Ahalenia

Upcoming Art Events

2012-01-12T18:41:00.002-07:00

In the juggling act between writing about and creating art, the latter has taken the front seat recently. Some upcoming art events I'll be participating in include the following.

Facing the Sunland: Works by America Meredith + Sally Ann Paschall + Kay Walkingstick
Jan 20–Feb 13: Berlin Gallery at the Heard Museum
2301 No. Central Ave, Phoenix, Arizona
Opening reception: Friday, Jan 20, 6–8pm
Indigenous Visions artist talk: Saturday: Jan 21, 1:30–2:30pm

Lumen: IAIA
Jan 27–Feb 20: Red Dot Gallery, 823 Canyon Road, Santa Fe, NM
Opening reception: Friday, January 27th, 5-7pm

H2OK: Native Responses to Water Issues
February 10—March 10: 120 E. Main Street, Norman, OK
April 6—May 13: Bacone College Art Gallery, Art Building, Old Bacone Road, Muskogee, OK
Website.

Heard Museum Guild Indian Art Market
March 3 & 4: Heard Museum, 2301 No. Central, Phoenix, Arizona
Sharing a booth with Linda Lomahaftewa, Roger Amerman, and Marcus Amerman.

Review | Manifestations: New Native Art Criticism, Part 2

2011-12-06T14:02:00.008-07:00

Manifestations: New Native Art Criticism features four essays by Nancy Marie Mithlo, Stephen Fadden and Stephen Wall, Sherry Farrell Racette, and Mario A. Caro. These alone are worth the price of the book.

The First Wave… This Time Around

In “The First Wave… This Time Around,” Nancy Marie Mithlo discusses the Vision Project in terms of the current state of affairs in Native contemporary art. She sees mainstream art critics being impatient with Native artists’ insistence on referencing their tribal communities and histories, but “Indian people continue to insist on being Indian” (Mithlo 18). “Why,” she asks, “when it would be so much easier to simply seek out hybrid, transnational, post-Indian or some such trendy association, do we insist on claiming our identities as Native peoples?” (19).

Mithlo asks the compelling question, “Is there bad Indian art?” (21), but doesn’t answer it, instead pointing out that markets and artists institutions make qualitative evaluations of indigenous art, as does the “intellectual capital” an artwork earns, through art writing. Most of the writing about Native art comes from the non-scholarly, “light press” (21). That’s especially evident here in Santa Fe, where local newspapers and magazines repeat each other’s same factual errors. She writes, “non-intellectual sources are guiding the assessment of contemporary American Indian arts, and that this casual, cultural art-of-the-week variety of arts writing has exerted a harmful influence on the development of a more serious field of inquiry” (21). She concludes that “[t]he ability to represent ourselves as Native peoples—intact and collectively—is a human right, too frequently ignored” (27).

“Indigenous curatorial methodologies” Mithlo says are defined “by four criteria: it is long-term, reciprocal, mutually-meaningful, and includes mentorship” (24-5). To art critics that question the need for self-defined indigenous criteria, she writes, “A dismissal of the logic and strategies of Native nations (and their artists) to move forward with their own communities intact mirrors the logical colonialism” (25).

Invisible Forces of Change:

United States Indian Policy and American Indian Art

Steve Fadden and Stephen Wall, both professors in IAIA’s Indigenous Liberal Studies Department, co-wrote “Invisible Forces of Changes: United States Indian Policy and American Indian Art.” They share US Indian history 101 and put forward three examples of artists that exemplify major eras in Indian policy. David Cusick, a founder of the Iroquois Realist School, illustrates the Formative Era of 1776–1810 when tribes were relatively as strong as the fledgling United States (29-30). Angel DeCora, whose life and work is defined by Indian boarding schools, defined the Allotment Era of 1880-1932, when assimilation into European-American society was the government’s mission (32, 34). Allan Houser, the first Chiricahua Apache born outside of captivity since 1886, is part of the Indian Reorganization Era of the 1930s and 1940s. Houser directed benefited from the Indian New Deal reforms allowing tribal governance, education, and self-expression in the arts (34-35).

As destructive and capricious as US Indian policy has been, Fadden and Wall argue, it’s impossible to ignore its role in Native art history. They do not describe any of the three artist’s work. Is familiarity with Cusick and DeCora’s art a given for the general readership? It’s curious that they do not reference Rennard Strickland and Margaret Archuleta’s Shared Visions: Native American Painters and Sculptors in the Twentieth Century, which also traces the influence of US federal Indian policy on Native arts.

Encoded Knowledge: Memory and Object in Contemporary Native American Art

While pointing out the dangers of generalization about Native art, Sherry Farrell Racette puts forward some of the underpinnings of indigenous art theory, which takes a great deal of bravery. She does so in a lyrical manner, showing respect for the subject matter—cherished belief systems and values—which, in print, have most commonly been written in print in the cold, reductionist language of Western anthropologists. Racette quotes the Traditional Care Committee of NMAI: “Objects are alive and must be handled with respect” (Mithlo 41). Contemporary mainstream Western art tends towards the nonreligious, but for indigenous art, an animist reading is appropriate and should be explored further, because that quote is literately true.

“Oral traditions were never solely oral,” Racette writes (41), as many artworks are mnemonic devices with their own visual language. Through examples, she illustrates the need of living Native peoples to engage with Native art for meanings to be activated and realized. The challenges of writing about traditional knowledge is the vulnerability of sharing long held beliefs with the public and that, in my personal opinion, all Native artists and writers have a gate-keeping role—determining what is appropriate to share with the public and what is not.

Continuity is a guiding principle in comparing Native art throughout time. “New objects become the storied object,” Racette writes (43). The one aspect of Native art theory that seems most agreed upon is the narrative quality of the art.

In the section “To Make It Correctly” (43-45), Racette points out that process and materials can have meaning and significance beyond simply being a means to an end. Technique has been exalted in the Native art world; however, Racette writes that the attitude and energy of the process has its own importance (45).

Artists, such as Diego Romero and Nicholas Galanin, use “strategies of deconstruction and contradiction” to explore and disrupt colonial attitudes and racism (50). Because what is familiar to a Natives can be jarring and challenging to a non-Natives, artists have to be conscious of the multiple audiences for their work.

“Many objects are a form of visual literacy,” Racette concludes, “not only in terms of the symbols coded on their surface or the actions and gestures that provide their human context, but for the words, prayers, tears and fervent hopes that are spoken into them at the moment of their creation and over their lifetime” (52).

Owning the Image: Indigenous Arts since 1990

In his overview of developments in the last twenty years of Native arts, Mario A. Caro covers a lot of ground in a short space. He sees “a vibrant field with every-increasing participation by … Native practitioners involved in determining how Native art is contextualized” (56). He chose 1990 as a starting point, since that is when NAGPRA and the American Indian Arts and Crafts Act were both passed into legislation, rapidly followed by the 1992 Columbus quincentenary (57).

In the 1990s, identity politics figured largely in the mainstream art world, when James Luna participated in the Whitney Biennial and later collaborated with outspoken Latina/o artists Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña.

Art history and anthropology have guided Native art writing, often with damaging effects, leading to their reassessment. Caro sees Native Art History finally emerging as a coherent discipline, and “it is the entry of Native scholars into the field that advanced theoretical frameworks based on paradigms of thought originating from within their communities” (60). The exoticism, objectification, and general “Other-ing” of Native art are cut through by self-representation.

Jolene Rickard’s doctoral thesis states “that Native art is, and has always been, a form a knowledge production informed by Native perspectives” (60). This might seem obvious but it is anything but, especially in light of the abundance of narcissistic 20th-century writing by European-Americans suggesting Native art was created and controlled by European-American institutions for a European-American audience.

The increasing corpus of Native art writing is rich in exhibition catalogs and anthologies, but still lacking general art surveys and scholarly art criticism (61). What surveys exist do not begin to cover the last several decades of artist production. Monographs are slowly increasing in numbers. Writing about individual might go against the collectivist impulse of Native scholars but are opportunities for in-depth investigation and analysis often lacking in Native art writing.

Museums have been primary sources of information about Native art, and the increase of tribal museums founded on indigenous perspectives, as well as the establishment of NMAI in DC, has drastically changed the institutional landscape of the indigenous art world (63). NMAI and indigenous curators participating in major biennial art fairs creates an international presence for indigenous arts of the Americas (64). Museum collections have influenced the market value of art.

The gallery system is not as strong, and prominent contemporary Native art galleries are located away from major art centers such as New York or London. Indian art markets have increased dramatically in number; however, these compete against themselves.

A lack of support network and infrastructure hampers the growth of many indigenous artists; however, community-based non-profit centers have increased and provide some mentorship (66-7).

Thoughts

Perusing the footnotes, one can see the impact of the internet in fostering dialogue. Personal interviews and correspondence directly with the artists is common. One of the draws of Native art, for natives and non-natives, is that most of the artists are accessible and willing to communicate to the public.

While certainly valuable for a collective updating of contemporary art for the general readership, is Manifestations really art criticism? W. H. Auden (Anglo-American, 1907-1973) is quoted in A Short Guide to Writing About Art defining what functions a critic can provide:

Introduce me to authors or works of which I was hitherto unaware.
Convince me that I have undervalued an author or a work because I have not read them carefully enough.
Show me relations between works of different ages and cultures which I could never have seen for myself because I do not know enough and never shall.
Give a “reading” of a work which increases my understanding of it.
Throw light upon the process of artistic “Making”
Throw light upon the relation of art to life, to science, economics, ethics, religion, etc. (Barnet 8).

Seen in this light, Manifestations is a success. Evaluation is only one aspect of art criticism and not the most vital. Introducing and mapping the artists’ perspective backgrounds and philosophical perspectives as well as their cultural contexts is invaluable. The book lets the public know that the Native American art world is building firm ground on which to stand.

So far the book is only available through the MOCNA gift shop. Their website is "under construction," but their phone number is 1-888-922-4242.

Mithlo, Nancy Marie, senior editor. Manifestations: New Native Art Criticism. Santa Fe: Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, 2011. ISBN 978-0-615-48904-9.
Sylvan, Barnet. A Short Guide to Writing about Art. 6th ed. New York: Longman, 2000.
Video interview with Will Wilson about the Vision Project, by DeCoy Gallerina (Chiricahua Apache). Indian Country Today.
The Vision Project website

Review | Manifestations: New Native Art Criticism, Part 1

2011-12-05T17:09:00.003-07:00

Manifestations: New Native Art Criticism, the culmination of three years’ work, is finally available. This book is part of the Institute of American Indian Arts’ “Vision Project,” an effort to showcase Native American art writers and new artists, through discussions, writing, and a series of solo exhibits at the Museum of Contemporary Arts (former IAIA Museum). The project involved 21 Native art writers and 60 artists.

What I witnessed of the process of the Vision Project was painful to watch, but, nonetheless, the results are inspiring. A committee chose the artists, selecting living artists, established, mid-career, and some emerging artists, who were active last three decades.

Only artists from Canada and United States, including Hawaii, were chosen. Why? Perhaps it’s an Anglophone bias, one certainly found in Canadian and United States academia but one that doesn’t conceptually hold any water. James Luna (Luiseño/Mexican), Mario Martinez (Yaqui), and Jennifer Vigil (Diné/Latina) represent the Americas south of the Rio Grande, and hopefully future projects of this nature will be hemispheric in scope, since innumerable cultural exchanges have taken place from South to North.

The writers were limited to only 500–word essays on each artist; somewhat hamstringing any attempt at in-depth analysis. On the plus side, given such a limited space, the writers chose their words carefully, resulting in beautifully written biographies of contemporary artists. Many of the artists are also writers and vice versa, so meeting and collaborating on this project will no doubt spark future collaborations. Magazine and book editors now have a showcase of talented Native art writers—with many more accomplished Native writers who were not part of this project. The Vision Project shows the world that Native art writers more than up to the task to write about Native art.

How does this differ from projects such as American Indian Art Magazine’s selection of 35 Native artists’ profiles for their 35th anniversary issue? In fact eight artists (Marcus Amerman, Arthur Ammiotte, David Bradley, Bob Haozous, Shelley Niro, Preston Singletary, Roxanne Swentzell, and Denise Wallace) were included in both projects. The immediately difference is that the magazine primarily chose non-Native authors.

Diane Pardue’s profile of Denise Wallace uses more marketing-inspired adjectives, “graceful,” “enchanting and engaging,” (AIA 73) and discusses technique in great detail, while Barry Ace goes more into the context of art in tribal society (Mithlo 186), but the profiles are astonishingly similar. Jennifer Vigil discusses Roxanne Swentzell’s art about women’s body issues (Mithlo 174-5) while Zena Pearlstone doesn’t even touch on the subject but does mention Swentzell’s work in permaculture (AIA 70). Both Mary Jan Lenz and Mique’l Icesis Askren describe Preston Singletary’s being raised away from his culture and his initial pursuit of music; however, Askren, the Manifestations author, looks at the irony of European techniques reconnecting Singletary with his people and that his glass sculptures take become kinetic, when illuminated by light. Ryan Rice touches on Shelley Niro’s “multi-nationality” but gives more straightforward resume information (awards, collections, degrees) than Zena Pearlstone does in her essay, which describes a range of Niro’s works (Mithlo 148-9, AIA 61). And so on it goes.

Trust me, I desperately want to see wide disparities between the two publications approached to art writing; however, the differences are subtle. Over time, the subtleties add up—aesthetics and techniques or content? Tribal ethnologies or contemporary tribal political realities? Some Manifestations art writers make a more dramatic departure. Overall the Vision Project's selection of artists lean towards the more conceptual, more difficult, and not always aesthetically pleasing artwork and there’s more space to discuss harsh realities. But as Nancy Mithlo points out, "the presence of contemporary Native art made from the broken legacy of America's attempt to destroy our communities is powerfully compelling, stark and well, I'll just say it, beautiful" (Mithlo 19).

In this project, women writers were able to analyze women artists and discuss women’s issues, which upon reflection, is not all that common. My personal observation has been that women artists are much better represented in the Native art world than in the mainstream art world; however, gender inequalities do exist. Of the 60 artists, 24 are women. 40% is a positive sign.

