Interviews From Yale Radio / Artists, Curators And More

Yatika Starr Fields, 2025. Portrait © Tom Fields 2025 Born in 1980 in Tulsa, Yatika Starr Fields is a member of the Cherokee, Creek and Osage tribes, as well as a member of the Bear Clan. Yatika Fields studied landscape painting at the University of Oklahoma’s Sienna, Italy summer program before enrolling at the Art Institute of Boston from 2001 to 2004. While living on the East Coast, the artist developed a keen interest in street art. His dynamic, vibrant graffiti works quickly attracted attention, generating public and private mural commissions across the country from Portland to Oklahoma City, Phoenix, Santa Fe, and Bentonville. In 2018, he completed Astonishment of Perception, a monumental site-specific mural in downtown Bentonville, as part of Crystal Bridges Museum’s Art for a New Understanding (2018–2019). Spanning the side of Cripps Law Firm’s two-story building, the work depicts lady justice peeking from behind her blindfold, highlighting the dissonance between America’s ideals and its judicial syst