencies and Indigenous arts workshops. Crow’s Shadow is the only professional fine art print publisher located on a Native American reservation in the United States.