It so good to see the focus of Native art writing on content for a change. Thanks to Nancy Mithlo, Manifestations editor; Stephen Wall; Will Wilson, Vision Project manager; Sarah Sense, former Vision Project Director; and everyone else who made this project and publication possible. So far the book is only available through the MOCNA gift shop. Their website is "under construction," but their phone number is 1-888-922-4242.

Mithlo, Nancy Marie, senior editor. Manifestations: New Native Art Criticism. Santa Fe: Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, 2011. ISBN 978-0-615-48904-9.
Taylor, Tobi, ed. American Indian Art Magazine. Volume 36, Number 1. Winter 2010: 36–74.
Video interview with Will Wilson about the Vision Project, by DeCoy Gallerina (Chiricahua Apache). Indian Country Today.
The Vision Project website

Questionart #4

2011-11-21T20:42:00.003-07:00

Do you think Native Pop is an art movement? If so, what are some of its characteristics and the thoughts that inspire it?

First of all, yes I do think it is a valid/vibrant subcategory of Native Art. Some characteristics would include the visual cacophony that a lot of us grew up with from Saturday morning cartoons to films like Star Wars, and other types of things grew out of mass media in general. I also think that these various things get filtered through the lens of our particular

Kill Your Idols, Hoka Skenandore, acrylic on canvas

experience, (urban/rez/young/old/traditional/etc.) and the end result is something not quite like the Pop art of the 1960's, but is perhaps a little more personal because it resonates and sometimes clashes with our individual tribal backgrounds.

In terms of thoughts that inspire it I think that all Native Art has been influenced by outside materials/terms/experiences from contact until today, and a lot of the time what is right in front of the artist can readily become art. Speaking for myself, I find it amusing that what I do is considered Pop, a lot of the imagery that I appropriate/steal/make ugly is old, literally taken from really old sources or from magazines thrown out in the garbage. I've found that Pop Art imagery tends to lean toward the "Now" and I tend to pilfer the past... anyhoo, I digress into the "me-me-I-me" artist-ego, let-me-talk-some-more-about-my-vision crap...

–Hoka Skenandore

(Luiseño-Onieda-Oglala Lakota) | website

You're My Best Friend, April Holder, acrylic

I totally think native pop is an art movement. If Native Americans live in two worlds, then native pop is the bridge between those two worlds. Native pop art is the combination of the essence of traditional identity and the embrace of the ever changing world around us. I love native pop; this is a cool question. Hope my answer helps.

–April Holder

(Sac and Fox-Wichita-Tonkawa)

I don't know if Native Pop is so much a movement as it is an instinct to decide to do whatever you desire to do. When I first learned beadwork. I did Mickey Mouse. I didn't know anything about art or native art. I was doing beadwork and I wanted to do what I liked.

A friend in high school commissioned me to do a "Rush 2012" beaded belt buckle and I did it. I don't think I had created any boundaries at that age about what I could or couldn't, should or shouldn't, or if it was Indian. It was me. From the beginning, I and other people thought my stuff was cool and different. There was no intellectual discussion of it's artistic merits, it was just neat. I consider myself a citizen of the world and as such I feel enabled and maybe entitled to do or depict or comment on anything in my world.

Marilyn Monroe, Marcus Amerman, beaded rosette

I also consider myself an Indian and therefore more closely related to the Indigenous populations of America, North America and the Americas. Because I felt like the same blood courses through my veins that coursed through all Indians, I felt comfortable and proud to depict great chiefs and leaders from all tribes. Perhaps, marketing is a factor that can encourage or support the use of popular imagery in Native Expression. I did beaded bracelet series of musicians, actors and civil rights leaders and they all sold.

I really never had to think about what I was doing, because I was too busy doing it. I later discovered that I was making art and specifically, pop art.

–Marcus Amerman

(Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma) | website

Inner Demons III opens Friday, Oct. 28th

2011-10-26T10:16:00.003-06:00

Kalki, oil, Brandon Williams, 2011

Inner Demons III Explores the Uncomfortable
and Unsettling through Art

Santa Fe, NM — Inner Demons III, opens with a reception Friday, Oct. 28th, from 6 – 9 p.m. at Ahalenia Studios, which has a new location at 2889 Trades West, Unit E, off of Siler Street. Celebrating its third year in what has become and annual show, Inner Demons III explores and encourages art that is dark, moody, and morbid (or otherwise disturbing in its subject matter) with an eclectic line-up of artists. This event is free and open to the public. Because of its proximity to Halloween, costumes are welcome at the opening.

The exhibit will be open to the public from 1 – 6 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 29; Sunday, Oct. 30; Saturday, Nov. 5; and Sunday, Nov. 6. From Oct. 31 through Nov. 4 the show will be open by appointment, which can be arranged by calling emailing ahalenia@yahoo.com.

Participating artists include:

• Marcus Amerman
• Bryon Archuleta

Moloch DC, acrylic, Bryon Archuleta

• Ross Chaney
• Melissa Dominguez
• Dennis Esquivel
• Robert Garcia
• Staci Golar
• Bob Haozous
• Sam Haozous
• Topaz Jones
• Daniel McCoy
• Marlon Melero
• Melissa Melero
• America Meredith
• Mary Beth Nelson
• Joseph Sanchez
• Kevin Sullivan
• John Torres-Nez
• Brandon Williams

Show website: www.ahalenia.com/demons.

Toltec Mounds, Arkansas

2011-10-17T23:36:00.000-06:00

The unassuming state of Arkansas boasts over 40,000 archaeological sites (AAS). The number of mounds in the state is staggering. And one of the largest mound sites in Arkansas is Toltec Mounds, so named because the Knapps, who once owned the land, thought Toltecs from Mexico surely most have built these elaborate platform mounds (TMS).

Built between 650 and 1050 CE, this ceremonial site sits near an oxbow lake separated from the Arkansas River centuries ago. Toltec served as a ceremonial center for adjacent farming communities; very few people actually lived on site. Of the 18 mounds at Toltec, the tallest stands at 39 feet. Certain mounds are positioned to correspond with sunrises and sunsets during both equinoxes and solstices. (TMS). The Toltec Mounds were abandoned abruptly in 1050, which is interestingly enough when Cahokia gained ascendency in a cultural "big bang," that many attribute in part to the explosion of a supernova on July 5, 1054 (Cahokia, Wilford).

The culture that built Toltec Mounds is called the Plum Bayou culture. Their descendants are unknown. Through NAGPRA, archaeologists legally have to consult with the Quapaw tribe about human remains and cultural patrimony of Toltec Mounds; however, the Quapaw only arrived in the region after the 13th century. Quapaw oral history says they migrated from the Ohio River Valley. The idea of a culture with no known descendants is somewhat haunting, but whether the Quapaw intermarried the Plum Bayou people or not, I'm glad that they have a tribe advocating on behalf of their burials and sacred items today.

Damon, Pythias, and a friend

The museum and grounds were well kept. A wooden structuretakes you out onto the lake among cypress looking back at the mounds. A couple of catfish resided in the audiovisual room. I asked what their names were and sure enough they did have names—Damon and Pythias.

"Arkansas Archeological Survey." Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture. 16 Sept 2010.
"The 'Origins' of Cahokia Mounds." Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site. 2008.
"Toltec Mounds Site." Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture. 16 Sept 2010.
Wilford, John. "Star Explosion of 1054 Is Seen in Indian Bowl." The New York Times. 19 June 1990.

Chucalissa, Tennessee

2011-10-13T12:30:00.000-06:00

Sinti (snake) mosaic, based on pottery design

Digging for a swimming pool in a segregated African-American park in 1938, the Civilian Conservation Corps unearthed precolumbian artifacts from a Mississippian mound complex. The University of Tennessee investigated the site, which showed evidence of human occupation dating back to at least to 1000 BCE. The town site dates back to 1000 CE and was alternately abandoned and rebuilt. The main occupation dates from 1400 and was thought to be abandoned by the 1541 arrival of Hernando de Doto in the region (CH Nash Museum).

Curvilinear "wave" patterns are ubiquitous in this region

The name "Chucalissa" means "abandoned house" in Choctaw (Visitor's Guide 2). Today the site is west of T. O. Fuller State Park, and it's difficult to believe you're still in the city of Memphis, surrounded by towering forests on all sides, and a nearby power plant. ("What is it with mounds and power plants?" commented Linda.) The CH Nash Museum has an extensive collection of artifacts from the site on display, and their signage ties in the African-American history of the area. Signage is geared toward children, making the site and lifeways of the people who lived there directly relevant to the visitors. Recently added panels show input from Choctaw and Chickasaw tribes. Perhaps the interpretive materials here are some of the best because instead of exoticizing the precontact residents of the site, they humanize them.

A replica village of high-pitched thatched-roof huts was torn down from the site for not being sufficiently accurate to the originals, but photos reveal that they look as good as any found in other sites.

Platform mound at Chucalissa, 1350–1600 CE

Human effigy bowl, note the elaborate hat

The main platform mound dominates the site. The front is covered by concrete, which ironically, gives more of a sense of what the mound looked like in its heyday, since most mounds were sealed in red or yellow clay. Built between 1350 and 1600 CE, the 25-foot-high mound measures 150 feet long at its base. Postmold evidence reveals that two 50-square foot buildings once stood on the platform's surface (Visitor's Guide 6-7).

Across the large plaza, where demonstration stickball games are still occasionally played, sits a residential ridge mound and the smaller and older platform mound, worn down by plowing. The site also features the obligatory dugout canoe and herb garden. Plant signage features the pawpaw, an important source of food and textiles, and sassafras, important for teas and medicine. Near an employee's house is a prodigious stand of river cane, Arundinaria.

Contemporary tribes thought to have ancestral links to Chucalissa during its different occupations include the Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Quapaw.

"A Visitor's Guide to Chucalissa." The Friends of Chucalissa, Memphis, Tennessee.
"CH Nash Museum: Chucalissa." The University of Memphis College of Arts and Sciences. 2011.

Pinson Mounds, Tennessee

2011-10-02T15:57:00.007-06:00

Incised greenstone pendant

The two-thousand-year-old Middle Woodland site, Pinson Mounds has my vote, hands down, for the creepiest site we've visited. This is probably due to the rain, the mist rising from the forests, the echoing insect calls, or the incised human skull rattles found on a male burial and on display in the museum. Built near the southern fork of the Forked Deer River, Pinson Mounds were constructed from 200 BCE through the 400 CE (Mainfort and Kwas).

Pinson is part of the Miller sub-tradition, a precolumbian culture that settled along the Tombigbee River in western Alabama, northeastern Mississippi, and western Tennessee, that flourished from 250 BCE to 550 CE (Peregrine and Ember 327). The Miller diet featured hickory nuts, goosefoot, maygrass, deer, turtles, fish, and shellfish (328-9). Miller peoples were part of the Hopewellian exchange. Many of the ceramics interred at Pinson were imported from throughout the southeast, while some of the Pinson stone artifacts came from as far away as Ohio (328, 333).

Pinson contains possibly 30 mounds, including five platform mounds. Unlike later Mississippian mounds, these early mounds have no conclusive evidence of buildings on their surface (328). Only three of the mounds were burial mounds; one of these being the Twin Mounds (Mainfort and Kwas). Few people are believed to have lived at the site; instead, it was a ceremonial center for the region (Peregrine and Ember 333).

Saul's Mound, Pinson Mound #9

At 72 feet tall, Saul's Mound, or Mound 9, is the second-tallest mound in the United States. Currently by trees and foliage, the mound is actually rectangular, with the corners corresponding to the four cardinal directions.

The park's museum is quite large and resembles a mound on the outside with turf-covered earth shored on its side. I can't help but think this architecture is genius and must help with their heating and air conditioning bills. They have an extensive collection of pottery, lithic tools, a dugout canoe, and other artifacts. The outside of the museum is covered with yucca plants, which seems incongruous, but as I found out, Yucca filamentosa is actually common throughout the south, growing as far east as Virginia.

As we drove away, we passed the amusing site of a flock of wild turkeys foraging on a mound, which lifted some of the creepiness of the site.

back entrance of the museum, covered in yucca plants

Mainfort, Robert C., Jr. and Mary L. Kwas. "Pinson Mounds State Archaeological Park." Tennessee Encyclopedia. 1 Jan 2010.
Peregrine, Peter Neal and Melvin Ember. Encyclopedia of Prehistory: North America, Volume 6. New Haven, CT: Human Relations Area Files, Inc., 2001.

Old Stone Fort, Tennessee

2011-09-30T12:38:00.000-06:00

Scenery and local residents of the Old Stone Fort, TN

Built two thousand years ago by Middle Woodland era peoples, the so-called Old Stone Fort is a series of embankments near the forks of the Duck and Little Duck Rivers. The rivers and embankments encompass 52 acres. No evidence of military or defensive action exist; the "Fort" designation was provided by early European-American settlers (Potter 252).

I made the classic move; I skimmed the signage, then hit the trail, wondering, "Where's the stone fort?" After circling through the woods, and running into the same pack of deer over and over, I finally circled back and realized that the low mounds at the entrance of the park were the "stone fort." Originally, three sections of wall made of rocks and earth encircled the area. They were once 4-6 feet tall (Faulkner); however, time has worn down the walls and soil has completely covered the rocks. The entrance way is marked by two taller "pedestal mounds" (Faulkner). This site, occupied for thirteen generations, beginning in the Hopewell Era, is believed to be a ceremonial site (Potter 252), and five Hopewell settlements were were located nearby. No burials have been found on the site, so the "Fort" is thought to be an ancient astronomical observatory (Faulkner).

Remnants of earth-covered walls at the fort's southern entrance

The two rivers have dramatic falls and are lined with stone. Remnants of 19th century grist mills can be seen. The flowered meadows, the parklike forests, and the rushing rivers are gorgeous. I want to live here. If there's any land that resembles this area available in Oklahoma, let me know!

The museum, when it finally opened, was mainly filled with maps and lithic tools. The park hosts annual flint knapping gatherings. The park also has camping, picnicking, playgrounds, hiking trails, and bathrooms, which house exciting and interactive living spider exhibits.

Faulkner, Charles F. "Old Stone Fort State Archaeological Park." The Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture 2.0. 23 Feb 2011.
Potter, Susanna Henighan. Moon Handbooks: Tennessee. Berkeley, CA: Avalon Travel Publishing, 2009.

Kituwah, North Carolina

2011-09-26T11:53:00.003-06:00

Kituwah, also spelled ᎩᏚᏩ and Giduwa, the mother mound of the Cherokee, was easily the most active mound site we visited. At only five feet tall, the mound not easy to locate, but the Eastern Band Cherokee posted signs marking the entrance.
Several times we've asked locals for directions to mounds, who came up blank—only to discover they lived within a mile of the mound. Seeing how many signs were up and how many activities happened at the mound, I find it amazing how a neighbor down the street had never heard of Kituwah.

The mound, located near a fork in the Tuckasegee River, contains the sacred, eternal fire (Pluralism). Kituwah is the location where God gave the sacred fire and laws to the Cherokee people (Curry). The site was a village that was razed by British soldiers in the late 18th century. The Cherokees lost the mound in a land cession treaty with the United States in 1823. In 1996, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians successfully purchased the mound and surrounding lands. In a ceremony in 1998, Cherokee children began rebuilding the mound by adding a small patch of red dirt (Pluralism).

Stickball pole next to the mound

Archaeologists believe that Kituwah has been occupied for 10,000 years, and at one point 200 people lived on the site (Pluralism). Noninvasive archaeological studies, using a gradiometer which measures magnetic fields, reveals numerous hearth sites within the mound, including a large central hearth, around which a ceremonial building was rebuilt every 20 years since the 15th century. Test holes have revealed 15 burials on the land, with the possibility of many more. The Eastern Band promises no major excavations will disrupt the mound in the future (Pluralism).

Cherokee children's gardens near the ceremonial grounds

A local Cherokee man told us that if we wanted to climb the mound to approach from the east, but we didn't feel that it would be appropriate for us to walk on it. Our friends from Squirrel Ridge Ceremonial Ground danced near the mound, and the Kituwah Ceremonial Ground planned to play stickball and have a feast at the mound site that very afternoon. The tribe sponsors youth retreats at the mound site.

Some frankly shocking proposals for development of the mound site have been put forward, even from members of the tribal council (Pluralism). Currently there's a Cherokee children's garden and a substantial amount of corn cultivation, which seems appropriate use of the land. The tribe and local community successfully fought the construction of a major Duke Energy power substation in the area, so hopefully they will be successful in keeping the sacred site intact in the future.

Curry, Andrew. "American Scene: Cherokee Holy of Holies: Abstract." Archaeology. Vol. 55, No. 5, Sept-Oct 2000.
"Kituwah Mound, NC (Eastern Cherokee)." The Pluralism Project at Harvard University. 2004.

Chief Vann House, Chatsworth, Georgia

2011-09-25T13:41:00.001-06:00

James Vann's house in Spring Place near Chatsworth, Georgia

Fast forwarding a few centuries, we visited James Vann's house, a 2-1/2 story brick house built in 1804. Known as "Chief Crazy James Vann," he was more of an economic leader, but was involved in Cherokee politics and was influential among Upper Cherokee towns at the dawn of the 19th century. He's definitely not a moral leader. He had nine wives and owned his own whiskey distillery. Historians have used phrases such as "one of the most intemperate characters in the nation," "a thoroughly godless man," "homicidal," or "when drunk... became as deadly as water moccasin" (McLoughlin 40). He invited Moravians to built a mission school on his land, yet they still called him "a long-standing enemy of Christ" (40). After he was shot to death in a tavern in 1809, a makeshift wooden marker was placed on his

portrait of "Rich Joe" Vann in dining room

grave reading: "Here lies the body James Vann/He killed many a white man./At last by a rifle ball he fell,/And devils dragged him off to hell" (McLoughlin 72). And he's my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather.

The house is extraordinarily well-built and was the first brick home in the Cherokee Nation. The exterior walls are 18" thick. The Georgia Guard seized the house from the Vann family in the 1830s during Cherokee Removal. Several individuals lived in the house until 1920 when it was sold to the Georgia Historical Commission. The house was restored in 1958, which included repainting the interior to its original fairly wild color scheme of sage green, sea blue, warm yellow, and Georgia clay red.

The museum, Robert E. Chambers Interpretive Center, contains a wealth of artifacts and information about the Cherokee Nation, the Vann family, and Cherokee forced removal, known as the Trail of Tears. The site also houses several historical Cherokee log cabins, salvaged from other locations in the Old Cherokee Nation.

"Chief Vann House Historic Site." Georgia Department of Natural Resources: State Parks and Historic Sites. 2011.
McLoughlin, William Gerald. The Cherokee Ghost Dance: Essays on the Southeastern Indians, 1789-1861. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1984.

Etowah Mounds, Georgia

2011-09-23T10:19:00.001-06:00


Gimme That Old Time Religion, based on the Rogan Plates, 1995

The Etowah Mounds, near Cartersville, Georgia, was built between 800 and 1550 CE by ancestral members of the Muscogee Creek Confederacy (NPS). Situated near the Etowah River, the site housed several thousand people at its peak, around 1300 CE, making it one of the largest Middle Mississippian communities in the southeast (NPS). It is also the most intact of these sites (GDNR).

The entire site had seven mounds; six of which remain today (GDNR). The largest is Mound A, second Mound B, and third Mound C, all of which are platform mounds — that is, they have flat surfaces. Mound C, the burial mound, was the only mound to be excavated. The signage at the mound site today actually mentions NAGPRA and repatriation efforts.

This is the home of the famous Rogan Plates, a pair copper repoussé plates of a dancing bird-human, wielding a mace and a severed head, and dating from 1300 CE. They are easily some of the most famous of Mississippian artworks. Some believe these plates were manufactured at Cahokia, and similar plates with slight stylistic variations imply these plates were then copied by local Etowah artists.

Female and male marble effigy statues

Etowah also boasts a pair of painted marble statues, depicting a woman and a man—22 and 24 inches high respectively—thought to be carved between 1250 and 1375 CE. Carved in the round, these effigies shed light on clothing and hairstyles of Etowah society.

A large school group was picnicking at the museum when we arrived. The museum displays a wide range of artifacts, including the marble statues, copper plats, mica ornaments, pottery, bone and shell beads, stone pipes, and even woven cloth fragments.

Wattle-and-daub hut with a thatch roof

Outside are the remains of a defensive ditch that surrounded three sides of the community — the river runs along the fourth side. There's an impressive reconstruction of a wattle-and-daub hut, typical of the time. It was constructed in the traditional way with poles bent over each other to form the rectangular frame of the house, with green cane woven in and out of the poles and covered with clay daub to form the walls. These are capped with conical thatch roof.

Mound B, as viewed from Mound A

The grounds have a small garden and signage mentions that the museum is dedicated to eventually replacing the turf grass with native plants. Some plants have signage with Muscogee Creeks plant names. Mounds A and B have stairways leading up, and Mound A towers at 63-feet. The river is gorgeous, and nature walks leads out towards it, for those who brought bug spray.

Georgia Department of Natural Resources. "Etowah Indian Mounds Historic Site." State Parks and Historic Sites. 2011.
National Park Service, US Department of the Interior. "Notice of Inventory Completion for Native American Human Remains and Associated Funerary Objects in the Possession of the Michael C. Carlos Museum, Emory University, Atlanta, GA." Federal Register. 7 Dec 2001 (Volume 66, Number 236): 63557-63558.

Moundville, Alabama

2011-09-20T07:43:00.005-06:00

Jones Museum, Moundville, Alabama

You definitely need an entire day to take in Moundville. Adjacent to the gorgeous Black Warrior River, the 172-acre park has 32 platform mounds, museum, gift shop, coffee shop, campgrounds, natural walk, reconstructed village, visitor's center, and even conference room.

This southern Mississippian settlement is second only to Cahokia in size. Moundville was built and occupied between 1000 to 1450 CE (MAP). Mound A sits in the center of a large rectangular plaza. This was clearly a stratified society but we had to laugh at all the various mound museums' signage which repeatedly emphasis the "elite" nature of the societies.

Architectural details

The recently renovated Jones Museum was first built in 1939 and combines art deco and Mississippian architectural elements in a way that I hope enjoys a revival and grows in popularity. Wouldn't it be cool if the town of Moundville, Alabama decided all new construction should be in the Neo-Mississippian Deco style? The skull and bone friezes comes from ceramics found at Moundville, while the wooden columns carved as birds resemble intact wood carvings pulled up from muck pounds in Florida.

The museums have extraordinary relics on display, many on loan from the National Museum of the American Indian. It's good to see the artifacts in the location in which they were created.

When I first saw a Mississippian feline pipe at the National Museum of Natural History's collections, I thought it had been misplaced from the Asian collections. The Florida panther, a subspecies of Puma concolor once lived in Alabama, and bobcats, Lynx rufus, are still common in the state.

The displays are flashy and attractive but far too speculative for my tastes. For instance the wall text states that Moundville religion was obsessed on death and the afterlife. Images of uktena and hand-in-eyes are presented as "death" imagery. If people studied contemporary American culture exclusively based on digging up cemeteries — the burials with fine clothes and jewelry, in elaborate coffins, and the extensive engraved stone sculptures marking the graves — they might think Americans were completely devoted to a death cult as well.

The mannikins and people portrayed in wall murals simply did not look like Indians. I thought the image of the bride being carrying on a litter to her husband was a bit over the top, but then discovered the Theodore De Bry engraving, A Bride Is Carried to the Chief, published in 1591, which no doubt inspired the scene.

Left: display in the Ford Museum; right: A Bride Is Carried to the Chief, Theodore De Bry, published in Frankfurt, 1591

Nonetheless, the museum had gorgeous pieces. I kept look at the labels to see if they were replicas, but they weren't. From October 5th to 8th Moundville with host its annual Native American Festival, featuring artists, performers, and educators and sounds like a major event. I'm curious to know which artists participate. The park also hosts gatherings of flintknappers.

The people thought to have built Moundville are Upper Creeks belonging to the tribal town Tuskegee, called Napochi in one early chronicle, who were Upper Creeks, members of the Muscogee Creek confederacy.

Mounds at Moundville, Alabama

Reconstructed Mississippian house on the top of a platform mound, Moundville, Alabama

"Ancient Site." Moundville Archaeological Park. 2011.
"Carnivores." Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources: Outdoor Alabama. 2008.

For more information about our trip, please visit Exploring the Ancient Southeastern Woodlands.

Nanih Waiya Cave and Mound, Mississippi

2011-09-18T21:29:00.005-06:00


Nanih Waiya Cave, Louisville, Mississippi

"Nanih Waiya" means "Leaning Hill" in Choctaw and is the Inholitopa iski, Mother Mound, of the Choctaw people. Origin stories alternately say the Choctaw people emerged to the surface of the earth through the cave or that in their migrations, Nanih Waiya is where they settled down permanently (Carleton).

Nanih Waiya Cave is in a dark, secluded area off paved roads. We couldn't help but wonder if the cave's hill was also a mound. The cave itself is nestled into roots of several trees and looks like a burrow that leads both to the right and left. The giant hill is capped by oak trees with a bare summit that someone clears and sweeps up. A slow moving creek, filled with bald cypress trees, runs along the base of the hill. Paths lead into the thick woods, which are filled with noise and movement of birds, lizards, and other animals. The aromatic earth smells and bird calls bring the area to life. In the background was a low hum that turned out to be from a factory located near the mound. Despite the picnic tables scattered on one face of the hill, this site felt very intimate and ancient.

Creek west of the cave site, Louisville, MS

The mound is located southwest, on Nanih Waiya Road near Neshoba, Mississippi. It was enclosed by a fence and the gate was locked but thankfully some intrepid soul with wirecutters had visited before us, so easy enough to hop through and circumnavigate the impressive 215-foot long mound. It is thought to have been built between 100 BCE and 400 CE (Myers), based on artifacts recovered from the surface of the mound, since it has never been excavated. While the platform mound is remarkably well preserved, surroundings structure and mounds have been destroyed by years of plowing.

Choctaws made pilgrimages to the mound and left offerings on its surface for centuries. Tribal councils historically met on top of the mound (Carleton).

Nanih Waiya Mound, Neshoba, Mississippi

The mound was ceded to the United States in the 1830 Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek. Both the cave and the mound became a Mississippi state park but due to budget constraints the state agreed to return the lands to the Mississippi Choctaw in 2008. Over a thousand tribal members showed up to celebrate the return of Nanih Waiya. Miko Beasley Denson declared that every second weekend of August is an official tribal holiday, Nanih Waiya Day, which is celebrated at the cave site with feasting and dancing (Myers). That might explain why the cave site felt so much more alive to us than the mound. However, the tribe is going has plans to redevelop the state park, including the mound, as a tribal heritage park, open to the public and with their own signage and interpretation.

Traveling through the lands surrounding the Choctaw Reservation, Linda observed that the scenery looked like Norma Howard's paintings, even down to the cotton fields.

Carleton, Ken. "Nanih Waiya: The Mother Mound of the Choctaw." NPS Archeology Program: The Delta Endangered. Vol 1, 1: Spring 1996.
Myers, Debbie Burt. "Nanih Waiya Day Includes Traditional Choctaw Dance, Food." Neshoba Democrat. 18 September 2011.
"Nanih Waiya Mound." Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians. 2011.

For more information about our trip, please visit Exploring the Ancient Southeastern Woodlands.

Grand Village of the Natchez and Emerald Mound, Mississippi

2011-09-14T07:59:00.004-06:00

The Great Sun's Mound

The Grand Village of the Natchez is within the city of Natchez, Mississippi, since the town probably built up around the Natchez village. Natchez are considered to be the last Mississippian peoples — retaining their social structure and ceremonial cycle well past European contact.

The Natchez peace chief is the Great Sun, who traditionally was carried in a litter and whose feet never touched the ground. The title of the war chief was the Tattooed Serpent. The Grand Village is dominated by the Great Sun's Mound, an immense platform mound, and the Temple Mound, aligned 30 degrees off from the cardinal points.

Pecan, Carya illinoinensis

The site feels incredibly immense. The visitor's center is well staffed and has an excellent selection of baskets on display and for sale. Gardeners have created plant labels and a nature walk. Next to the replica Natchez house, a claustrophobic but tall conical structure, workers planted a small garden, with an overpowering aroma. The small native grapevines are swamped by sea of wild onions!

In the future, I'll never think of mounds without thinking of pecan trees. Their heights were dizzying, and many of the trees might have been alive when the village was still active. It's interesting to consider that while the thick, green grass is such a prominent feature of mounds today, all turf grasses were imported from Europe. Ground covers such as sorrel, purslane, other spreading plants, or bunch grasses are indigenous, but many mounds and plazas were carefully capped with color clay or sprinkled with fine river sand.

Alligator basket by Lorena Langley (Coushatta)

This Grand Village was the Natchez ceremonial center from 1682 to 1729. After warring with the French in 1730, the Natchez ultimately moved to Indian Territory and joined the Muscogee Creek Nation and the Cherokee Nation. Today Natchez people are enrolled in these tribes but have their own organization. Hutke Fields, the Natchez peace chief, maintains his own blog.

For more information about our trip, please visit Exploring the Ancient Southeastern Woodlands.

Emerald Mound

A montage attempting to convey the immense size of Emerald Mound, Adams, MS

Located only twelve miles from the Grand Village is Emerald Mound. This pentagon-shaped platform mound is almost eight acres large and is the second-largest precontact earthwork in the United States. The pentagonal primary mound has two mounds on its surface. It was once surrounded by a protective ditch and six other mounds, which have since been plowed over. Mississippian people, mostly likely Natchez, settled the area at least by 900 CE. Construction on the mound is thought to have begun around 1250, and the mound was used by Natchez well into historical times in the 19th century.

What I haven't read anywhere about the mounds is how much living tribes visit and use the mounds. Natchez traditionalists have traveled from Oklahoma and have held dances on top of Emerald Mound. Despite removal, tribes still maintain relationships to their sacred sites today.

Winterville Mounds, MS and Poverty Point, LA

2011-09-12T22:40:00.005-06:00

Mound A, Winterville Site, Mississippi

Today, things became more unpredictable. Linda picked cotton for the first time, and we naïvely followed the GPS through a burning field of sugarcane, past semi-suicidal dogs, to a gravel road, to a rutted dirt road in the thick woods for miles until reaching an extensively (mostly) abandoned settlement of shipping containers and trailers on metal slits straight out of the worst 70s horror movie, before beating a hasty retreat.

Winterville Mounds

We visited Winterville Mounds north of Greenville, Mississippi. Until last week, I'd never even heard of the site, but at one time it boasted 23 mounds around two grand plazas, surrounded by settlements of farmers. Built around 1000 CE by ancestral Choctaw and Chickasaw peoples or possibly relatives of the Natchez, Winterville Mounds has a protected park and museum with twelve of the mounds, most of which have never by excavated (MDAH).

Winterville Museum

Archaeologists believe that only elite families lived in the mound complex, many of which form an oval around Mound A, which towers at 55 feet even today (MDAH). Another mound, almost as tall, is completely surrounded by woods. A major fire burned the complex in the late 14th century, and it was abandoned by the 1450s (MDAH).

I love the architecture of the museum, with earth shored up around the sides. This construction would make so much sense in the windy Plains, where the earth would stabilize interior temperatures. On display is a fantastic photo of cows saving their lives from the 1927 flood by standing on the top of Mound A. This brings the possibility to mind that one reason for moundbuilding might not be status but the practical purpose of preserving temples and sacred items from flooding, which would have been more prevalent during the Mississippian era, with its heavy rainfalls and lack of levees and dams.

Having seen thousands of Mississippian artifacts in museum collections, it's exciting to see the environments these art works and tools originated — lush with oak trees, bald cypress, sumac, frogs, butterflies, dragonflies, and turtles. One word of warning, if you visit this site, get bug spray or boots because the little black ants sting like crazy.

"Winterville Mounds." Mississippi Department of Archives and History. Web.

Poverty Point

The Bird Mound or Mound A, Poverty Point

Much much ancient than the Mississippian mounds, Poverty Point has arrowheads dating back over 10,000 years. The complex earthworks date back to 1600 BCE. Mound A, an effigy mound that once formed the shape of a bird, was the largest mound in the Americas when it was built in 1400 BCE. Even today it still has over 90,000 tons of dirt. There's no evidence of structures on the top of the mound (PPSHS).

Mound B was a platform mound that has been mostly excavated. There's no evidence of buildings on the mound.

Mound B, once a platform mound

The site is defined by six concentric semi-circles of earthwork embankments, that were once five feet high, that enclosed a central plaza and face the Bird Mound. It's been suggested that houses sat on top of these ridges. This elaborately planned architecture predates agriculture. The Poverty Point people were hunter-gatherers, and they built on the site between 1600—700 BCE.

Thousands of variously-shaped clay blobs have been found at the site. Called Poverty Point Objects or PPOs, they were heated and put into cooking pots. I don't think they'd be difficult to make; it'd be interesting to try to cook stew with them.

"Driving Guide." Poverty Point State Historical Site. Epps, LA.

Spiro Mounds, Oklahoma

2011-09-11T23:11:00.007-06:00

Spiro Mounds in LeFlore County in the Choctaw Nation was our first stop today. The weather was perfect, the clouds rolled in, and butterflies and ladybugs dotted the gorgeous landscape. Lind and I were happy to have Nuket Duman and Joseph Erb join us in hiking through the site. We’re incredibly glad that the site was open on a Sunday and that Dennis Peterson answered my battery of questions.

Spiro Mounds was a Mississippian ceremonial site that flourished from 850 to 1450 CE but was occupied before and after. This ceremonial center containing at least twelve was built by the ancestors of the Caddos and Wichitas, especially the Kitsai, who are today enrolled in the Caddo and Wichita tribes (Watkins 155-6). At its height, its population was about 7,500 with more outlying settlements.

Replica of a incised lightning whelk shell dipper

Spiro never had major defensive structures and no evidence of major warfare. It was the major western center in the Mississippian world and was linked to a continental trade routes. Olivella shells from the California coast have been found there. It is notable for having the widest range of shell carvings, dippers and gorgets carved from Busycon contrarium or the lightning whelk shell imported from the Gulf Coast and Florida. Designs are highly elaborate and many are not repeated elsewhere. The dippers were used for serving ceremonial medicine, such as black drink. The gorgets were worn around the neck. The distinct iconography, which forms a visual language used through the southeast, has been widely debated. I would love someday to see an intertribal gathering in which oral historians share their interpretations of the imagery to compare to the interpretations from the archaeological community.


Craig Mounds

Beginning in the 1830s, Choctaw freedmen settled and farmed around the site, and one family in particular tried to protect them mounds. Unfortunately family members leased the land to the Pocola Mining Company in 1933. Those pothunters pillaged the mounds, selling items and burning others. They even burned human remains they unearthed from their graves. The State of Oklahoma finally passed legislation to protect the site in 1935, and in 1936 the University of Oklahoma and WPA workers started a scientific excavation (Peterson).

We saw pokeberries, pecans, acorns, yellow wood sorrel, and other edible plants. Reading about the Spiroan diet of venison, corn, hickory nuts, chestnuts, persimmons, and wild grapes makes me really wish for a Southeastern Native Foods Festival.

Joseph, Nuket, and Linda under a venerable oak tree

As Oklahoma’s only archaeological site open to the public and one of the richest archaeological sites in the US, the museum is grossly underfunded. It seems that Oklahoma would want to promote tourism to the site, and the first step would be putting up signs on the roads leading to the site. Seriously, even spray painted wooden planks would be of great assistance to travelers!

Peterson, Dennis. “Spiro Mounds.” Oklahoma Historical Society. Web.
Watkins, Joe. “Artefactual Awareness: Spiro Mounds, Grave Goods and Politics.” Fforde, Cressida, Jane Hulbert, and Paul Tumbull. The Dead and their Possessions: Repatriation in Principle, Policy, and Practice. London: Routledge, 2002.

Brother Juniper Helps Out at Spiro, America Meredith, acrylic on canvas, 5"x5", 2004

Exploring the Ancient Southeastern Woodlands

2011-09-06T12:48:00.002-06:00

Mound B at Moundville, Hale County, AL, photo: Jeffrey Reed

For two weeks, Choctaw-Hopi artist and professor Linda Lomahaftewa and I will travel through the south to visit archaeological sites in Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee. Our goal is to further our research of the Mississippian and earlier indigenous cultures and the iconography of the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex. We will both visit the mother mounds of our respective tribes for the first time. Our hope is to better understand connections between ancient peoples and contemporary tribes, intertribal relations, and the way oral histories connect to the land.

To contribute (even a dollar is gratefully appreciated!), visit our Kickstarter project page.

Some locations we will visit include:

Spiro Mounds, OK
Poverty Point, Pioneer, LA
Grand Village of the Natchez, Natchez, MS
Emerald Mound, Adams, Mississippi
Nanih Waiya, Winston County, Mississippi
Moundville Archaeological Site, Tuscaloosa, AL
Etowah Mounds, Cartersville, Bartow County, GA
New Echota, Calhoun, GA
Southeastern Tribes Festival, Cherokee, NC
Museum of the Cherokee Indian, Cherokee, NC
Kituwah Mound, Bryson City, NC
Nikwasi Mound, Franklin, NC
Frank McClung Museum, Knoxville, TN
Old Stone Fort, Coffee County, TN
Pinson Mounds, Madison County, TN
Chucalissa Indian Village, Memphis, TN
Hampson Museum, Wilson, AR
Parkin Mound, Parkin, AR
Toltec Mounds Archeological State Park, Scott AR

We will extensively photograph these sites and will place some of our photographs into the public domain to be used by teachers and artists. During the trip, we'll sketch sites and post blogs. Upon our return to Santa Fe, we'll create new series of works based on the journey, which will be exhibited in the spring of 2012 at Ahalenia Studios in Santa Fe. We will give presentations of our travels in both New Mexico and Oklahoma, with the goal of sharing information and creating dialogue with artists, writers, storytellers, and researchers from a wide range of tribes.

Bibliography

Bartram, William. William Bartram on the Southeastern Indians. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002.
Chapman, Jefferson. Tellico Archaeology: Twelve Thousand Years of Native American History. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985.
Dickens, Roy S. Cherokee Prehistory, The Pisgah Phase in the Appalachian Summit Region. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1976.
Fundaburk, Emma Lila. Sun Circles and Human Hands: The Southeastern Indians Art and Industries. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2001.
Gouge, Earnest. Totkv Mocvse/New Fire: Creek Folktales. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004.
Power, Susan C. Early Art of the Southeastern Indians: Feathered Serpents and Winged Beings. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004.
Reilly, F. Kent and James Garber, eds. Ancient Objects and Sacred Realms. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004.
Townsend, Richard F., ed. Hero, Hawk, and Open Hand: Hero, Hawk, and Open Hand: American Indian Art of the Ancient Midwest and South. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004.
Welch, Paul D. Moundville's Economy. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991.

2011 SWAIA Indian Market

2011-08-23T12:43:00.002-06:00

First time market goer

Art can be distinguished from design, propaganda, decoration, or advertising by its polyvalence — it works simultaneously on many different levels. As an art event, Santa Fe Indian Market is certainly polyvalent. People from all perspectives encounter a dizzying range of art forms and walk away with a myriad of different conclusions. Unfortunately as an SWAIA artist I had to work or attempt to sleep, so missed out on some of the amazing extracurricular activities but got to check out Friday’s art openings, when it feels like the entire town has come alive.

Best of show: ash splint basket by Jeremy Frey (Passamaquoddy)

Passamaquoddy artist Jeremy Frey’s brown ash basket was fantastic and subverted many narratives about the direction Native art is heading. The basket is a boldly graphic, abstract, nonobjective sculpture. The sweeping lines of its form are broken up by the fine porcupine points—the delicate curls of brown ash splints that embellish the basket’s exterior—creating an almost wavelike effect. The shadow play of their repeating forms call to mind the work of minimalist sculptor Donald Judd. The piece terminates with a lid capped by a circular splint ring featuring a dynamic pattern of chevrons. The pure aesthetics of the piece is complemented by its materiality — it’s constructed from Fraxinus nigra, also commonly known as the black ash, a tree used by Northeastern Woodland basket makers for centuries that is currently under dire threat of extinction from the invasive emerald ash borer. Harvesting and processing the ash splints is usually more labor intensive and takes longer than the actual weaving. Word of mouth says that Jeremy Frey is only the second artist to ever win Best of Show at both the Heard Market and SWAIA’s Indian Market in the same year, and this appears to be the first basket to ever win Best of Show. Baskets only gained their own classification last year.

Classification winners are as follows.

Best of sculpture: ceramic sculpture by Marcus Wall (Jemez)

Jeremy Frey (Passamaquoddy), basketry
Joyce Growing Thunder (Sioux-Assiniboine), beadwork and quillwork
Jamie Okuma (Luiseño-Shoshone-Bannock) for diverse arts
Chris Pruit (Laguna Pueblo) for jewelry
Bennie Klain (Navajo) for moving images
Dyani Reynolds-Whitehawk (Rosebud Lakota) for painter, drawings, graphics, and photography
Jody Naranjo (Santa Clara Pueblo) for pottery
Marcus Wall (Jemez Pueblo) for sculpture
Lynda Teller-Pete (Navajo) for textiles
Arthur Holmes Jr. (Hopi) for wooden carvings
Valerie Calabaza (Santo Domingo Pueblo) for youth.

Overall most of the artists I talked to did modestly well. The turnout was great with no major breaks of visitors, which is a huge relief after last year when the market felt like a ghost town after 10am Saturday. Many artists reported better sales on Sunday than Saturday. Perhaps the negative ions generated by all the rainfall contributed to an overall cheerfulness, but this market actually felt fun. It was great to visit with everyone and meet new curators and artists. I’m humbled by the generosity of my fellow artists. Innumerable academic papers study the sales at Indian Market; how many people write about the very active bartering, as well as sharing and gift giving?

In a Nutshell

2011-07-25T15:08:00.003-06:00

Why is the false dichotomy between so-called "traditional" and "contemporary" art so insidious? "Contemporary art" is art from a certain time period, usually defined as being after World War II to the present day (1945–2011); it's a chronological term. "Traditional" refers to culture of one's tribe, whether religious, artistic, social, or material. Pairing these terms inaccurately places a chronological framework on tribal culture. The implication is "contemporary," usually exemplified by Western art media, materials, and messages, is "new." Therefore, "traditional," as exemplified by tribally-specific indigenous art practices, must be "old." I've watched art forms specific to my cultural region, the Southeastern Woodlands, increase in practitioners and scope within my own lifetime. There are more Cherokee ceramic artists and shell carvers today than there were thirty years ago. Tribal arts are contemporary, and our traditions will continue well into the future.

“Right to Difference”—Museo del Barro, Paraguay

2011-07-20T20:23:00.009-06:00


Temporary exhibit, photo by Alessandra Celauro

Occasionally art writers voice a nostalgia for the 1950s, the height of the Modern Era, when artists belonged to discreet art movements, galleries and museums were finite, and art critics were major power brokers who articulated art theory and cleaved good from bad art. Today’s post-modern art world is bewildering in its diversity, accelerated by the global reach of the Internet. Theoretically, at least, artists from all backgrounds, genders, races, ages, and ethnicities can claim a piece of the Post-Modern art world.

So how to make sense of the tens—or hundreds—of thousands of artists active in the world, especially with no powerful art critics to arbitrate, and with the illusion of linear progression shattered? Major art fairs, usually biennials, are experiencing unprecedented growth. Museums and other institution operate as gatekeepers. Curators, art historians, and writers advocate for their chosen artists and art communities.

While artists might try to resist labels, auction houses, appraisers, museums, curators, and others label art to make sense of and to ascribe value to it. Borderlines are drawn. The mainstream art world remains staunchly hierarchical and Eurocentric. Even as anthropology and other human sciences try to overcome their historical Western biases and institutional racism, the mainstream art world lags behind. Non-Western artists are still labeled as “Ethnic.” “Tribal art” or “indigenous art” is seen as being in opposition to “contemporary art,” as if tribes and indigenous peoples live outside of the sphere of time — dwelling in the unchanging ethnographic present instead of participating in the 21st century. Even NMAI, theoretically "our" museum, labels its historic collections as "Ethnographic."

Yet some few institutions reject Western art hierarchies and divisions. The Museo del Barro in Asunción, Paraguay is such a place. In fact, in 1989, the United Nations recognized the museum for “as an institution organized around non-Western principles and subjects” (Legrás 188). Chilean art critic and curator, Justo Pastor Mellado wrote about the museum for the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, headquartered in Karlsruhe, Germany, and the ZKM later featured the museum as their "MoCA of the Month" (ZKM).

What’s so special about the Museo del Barro? It crosses those boundaries entrenched in the mainstream art world. In the words of Justo Pastor Mellado, an art critic and curator from Santiago, the Museo del Barro features “a collection where frontiers between indigenous art, popular art and contemporary art had never been established” (Mellado 310) and this fluid approach to curating reflects an “expanded adaptability, without trauma” (Mellado 312). The Museo del Barro is a conscious effort to expose very different communities to each others’ art without comprising or disguising the artists’ personal visions or cultural backgrounds.

In truth, the Museo del Barro is several institutions combined in one and housed together in the capital city of Paraguay. Museo del Barro features pre-Columbian, historical, and contemporary indigenous art, alongside contemporary ceramic art, and contemporary conceptual art. The art collections from various communities are represented in sufficiently large numbers as to avoid tokenism.

Paraguay

The Paraguayan government conducted a census of its indigenous population in 2002 and concluded that only 1.7% of its population is indigenous (CIA), which, with high birth rates, is estimated to be 100,000 people today. To qualify as being indigenous in Latin American requires one to have little to no European blood, live in an indigenous community, and/or speak one’s tribal language. Criteria are much stricter than in the United States. Meanwhile, a full 95% of the Paraguayan population is mestizo—that is, of mixed Indian and Spanish descent—though they typically don’t identify as being indigenous (CIA). Guaraní is the national language along with Spanish.

Paraguay, a landlocked country in the center of South America, was ruled by the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner from 1954 to 1989 (Fraser). Under the dictatorship, opportunities for artists were limited, but Grupo Arte Nuevo, founded by artist Olga Binder in 1953 created modern art exhibits in the streets or shop windows of Asunción (Fraser). Paraguayan modern artists drew upon indigenous art forms, such as petroglyphs, as inspiration for abstract art (Fraser). During the dictatorship, the painter, author, and architect, Carlos Colombino challenged authority through coded messages in his art (Fraser). It was “artists, rather than writers, [who] played a leading role in the democratic consolidation after the Stroessner dictatorship" (Legrás 187). Mellado writes that, "Museums are the ideological cement from which nations are built" (Mellado 209), and in Paraguay’s case, this is absolutely true.

Founding the museum

The Museo del Barro came together from various grassroots efforts by artists and writers in the 1970s. In 1972, Olga Blinder and Carlos Colombino created a circulating collection of 2-D art that they exhibited in various schools and public spaces. Their collection expanded to include sculpture and installations and needed a permanent home (ZKM). Meanwhile Colombino also collaborated with Ticio Escobar, anthropologist, art critic, and dealer, and Ysanne Gayet, a British activist on projects in the city of San Lorenzo.

display of masks, photo by Michele Molinari

Construction began in 1979 on a museum building, which was completed and open for exhibits in 1984 (ZKM). Carlos Colombino, Osvaldo Salerno, and Ysanna Gayet founded the Museo del Barro in 1980, with a collection of 800 ceramic works, including prehistoric Guaraní pottery. In 1987 the Centro de Artes Visuales was founded, joining the Museo del Barro. A tornado damaged the building in 1993, and the next two and half years were spent raising funds and rebuilding. In the reconstruction, the separated galleries were connected, and when the museum opened in 1995, new exhibits of indigenous art, curated by Ticio Escobar, were on display (ZKM)

The museum remains active in the international art world. In 2007, Escobar and Mellado submitted "Complejo Museo del Barro/Obra institucional" [The Barro Museum Complex/Institutional Work] to the Bienal de Valencia, Spain. "Our purpose," writes Mellado, "was to demonstrate the existence of ethnical, formal, and political resistance, in a minoritarian curatorial practice" (Mellado 312).

Ticio Escobar

Ticio Escobar, Paraguay’s leading art critic (Fraser), has played a major role in the development of the museum. Author of Una Interpretación de las Artes Visuals en el Paraguay, Escobar is a curator, art writer, anthropologist, and lawyer, who has advocated for the rights of Paraguayan Indians, many of whom live in dire poverty without rights to their land or access to even clean drinking water, much less electricity, education, or healthcare.

Escobar has definite views about “the confused site of art criticism” (Escobar 2). “The art critic confronts the work of art and ventures a reading that, in the best of cases, does nothing more than incite other readings and suggest other possible points of entry,” he writes and then follows with a viable course of action for today’s art critic. “Faced with the urgent presence of the work of art the critic erects his own reading: for such a task his point of view is necessary. He does not set out to decipher the work of art, to describe it objectively, or judge it; instead his gaze confronts it, intersects it, and seeks to shake it, frame it, and turn it into the focal point of other gazes” (Escobar 2).

The Ishir

Most interesting is Escobar's 2007 book, The Curse of Nemur: The Art, Myth, and Ritual of the Ishir, as well the journey that led to the book.

In 1983, Ticio Escobar and Osvaldo Salerno, director of the Museo del Barro, attended the São Paulo Bienale. After seeing the exhibition, "Arte Plúmeria do Brasil" (Feathers Arts of Brazil), the two men were inspired to curate a similar exhibition showcasing indigenous Paraguayan featherwork. For two years they collected the works that would form the indigenous collection of the Museo del Barro. Besides the aesthetic and artistic concerns, the show was politically motivated. In Escobar’s words, they wanted to present “the indigenous peoples not through what they lack (and they lack much, of course), but rather through what they make (which is among the best art produced in Paraguay) as a way to support their right to difference" (Escobar 262).

Over the next two years, the men collected featherwork from all 17 Paraguayan indigenous ethnic groups except the Ishir, also known as the Chamacoco. The Ishir ceremonies for which feather regalia was made had been all but wiped out by missionaries. However, one group of Ishir, the Tomáraho, had risked extinction by evading the missionaries through living in an abandoned sawmill in a remote forest (Escobar 6). They continued to hold the annual Debylyby ceremony, in which social pacts are renewed and the tribe collectively mourns (Mellado 312).

Justo Pastor Mellado cites the Debylyby ceremony as an inspiration for his curatorial theory, and he writes, “It is almost as if a myth from the Paraguayan jungle anticipated the theory of the appearance of the museum as a key institution in the construction of the Republic” (Mellado 313).

Featherwork in museum's collection, photo by Michele Moliari

The relationships the curators built with the Tomáraho band of Ishir included assisting them in moving to reserved Ishir territory at Puerto Esperanza (not without its own problems), where the Tomáraho retaught the Debylyby ceremony to members of the Ebytoso, another band of Ishar.

The years working with the Ishir are outlined in Escobar’s The Curse of Nemur, a book of art criticism informed by structuralism and post-structuralism (Escobar xvi). Escobar says that the spheres of “art, myth, and ceremony” can each be examined from the perspectives of “religion, shamantic magic, and history” as art is “the object of plurality of gazes” (Escobar 2). He examines corporal art—body painting—and featherwork, in the context of Ishir cosmology and oral history and discusses at great length Ishir color theory.

This is huge. Instead of waiting for the indigenous Paraguayans create art in Western media and exhibit in western institutions, Escobar travels to remote Ishir communities and devotes an entire volume of serious art criticism to traditional Ishir art forms. Where does this happen in the United States? Our indigenous art forms are usually dismissed in art circles as "old" or "ethnographic," as if our featherwork, beadwork, textiles, carvings, ceramics, etc. are made by the anthropologists, not the indigenous artists.

Escobar writes “to underline the value of indigenous culture and to present it not only as a site of dispossession and marginality but also as a place of creativity and ethnic self-affirmation…” This internationally known art critic devotes his energies to traditional Ishir arts because “Indigenous people are not only the most exploited and humiliated inhabitants of this country: they are also great artists and poets, creators of worldviews, inventors of alternative ways of feeling and thinking in this world (Escobar 4).

Ultimately, the museum secured five pieces of Ishir ceremonial regalia from the Debylyby, including feathered masks and textiles (ZKM), but more important were relationships forged.

Museo del Barro Collections and Mission

Currently, the museum has three main divisions, described as the “urban, peasant-popular, and indigenous” (Legrás 188), which are respectively represented by the Contemporary Art Museum (MPAC), the Museo del Barro (Clay Museum), the Indigenous Art Museum (MAI). The current directors are Osvaldo Salerno (MdB), Lia Colombino (MAI), and Carlos Colombino (CAV) (ZKM).

MPAC focuses on contemporary Latin American and specifically Paraguayan visual art, but also includes Spanish art in its collections of over 3000 items (ZKM)

The Museo del Barro has a permanent collection of over 4000 art works, including ceremonial and festival masks, retablos, ceramics, woodcarving, works in gold and silver, and ñandutí, fine colonial silver and cotton lace dating from the 18th century (ZKM). The campesino art is showcased in a downtown Asunción gallery sponsored by a local bank (Legrás 188, 195).

The Museum of Indigenous Art’s collection now includes over 2000 artworks by all 17 indigenous Paraguayan tribes (Legrás 195) and includes woodcarving, featherwork, beadwork, textiles, baskets, and masks, with 300 pre-Columbian ceramics (ZKM). According to the Paraguay Travel Guide, the pre-colonial Guaraní pottery is the most population attraction. Ramón Duarte (Guaraní) is an contemporary Native sculptor, whose zoomorphic cedar carvings form part of the collection (ZKM).

“The items were selected with the purpose of enhancing their expressive value and form quality over their ethnographic, historic and technical references, which are normally the only values to be considered by conventional museums and galleries” (ZKM). While much of the collection was gathered by anthropologists, indigenous people have also donated directly to the museum (ZKM) — a positive step towards community self-representation in the absence of tribal museums.

Additional facets of the museum are the Visual Art Center (CAV) and the Center for Research and Documentation (CDI), devoted to “ the recovery and preservation of indigenous and peasant art in Paraguay” (Legrás 188). These centers’ mission is “the gathering and diffusion of expressions of the rural and native cultures, always with the purpose of emphasizing the pluricultural nature of the country” (ZKM).

Besides producing exhibitions and publications, the museum hosts workshops, award prizes, and provides educational opportunities. Mellado says the museum receives little financial support from the Paraguayan government, so it is funded by artists and the international community (Mellado 314). A museum shop for rural craftwork was funded by the Government of Canada from 1993 to 1996 (ZKM). Despite the international assistance, “models evolved by First World institutions are not necessarily replicated in places like Paraguay” (Mellado 314). Instead he is “conceiving of the museum as a house of contemporary myth” (314), one of many potential museums that could “serve as points of resistance as well as of collective memory and the recreation of national narratives” (32).

By dissolving boundaries between indigenous, non-indigenous, ancient, historical, and contemporary art, while remaining actively engaged in both rural communities and the international art world, the Museo del Barro exemplifies "institutional flexibility” (Mellado 312). Mellado writes that "in a residual world without frontiers in which indigenous production is protected, a hybrid form escapes the control that any institution of cultural control could exert" (Mellado 312).

Works Cited

CIA. "Paraguay: Ethnic Groups." The World Factbook.
Escobar, Ticio. The Curse of Nemur: In Search of the Art, Myth, and Ritual of the Ishir. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 2007.
Fraser, Valerie. "Paraguayan Art in the Twentieth Century." University of Essex Collection of Latin American Art.
Legrás, Horacio. Literature and Subjection: The Economy of Writing and Marginality in Latin America. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008.
Mellado, Justo Pastor. “Memory in Chile and Paraguay: Two Arts Museum in Latin America.” Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg, eds. The Global Art World: Audiences, Markets, and Museums. Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Catz Verlag, 2009.
Paraguay Travel Guide. "The Museo del Barro In Asuncion Paraguay."
ZKM. "MoCA of the Month: Centro de Artes Visuales/Museo del Barro. " Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe. 2011.

Additional Links

Images reprinted under a Create Commons license.

Questionartist: In Conversation with Bobby Martin and Tony Tiger

2011-07-12T11:45:00.001-06:00

Bobby Martin and Tony Tiger

Tony Tiger and Bobby Martin are two artists and educators from Tahlequah on an art-inspired road trip to Alberta, Canada. I had the pleasure of visiting with them while they traveled through Santa Fe. Tiger, previously interviewed on this blog here, is a Sac and Fox-Muscogee Creek-Seminole mixed media artist and photographer from Muskogee, Oklahoma. He is head of the Bacone College art department, the oldest continuing Native art department in the country. Martin is a Muscogee Creek painter, printmaker, and designer who teaches at John Brown University, a private college in Siloam Springs, Arkansas. Together they are members of the Southeastern Indian Artists Association, a non-profit group working to promote Eastern Woodlands art.

What are some of the issues and concerns in your corner of the contemporary Native art world?

Tiger: Some of our little group, the SEIAA, are pushing to show outside the area. However the market shows hurt the artist by lowering their expectations.
Martin: For some artists, that’s the best they can do.
Tiger: If you’re in it for the cash. But if you are into it for the art, then you need to focus on that. For Native artists, we need to ask ourselves what we’re doing as art. Such as the water spider image [we had previously been discussing] — do you just regurgitate that image or try to add something to it? Do you try to make it your own and bring it into your own times?
Martin: Joseph [Erb] tries to start that discussion on his Facebook discussion group. What does it mean to be a Native fine artist? Should you show at a booth show?
Tiger: As contemporary Native artists, we aren’t given much credibility as artists. At Eiteljorg, they have me a questionnaire. Who taught you how do art? Your ancestors? It was all about marketing instead of asking about subject matter/content/concept.
Martin: That university in Indonesia that where I presented and talked asked about Native art, but they really just wanted to know about marketing. They have a lot of tribal artists, who are wondering how to sell their art. They don’t see it as creativity or a way to communicate ideas.
Tiger: Walking around Santa Fe, so many galleries carry the exact same work. Here people are looking for the “exotic.” It’s not LA; it’s the East Coast. They want something “Native”—but only the stereotype. You have to experiment and show in other venues, not just Native venues. It goes back to: what are you?
Martin: It’s a double-edged sword. Many Native artists would prefer to break out.
Tiger: I’ve shown in both [Native and non-Native venues]. By participating in Native art markets—biting the bullet—that’s just not the road I want to hoe. The economic downfall has been good in some ways since the economic incentive to cater to the market has dwindled.
Martin: At some point you can’t worry about labels, you just need to make your art.
Tiger: At Bill Wiggins’ talk, we discussed how contemporary Native artists aren’t recognized today, but twenty years from now, they will be the ones who’s shown and studied. That’s what Rauschenberg said as well. So much art is about recreating the part. I’m recording my time period. It’s related to the past but it’s not the past. I love the old photos—that’s my father, that’s my great-great-grandfather. But my art records my time and how government policy is affecting my time.
Martin: Some of the artists in our little area, Roy Boney, Joseph Erb, and Troy Jackson are creating fresh work and branching out to multimedia. It stems from ideas we’re familiar with but moves on. That’s why I like printmaking. That’s where you can collaborate and experiment and get something new — some nice art out it. I’m not a scholar about Native art from all regions — just our corner, there’s good energy there.
Tiger: I like to go the markets, like the Heard. Just to see what is going on. For instance, Molly Murphy, the beadwork at Lovett’s. She incorporating science and medicine. She’s beaded works about tuberculosis and its effects on lungs.
Martin: Isn’t she the one beading about biology and scientific theories?
Tiger: I’d like to see contemporary Native art without boundaries. And that’s one reason I wanted to take this trip—get out of Oklahoma and see what’s out there.
Martin: I want to take all these different mixtures of people—get them into my studio to makes prints together—and get a show out of that. Collaboration is the most interesting thing going on right now.
Tiger: When museums start showing contemporary art of living artists, it makes a big difference.
Martin: It’s cool that the Sam Noble Museum is collecting contemporary art.
Tiger: That gives you credibility—museum collections.
Martin: But when artists ask about marketing and how to get into museums… that’s not my focus. I’m in seven museums’ collections, but did I go out and look for those? No.
Tiger: But someone saw your work at the shows you do.
Martin: If I tried to put a booth up at Mayfest [art market in Tulsa], I couldn’t sell a thing. You just have to keep producing and producing art that’s true to you. Trying to create art to sell—that’s a sure route to failure.
Tiger: But that happens all the time.
Martin: You see artists painting the same thing for ten years. Well, I’m still painting the same things, but it’s still interesting to me!

The Southeastern Indian Artists Association: new site, earlier site with profiles

Bob Martin’s website
Tony Tiger’s online profile

T. C. Cannon documentary

2011-07-05T16:24:00.001-06:00

A friend just turned me on to this amazing, short documentary about T. C. Cannon, with interviews from various IAIA staff and students. I like his classmates' comment that he was the only student in his art history class to get an A!

Carving of a Mammoth Could Be the Oldest Known Artwork in the Americas

2011-06-29T14:17:00.014-06:00

rough sketch of the etched Vero bone

Since 1913, numerous bones of Pleistocene megafauna have been found in Vero Beach and nearby Van Valkenburg Creek in Florida. These have ranged from the remains of mammoths, mastodons, ground sloths, tapirs, horses, llamas, dire wolves, and even saber-tooth cats (Purdy et al 5). In 2006 or 2007, a fossil collector, James Kennedy, found a 15.75” long, fragmented bone from near the site (4). It wasn't until February 2009, that he noticed the faint carving of a proboscidean—that is, the order of elephants and mammoths—on the bone's surface. The significance of this carving sank in, and he contacted several anthropologists to examine the bone.

Over the next years, a team of scientists from at least six different institutions conducted a battery of tests to determine the age of the carving and its authenticity. Forgeries of ancient indigenous art have been common in the last century, such as the Holly Oak pendant that surfaced in 1889. The shell gorget carved with the image of a mammoth was radiocarbon dated to 1530±110 (Corliss), and appears to be a 19th-century carving on an older shell.

To dispel the possibilities of forgery, the Vero bone was subjected to rare earth analysis, optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), examination of backscattered SEM, energy dispersive x-ray spectroscopy, and reflectance transformation imaging (Purdy et al 3).

Research determined the bone was from the Vero area (7) and that the engravings are from the same era as the bone. The incised areas bear the same weathering marks as the bone's surface. The fragment contrasted greatly with a modern bone found in the area (8). The original cuts into the bone revealed no trace metals and were extremely different than an intentional incision made by the scientists with a razor (10).

The image is clearly recognizable as a mammoth, due to the shape of its high-domed skull, the proportionally correct tusks and trunk, and its front legs being longer than its hind legs (Purdy et al 4, 13). Such imagery is common in ancient Europe, but heretofore unproven to exist in the ancient Americas. Mammoths became extinct 13,000 years ago, so that establishes the minimum age for the bone (4), while the possibility exists that it could date back to 20,000 years ago.

An intriguing diamond pattern of the cross-hatched lines flanks the mammoth image. While visible to the left, the lines fade and aren’t visible on the worn, weathered right side of the bone (11).

The artistic subject matter may be clear, but the species of the bone cannot be precisely determined. It is a mineralized bone, so DNA cannot be extracted (5). Due to its size and shape, mostly likely it belonged to a mammoth, mastodon, or, possibly, but less likely, a giant sloth (4).

In the scholarly article published the Journal of Archaeological Science, the research team is cautious about declaring this Vero mammoth engraving the oldest art of the Americas. They point out a curious discovery in 1959 at the highly contested archaeological site, Hueyatlaco, near Valsequillo, Mexico. There Juan Armenta Camacho found a mastodon pelvis incised with images of several Ice Age animals, including a mammoth. The pelvis has since been lost (Purdy et al 14). Shrouded with controversy, this object will hopefully resurface. Found in Oklahoma, the Cooper Bison skull is the oldest known painted object in the Americas and dates back to 12,200 years ago. Cross-hatched lines and other abstract designs appear on rocks found in Texas, which date from approximately 11,500 years ago (Bower).

The research team briefly writes, “The similarity of the Vero engraving with Upper Paleolithic European art begs the question of whether this similarity is simply due to coincidence or if there exists a more direct Ice Age connection between North American and Europe as Stanford and Bradley (2004) have argued” (Purdy et al 12). That is as far as they state. Personally, I believe time will reveal that ancient peoples’ migration routes are more complex than imaginable; however, logically, it would follow that if two different groups both saw a mammoth, their rendering of the animal would be similar.

The carving is quite elegant. The lines are curvilinear, and one would imagine that an artist who can butcher a mammoth would be extremely deft at handling a knife. The multiple carving marks along the contour could be mistakes, but they imply motion. The far, hind leg is completely carved out, suggesting a shadow. The base of the trunk and front foreleg are not clearly terminated; rather, they fade into the negative space.

Online responses to mainstream press articles about the find are predictably horrible. Some suggest that the artist had to be European not Native American, even though it accepted by even the staunchest Clovis First advocate that Paleo-Indians had widely settled the Americas by 11,000 BCE. Basic science, both Native American and Western, is apparently not getting through the general public.

Other people can’t believe anything so realistic could be made so long ago. But much ancient art is highly naturalist due to the keen observational skills a hunter would require. The artist had living models from which to work. The profile of the walking mammoth shows receding perspective in the tusks and legs. Popular culture has dictated that Native American art is flat with no perspective, but this view comes from the early 20th century, and even pre-20th century ledger art often displayed foreshortening and perspective. The artist was observing from life, not necessary from a stylized artistic tradition, so the realistic rendering makes sense.

Bower, Bruce. "Bone may display oldest art in Americas." Science News. 27 June 2011.
Purdy, B.A., Jones, K.S., Mecholsky, J.J., Bourne, G., Hulbert, R.C., MacFadden, B.J., Church, K.L., Warren, M.W., Jorstad, T.F., Stanford, D.J., Wachowiak, M.J., Speakman, R.J. "Earliest Art in the Americas: Incised Image of a Proboscidean on a Mineralized Extinct Animal Bone from Vero Beach, Florida." Journal of Archaeological Science (2011), doi: 10.1016/j.jas.2011.05.022
Corliss, William R. "A Mammoth Fraud In Science." Science Frontiers. No. 61: Jan-Feb 1989.

Review | Teri Greeves: Storied Beads

2011-06-15T22:51:00.000-06:00

Storied Beads marks Teri Greeves’ first solo exhibition in Santa Fe in over three years. The Kiowa-Comanche-Italian bead artist has been busy — traveling nationwide, teaching, showing in major group exhibitions, and beading. Her new series, unveiled at the show, takes beadwork to a completely new level.

Hung in Shiprock’s main gallery hall, the works are immense. Five new, monumental beaded appliqué pieces are mounted on shimmering raw silk and luminescent vinyl. The tallest piece looms at 80” high.

The trend in beadwork is to use the smallest possible beads — to achieve fine detail and to display the beader’s technical prowess. However, an ongoing challenge for bead artists is to have their audience not just admire the technical skill in a piece but go beyond to see the composition, palette, and most importantly the content. Beadwork is an art medium loaded with historical implications; however, it’s still an art medium.

By blasting past expectations, Greeves carves a new space for expression. In these new works, she uses pony beads, large-scale beads that can be a centimeter or more width. These oversized beads, in glass, crystal, brass, and wood, coupled with mother-of-pearl disks showcase the reflective, translucent, textured, or glittering surfaces of the individual beads — approaching almost a mosaic quality, which is beautifully offset by the raw silk. While beadwork is most often seen in motion — on personal adornment, dance or ceremonial regalia, moving rattle or fan handles — the glittering quality of the cut-beads and crystals are activated when the viewer walks along, bringing the piece to life. In Sunboy's Women, Swarovski crystals flicker in the starry night sky.

Detail of Wa-Ho: The First Song After the Flood

Stars are a perfect allegory for the Kiowa oral history that inspired these works. The stories reflect unchanging truths, standing outside of daily timeframes, and serves as navigational guides like stars. “This is how our histories are passed on to us: through the vibrations of sound spoken from one individual to another,” writes Greeves in her artist’s statement. “It is also the basis of much conflict between how we see history and how history is written and read by non-Natives.” The subject matter in the show is highly specific. Greeves truly wants people to know and understand the stories, so she included lengthy artist’s statements for each work. The gallery has posted her statements in toto on their website; however, the staff at Shiprock is so gracious and outgoing, you would feel completely welcome reading the entire statements in the gallery at your leisure.

The centerpiece of the show is Sunboy's Women, a 72” x 72” diptych mounted on blue and red raw silk, the colors worn by Kiowa gourd dancers. Sun Boy or Half-Boy are cultural heroes that were born from an earth woman who fell in love with the Sun. She died trying to return to the earth from the sky world, so the orphaned Sun Boy was raised by Spider Woman, an adoptive grandmother. The figures of the two women are portrayed side by side—young and old—encased in a giant handprint, dividing in half like Sun Boy.

The figures in the show are women, each portrayed representational but faceless, giving them a timeless or universal quality. Greeves’ figurative style calls to mind the work of Virginia Stroud, a Muscogee-Cherokee artist who was adopted Kiowa and who helped revive ledger painting in the 1960s and 1970s. Text is also a key feature of the works, graffiti-esque text in the thought bubble above NDN GRRRL! and the embellished script of a lullaby in Wa-Ho: The First Song After the Flood.

detail of Wa-Ho: The First Song After the Flood

The haunting She Loved Her People struck me the most. A lone, faceless female figure stands on a burgundy background, brandishing a sword. Curliqued script proclaims that “She loved/her people.” Strategically sewn darker beads create an illusion of shadow on the figure, and mother-of-people discs stand in for elk’s teeth on the yoke of her dress, composed of sparkling cut midnight blue beads. Greeves explains how a 16-year-old Cheyenne girl witnessed Custer’s massacre of her people, including most of her relatives, at the Washita River. The girl saw Custer slice through the belly of a pregnant woman, dismembering her unborn child. This survivor joined a war party, traveled north to Little Big Horn. She fought in that battle and ultimately found Custer. She slit him open from naval to neck with his own sword. Today the German silver trailers that Southern Plains women wear at their waist commemorates this girl’s bravery.

The juxtaposition of feminine grace and bloodshed might seem incongruent, especially expressed through the “delicate” medium of beadwork. However, this and other works are about family and the willingness to stand up and fight for family. The young Cheyenne girl’s act of resistance restores some harmony and balance in the face of atrocities. So therefore the depiction of the girl is with grace and respect. The oral histories, although not necessarily “pretty”, bind together generations of an extended families and tribes. Greeves is offering the public a window into the encompassing and protecting web of stories and relations that help shape her tribe and her own family.

Storied Beads will be on exhibit through June 30, 2011 at Shiprock Santa Fe, Old Santa Fe Trail, 2nd Floor on the Plaza.
www.shiprocksantafe.com

Review | Euphoric Recall: New Work by Daniel McCoy

2011-06-06T22:28:00.008-06:00

Daniel McCoy, Jr. unveiled eight new works in his (mostly) solo exhibit, Euphoric Recall, at the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts’ Lloyd Kiva New Gallery. Euphoric Recall happens when an addict remembers only the good experiences from her or his addiction. The description is apt—as angst and heartbreak are portrayed, to quote Henry Rollins, "with a renewed vigor and enthusiasm not seen by many."

The Muscogee Creek-Citizen Band Potawatomi artist hails from Bristow, Oklahoma, attended IAIA in the early 1990s and 2000s, and moved back to Santa Fe after living at Lake Havasu. McCoy describes his work as a “visual time line” documenting his “past triumphs, current disasters.”

In his art statement, McCoy writes of his paintings, “I try to make them as busy as possible.“ That is no lie. Repetitive mark making and patterns set the pieces in motion, and his tragicomic narration buzzes, crackles, and pulsates with a simmering dynamic energy.

The largest piece in the show, The Letter, is also the most enigmatic. The acrylic-oil enamel painting is a collaboration between McCoy and Topaz Jones (Shoshone-Lummi-Kalapuya-Molalla). Bisected vertically down the middle, McCoy predominantly paints the left side and Jones takes the right, with an oversized heart drips blood from center stage. In a heavily outlined style reminiscent of R. Crumb or José Guadalupe Posada, a celestial woman surveys a mummified man in cowboy hat reading a letter. The clouded sky is populated by classic tattoos: swallows, daggers, scrollwork emblazoned with the phrase “Impending Doom.” The sky shifts to night on the right, with a map of Turkey and a projected Bat Symbol over a purple pueblo scene. A loose leaf notebook paper is a scrawled letter, with the words “Daniel, I forgive you” and “Love always, Topaz Jones.” Below is a yeti-like form on a pillow. This chaotic soiree leaves one with more questions than answers.

The Letter, Daniel McCoy and Topaz Jones

In the drawing Forbidden Art #1, a bright-eyed and plucky Deerlady, ala Veronica Lodge from Archie comics, stands with arms akimbo in a shiny pool of blood. A stompdance skirt and turtleshell dance shackles reveal her hairy cloven hooves, as she cheerfully presides over the grasping, screaming faces of her male victims, and she beams with pride over her accomplishments.

The show’s centerpiece, The Indian Taco Made by God, an acrylic painting on canvas, is quite beautiful, with a sky is stitched together from slashes of paint. Heavily articulated hands reach out for absolution from the perfect Indian Taco. Showcasing McCoy’s flair for visual puns, the clouds resemble bubbles in hot lard. Taco can be taken as a lightly, as a clever joke, but underneath the dazzling colors and masterful graphic strokes lies questions. Why does Indian Country fetishize a food so unhealthy, born of poverty and privation? Nostalgia for comfort food is a running theme in McCoy’s work — Frito pies, spam, commodities — but we are what we eat.

What refreshing about McCoy’s approach is that he is more questioning than didactic. His work is socially conscious but occupies a universe filled with possibility and contradictions — a young schoolgirl hauling an oversized Bible dreaming about Liz Taylor’s Cleopatra — comic book style with theological implications.

Euphoric Recall will be up through July 31st.

Blood of the Sun: Artists Respond to the Poetry of Suzan Shown Harjo, opening May 13

2011-05-09T12:17:00.003-06:00

Red King Ghidorah, Melissa and Marlon Melero

Santa Fe, NM — The powerful poetry of Susan Shown Harjo (Cheyenne-Holdulgee Muscogee) will be celebrated and explored by visual artists in a unique exhibit, Blood of the Sun: Artists Respond to the Poetry of Suzan Shown Harjo, opening Friday, May 13, 2011 from 6:00 pm to 9:00 pm at Ahalenia Studios (1422 Second Street) in Santa Fe. Harjo will attend the opening. She made her first appearance at Ahalenia Studios to read poetry created for the Freedom of Information: The FBI, Indian Country, and Surveillance exhibit.
Blood of the Sun will remain on display until Sunday, May 22, 2011. An installation and performance piece created by artist DeCoy Gallery (Warm Springs Chiricahua Apache) will occur at both the opening and closing receptions. The closing reception will be Sunday, May 22nd, 2:00 pm—4:00 pm.

Harjo is a poet, curator, and likely the most influential policy maker in Indian Country today. She has helped Native nations to regain ownership and control of over one million acres of ancestral lands. She also has been involved in drafting and securing the passage of key legislation to promote and protect Native nations, sovereignty, children, arts, cultures, languages, and sacred spaces, as well at the 1978 American Indian Religious Freedom Act, 1989 National Museum of the American Indian Act, 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, and the 1996 Executive Order on Indian Sacred Sites. She served on the Native American Policy Committee for Senator Barack Obama's presidential campaign and as an advisor to the Transition in 2008-2009.

Suzan Shown Harjo, photo by Lucy Fowler Williams

President of the Morning Star Institute, a national Native rights organization founded in 1984 for Native peoples' traditional and cultural advocacy, arts promotion and research, Harjo was one of seven prominent Native people who filed the 1992 landmark case, Harjo et al v. Pro Football, Inc., against the disparaging name of the Washington professional football team. She has been a featured guest twice on the Oprah Winfrey Show and has been profiled and her work included in myriad broadcasts, newpapers, magazines, and books. On May 13, 2011, she will receive an honorary doctorate degree for a lifetime of advocacy and contributions to Native American arts, cultures, and rights from the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe.

"It's an honor to be associated with such extraordinary artists," said Harjo. "Many of these artists have inspired my created and policy works for years. I look forward to the interpretations of and commentary on my poetry by these diplomats, resisters, and catalysts in the arts." Both emerging and internationally exhibited artists will be a part of Blood of the Sun, each responding to a poem or phrase of Harjo's in order to create a finished piece.

Participating artists include:

Painting by Brandon Williams

• Marcus Amerman (Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma)
• David Bradley (White Earth Ojibwe)
• Kelly Church (Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa Chippewa Indians)
• Anita Fields (Osage Nation)
• DeCoy Gallery (Chiricahua Apache)
• John Hagen (Aleut-Iñupiaq)
• Bob Haozous (Chiricahua Apache)
• Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds (Cheyenne-Arapaho)
• April Holder (Sac and Fox-Tonkawa-Wichita)
• Kenneth Johnson (Muscogee-Seminole)
• Linda Lomahaftewa (Hopi-Choctaw)
• Marlon Melero (Reno-Spark Paiute-Modoc-Tlingit-Haida)
• Melissa Melero (Fallon Paiute-Modoc)
• America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)
• Diego Romero (Cochiti Pueblo)
• Mateo Romero (Cochiti Pueblo)
• Hoka Skenandore (Oneida-La Jolla Luiseño-Oglala Lakota)
• Dr. John Torres-Nez (Diné)
• Richard Ray Whitman (Yuchi-Muscogee Creek)
• Brandon Williams (Diné)

Daily viewing hours for the exhibit vary. Please email for an appointment.

By Staci Golar (Welsh-American)

Art show website: www.ahalenia.com/harjo

"Kanutche Dogs: Contemporary Cherokee Art" at Firegod Gallery, Opens Friday, May 6th

2011-05-02T11:55:00.002-06:00

Image: detail of Commodity, Roy Boney

Albuquerque, NM — Eleven Cherokee artists will participate in an upcoming group art show at the Firegod Gallery, 3413 Central Ave, NE, Albuquerque, New Mexico 87106.

An opening reception will take place Friday, May 6th, from 6:00 – 9:00 pm. This event is free and open to the public. The show will run through May 31st.

On Saturday, May 7th, from 2:00 – 4:00 pm, computer animation and claymation videos in the Cherokee language by Roy Boney, Jr. and Joseph Erb will be displays, following by question and answer period about using art to preserve tribal languages. This lecture is also free and open to everyone.

Artist America Meredith will present a two-part presentation, free and open to the public, about Cherokee art history from precontact times to the present, on Saturday, May 28th, from 2:00 – 4:00pm.

The Cherokee tribe is an enigma. Over 800,000 people claimed Cherokee descent on the 2010 US Census; however, very few people are familiar with Cherokee culture or arts. Of the 300,000 actually enrolled in of the three federally recognized Cherokee tribes, only about 10,000 people speak the Cherokee language–mostly in Oklahoma and North Carolina. Only an estimated 500 Cherokee people participate regularly in stomp dances, the traditional expression of Cherokee religion, at the seven ceremonial grounds in Northeastern Oklahoma.

This show hopes to share culturally-informed contemporary Cherokee art with the general public and Cherokee people in New Mexico. New Mexico has such a large Cherokee population that it is home to the Southwest Cherokee Township, a satellite community of the Cherokee Nation.

The show’s title comes from a folk term, Kanutche Dogs, for the America dingo or Carolina dog, the indigenous dog of the American southeast that has been an important part of Cherokee society. “Kanutche” (pronounced kah-NUH-chee) is a traditional Cherokee food made from hickory nuts.

Roy Boney, Jr. (Cherokee Nation), from Locust Grove, Oklahoma, is a painter, illustrator, digital artist, and computer animator, who uses the Cherokee language extensively in his work. He also created a series of zombie comics for Slave Labor Graphics.
Ross Chaney (Cherokee Nation/Osage Nation), from Santa Fe, New Mexico, is an emerging expressionist painter and draftsperson.
Joseph Erb (Cherokee Nation), from Gore, Oklahoma, is a painter, digital artist, and computer animator, working to preserve the Cherokee language. Mixing new and old technology, Joseph also paints on gourds, an ancient Cherokee art media, and uses imagery from the Booger Dance, a masked dance unique to the Cherokee people.
Lara Evans, PhD. (Cherokee Nation) is an experimental photographer and painter, as well as a professor of Native art history at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. Her work was recently published in Art in Our Lives: Native Women Artists in Dialogue.
Fran Hill is a contemporary ceramic artist from Albuquerque, who is an active member in the Southwest Cherokee Township.
Daniel Horsechief (Cherokee Nation-Pawnee) is a bronze sculptor, wood carver, and painter from Sallisaw, Oklahoma. He is an alumnus of the Institute of American Indian Arts.
America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) is a painter and printmaker from Santa Fe, who is also an IAIA alumna. She will exhibit her recent experiments in fumage (smoke art).
Mary Beth Nelson (Cherokee Nation) is a painter specializing in wildlife. She lives in Guthrie, Oklahoma.
Lisa Rutherford (Cherokee Nation) of Tahlequah, Oklahoma specializes in southeastern beadwork and ceramics, but is also experimenting with traditional featherwork clothing. She showed at SWAIA’s Indian Market for the first time in 2010 and won an award for ceramics.
Sean Ross (Eastern Band Cherokee) from Cherokee North Carolina combines humor, social commentary, and Cherokee culture in his paintings.
Arlo Starr (NTA Cherokee-descent), a painter, currently lives in Albuquerque but was active in the development of the Squirrel Ridge Ceremonial Ground in Kenwood, Oklahoma. He worked with Cherokee elders to create a healthy cookbook based on traditional foods.

Firegod Gallery specializes in quality and innovative contemporary Native American art. It is owned by Silvester Hustito (Zuni), an artist and curator.

Upcoming symposium: Essentially Indigenous

2011-04-28T13:38:00.003-06:00

Essentially Indigenous?: Contemporary Native Arts Symposium
Thursday, May 5, and Friday, May 6, 2011
National Museum of the American Indian in New York
George Gustav Heye Center; Diker Pavilion
One Bowling Green, New York, NY

This is a free event. I can't go (someone has to create the art and curate the shows, right?), but if you're in the New York area - check out it. If anyone wants to share feedback about the symposium, I would be very grateful! Session topics include:

Essential Images: On the Critical Production and Reception of Contemporary Native Art
Essential Place: The Relationship between Native Art and Place
Blood Memory: Indigenous Genealogies and Imagined Truths
Indigenous Aesthetic Paradigms: Community and the Artist.

Registration info.
Schedule online.

In Praise of Annual, Competitive Art Shows: The Trail of Tears Art Show

2011-04-22T14:42:00.011-06:00

Resurgence, Daniel Horsechief, at the CHC

While new Indian art markets seem to pop up like mushrooms – despite the horrible economy – annual, intertribal competitive art shows have decreased, not increased, in number. With the loss of the Lawrence Indian Art Show in Kansas, which operated independently of the Haskell Indian Art Market, the number of annual shows open to all tribes is down to two. As far as I know, there is only the Red Cloud Indian Art Show and the Trail of Tears Art Show.

A few more annual shows are limited to certain tribes. Founded in 1997, “Here Forever” is an August show at the Tamástslikt Cultural Institute in Pendleton, Oregon. It’s open to enrolled members of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, that is Umatilla, Cayuse, and Walla Walla tribes. The Five Civilized Tribes Museum in Muskogee, Oklahoma sponsors a competitive show each June and July that is open to members of all federally and state recognized Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee Creek, and Seminole tribes. Each August/September, the Cherokee Heritage Center in Park Hill, Oklahoma hosts the Cherokee Homecoming show open to enrolled members of the three federally recognized Cherokee tribes. For the last three years, the Cherokee Nation hosts the Cherokee National Holiday Art Show in Tahlequah, Oklahoma.

Both markets and art shows serve worthy purposes. While art markets are exciting events for socializing and networking, they can also prove expensive and exhausting for artists. Many emerging and elder artists might not have the inventory to fill a booth, and familial, academic, or job commitments or health issues prevent many artists from traveling to markets. Art shows, as opposed to markets, allow these artists to participate and share their work and ideas. And unlike markets, the art, not the artist, is showcased. One can quietly spend as long as one wants examining and reflecting on the work, allowing for a deeper understanding of content and underlying crosscurrents between works.

Both the two annual intertribal art shows are in Indian County: Pine Ridge, South Dakota and Park Hill, Oklahoma, which allows the local Native communities to see what’s going on in the contemporary indigenous art world. And both are free to enter, which in the art world in extraordinary. Usually art spaces will host a competitive art show as a fund-raiser, since it’s common to charge $5 to $50 just to enter.

The Trail of Tears show is near to my heart because it the first place I ever exhibited my art. Since 1995, I’ve shown in it every year. Now in its 40th year, the Trail of Tears art show (TOTAS) was founded in 1971 by the Cherokee National Historical Society at the Cherokee Heritage Center. All entries to first shows were limited to the Trail of Tears theme, which proved too narrow a focus. My mother says that at the shows’ low point less than half a dozen people showed up at the reception to see the four or five entries for the entire show. The following year, the show opened up to new categories.

Categories now include painting, graphics, pottery, basketry, miniatures, and Trail of Tears theme. This year was exciting because, thanks to sponsorship by the Chickasaw Nation, a jewelry category was added. The show now allows photography and digital art, but these compete with hand pulled prints, drawings, and even scrimshaw. Every year I crack up when I read the rules explicitly prohibiting painting on saw blades.

This year had an excellent turnout, and visitors at the opening reception said it was too crowded to even see the art (which is why you have to visit more than once). The show had 155 pieces from 95 different artists, but representing only 13 tribes. It seems that is has been more tribally diverse in the past, and I hope it will be in the future. I didn’t see any non-Cherokee baskets. Attention indigenous basket makers of America, please enter next year! Both sales and prize money are good, and it’s a great opportunity to share your work with a largely Native audience.

The grand prizewinner was Putting the Pieces Together, a gorgeous and haunting ceramic sculpture by Troy Jackson (Cherokee). The foot tall figurative work has an elegant Mississippian-esque man composed of black and white jigsaw puzzle pieces, holding black and white pieces in his hands. The figure sits on a blanket on top of a container bearing the word, ᏣᎳᎩ (Cherokee). The lip of the bowl has a lug of copper wire holding a white cross. Small coiled, copper earrings also provide a touch of color. Representing a mixed blood individual’s identity struggles and that of the entire tribe, the piece is ultimate serene, suggesting a resolution and acceptance of a mixed identity.

Shan Goshorn’s High Stakes; Tribes Choice won best of graphics category. Her photograph of a traditionally dressed Eastern Cherokee man is accented with an array of glitter, suggesting the glitz of casino lights more than the spiritual sparkle of mica or other sacred minerals. Sharon Irla’s very classically painted Corn Mother is a beautiful, naturalistic, oil painting of Selu as a tattooed woman with closed eyes, clad in a fur robe, and wearing wampum and shell necklace and pearl bracelets. She holds a white swan feather fan, symbol of a Beloved Woman’s authority. Before her sits a shallow tray of ripe corn. Irla delicately implies erotic energy in manner that doesn’t cross local sensibilities.

David Pruitt's Fire Carrier, a raku clay sculpture of the southeastern Mississippian water spider who brought fire to humanity, won best of the ceramics category. The large number of ceramics entries is a testimony to the work of Anna Sixkiller Mitchell and recently Jane Osti, who offers pottery classes from her studio in Tahlequah.

Lisa Forrest won best of the basket category with her ambitiously large Traditional Storage Basket, woven from vegetal dyed honeysuckle runners. This basket is a foot in diameter, with a delicately woven lid, embellished with seedpods and hazelnuts. Gathering one’s own materials and dyeing with natural dyes is greatly prized in Oklahoma basket weaving; however, I saw some nice doubleweave baskets in commercial reeds. At least the lesser materials allow new weavers to master the art of doubleweaving.

Best of sculpture category was a naturalistic wooden carving, Redtail Hawk by Darrell Smith (Cherokee Nation). The attention to detail was extraordinary with every single feather carved out.

Navajo jeweler and teacher Fritz Casuse won first place in the new jewelry category, with his impressive towering Cala ring with abstract floral designs. His wife Wanesia Misquadace (Fond du Lac Ojibwe) won second and third places. Misquadace is one of possibly a dozen birchbark biters active today, and she travels to northern Minnesota each year to harvest the bark. She incorporated birchbark bitings of turtles in her second place winner, A Song and Prayer for Mother Earth, a canister of birch embellished with silver. Personally I also greatly enjoyed Charley Johnson’s Man from Etowah.

The Trail of Tears category, open to work about any forced removal such as The Long Walk, was won by James Wing with his oil painting, Trail of Tears Water Crossing, a realistic narrative piece portraying two men and a woman trudging through the snowy forest.

Because of the nature of the show, many emerging artists participate, and the quality is uneven. Due to the uncurated nature of the show, one get a more direct feel for trends in styles and subject matter, where genre and figurative art well represented. Many works reflect agrarian culture, such as Choctaw artist Norma Howard’s painting of working cotton fields or Amy Smith’s still life of eggs. Relationships between artists are evident everywhere with relatives and teachers and students showing together. Rose Drake entered a tribute, Quiver for Gunter, in memory of the Cherokee basketweaver, Gunter Anderson, who recently passed on.

The Trail of Tears art show runs through May 8.

If you are interested in entering the Red Cloud Indian Art Show, the information is online here. You have until May 1st to let them know what you want to enter.

Revitalizing Bacone College's Native Arts Program: An Interview with Tony Tiger

2011-04-10T16:21:00.005-06:00

Ataloa Lodge, Native art museum on campus

Turning off Highway 62 onto Old Bacone Road in Muskogee, Oklahoma will lead you to a cluster of native red stone buildings with blue slate rooftops. Some buildings date to the 1880s. This is the campus of Bacone College, the oldest continuing Native American institution of higher learning. The school boasts the oldest continuing Native American art program in the country. Celebrating its 75th year, the Art Department was founded in 1935 and is unique in that Native American artists have always directed the program. Bacone College itself was founded in 1880, when it was simply known as Indian University. While its campus stands within the Muscogee Creek Nation’s tribal jurisdictional area, and the college maintains close relationships with area tribes and the American Baptist Churches, the school remains an independent four-year liberal arts college.

Professor of English and Philosophy Mary Stone McClendon (Chickasaw) founded the Art Lodge at Bacone in 1932. Her Chickasaw name was Ataloa, and the art museum was later renamed the Ataloa Lodge in her honor. The comfortable, home-like museum exhibited her extensive collection of Native American art. “Many of the beautiful things created by Indians have been taken far away, to museums in the east, where the Indians rarely see them,” she said at the museum’s dedication. “We want to bring many of those things here… where Indians may see them and be inspired by them” (Elder 64).

In 1935, the charismatic dancer, actor, and artist Acee Blue Eagle (Pawnee-Muscogee-Wichita) helped establish the college department and became its first director. Studying under the Kiowa Six’s mentor, Oscar Jacobson (Swedish-American), Blue Eagle helped create the Bacone style of painting, which was in the flat-style popular among Native artists at the time. He drew upon his Southern Plains and Southeastern oral history and worldviews, as well as Modernist influences such as Art Deco. This syncretic, versatile style became a vehicle for expression for artists whose tribes had, due to Removal and cultural upheaval, lost their tribally-specific traditional painting styles.

Tony Tiger (Sauk and Fox-
Muscogee Creek-Seminole)

Woody Crumbo (Muscogee-Potawatomi) replaced Blue Eagle in 1938. Crumbo was a dancer, musician, muralist, and easel painter. In 1947, Crumbo was succeeded by Dick West, a Cheyenne peace chief and father of the National Museum of the American Indian’s founding director, Rick West. Ruthe Blalock Jones (Shawnee-Delaware-Peoria) directed the art program from 1979 and now works as a fulltime artist. Tony Tiger (Sac and Fox-Muscogee-Seminole) took the reins from Jones as Director of the Art Department. He has extensive experience and working with Indian young people in the US and Canada, and is an award-winning mixed media artist. Tiger’s work incorporates images of family photographs with vividly hued, transparent layers of paint, and, often, sculptural elements, which differs dramatically from the work of his predecessors.

I was highly impressed by the Bacone students who attended last year’s Native American Art Studies Association (NAASA) conference in Norman. A Kiowa student in particularly was quite articulate about how his art was created for family and community, not for the larger art world. Listening to these young Bacone artists made me curious to know more about the new director’s efforts to revitalize this long-standing art program.

Why did the faculty of Bacone back in the 1930s feel the need to create a visual art program? Why are visual arts important to Native students today?
From what I have heard and read, the study of the visual arts was a natural progression in Native education. Many students created and excelled in many art forms already, such as pottery, weaving, carving, and painting. The forms were primarily either utilitarian in nature or history based, items such as baskets, pottery, and ledger paintings. The study of art, form, subject matter, and content, for the Native student has evolved. Technology and the influence of contemporary society on the Native population is evident in the art that young Native artists are creating.

How large is the art program? What tribes are most represented?
The art program at Bacone is continuing to expand, and each semester we are accepting more art majors. There is also a growing interest in the art program, enticing students from other disciplines to take the classes we offer. The tribes most commonly represented on campus are Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee (Creek), and Seminole, but there are students from tribes throughout the United States and Canada studying at Bacone.

What are some common themes you see emerging in your student’s work? What are their goals are artists?
Technology and mass media are very influential, and as a result themes emerging from both technology and mass media are quite prevalent. Many students are also interested in mixed media and digital imaging. As far as their goals as artists, we have students who desire to go into many different aspects of the art world. I considered it the program’s goal, since we are still an associate’s degree program, to give the students a strong foundation in the arts. We want to prepare the student’s for the next level of study.

You’ve been cleaning out storerooms filled the artwork. What was your most unexpected find?
I found the original ink drawing by Dick West, The Founding of Bacone.

Do you find time for your own artwork? Has your experience at Bacone so far changed your art?
Yes, I have a studio in McCombs Art Building. I teach a class, go down to my studio and work until my next class. I have an upcoming solo exhibition at the Southern Plains Indian Museum which will run from July-September 2010. I have found the history of the institution has influenced my new work. My grandfather attended Bacone in the early 1900s, and that family history combined with the names and images of the past is fueling a new body of artwork.

Your mixed media work is a dramatic departure from the art for your predecessors. What kind of response does your work receive in northeastern Oklahoma?
I have received good reviews in the media and in responses from fellow artists. The word “new” is used a good deal, and the mixed media applications create interest and questions about the content and form.

Cited Work:
• Elder, Tammy Liegerot. Lumhee Holot-Tee: The Art and Life of Acee Blue Eagle. Edmond, OK: Medicine Wheel Press, 2006.

Review | Double Vision: New Works by Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie

2011-04-07T10:40:00.006-06:00

Recovering forgotten histories of 19th century Native American photographers, curating shows, and organizing international indigenous photography conferences, the self-identified “aboriginal savant” Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie has dedicated herself to furthering the cause of Native photography. The Diné-Seminole-Muscogee artist created a new series of digital prints on fabric at the Great Plains Art Museum in downtown Lincoln, Nebraska. She responds to photography by non-Natives — photographs in the Great Plains Art Museum’s permanent collection.

When invited to view early photos of indigenous peoples, Tsinhnahjinnie writes that she does “hesitate when invited to view or respond to them. I scan the messages, intentional and unintentional messages” and “reflect[s] upon the intention of the ‘subject’."

“It is my hope that these new works present a visual confrontation,” Tsinhnahjinnie writes, “an argument with premise that should be critically reviewed and endless questioned.”

Tsinhnahjinnie created large-scale digital prints on poly-satin, hung from curtain rods. Digital art, existing in the zero-space of a computer, can take a range of forms from computer monitors, light projections, or on prints on paper resembling traditional photographic prints. By choosing poly-satin, a polyester fabric with a dramatic sheen, Tsinhnahjinnie ‘s pieces become movie theater-esque — "silver screens."

Her dark palette of blacks, silvery blues, purples, browns, and a process cyan referencing CMYK prints, imbues the work with a dreamlike or nightmarish quality, punctuated by bright citron, red, and orange accents.

The first piece that confronts the viewer is one of the strongest, A Penny for Your Thoughts, derived from Laton Alton Huffman’s Stereoscope postcard, Taking the Tongues. Images of the buffalo nickel form a border below a giant buffalo nickel combines with Huffman’s print, featuring a man stretching a tongue for cutting from a buffalo corpse, one of eight – some partially butchered. The overarching, larger buffalo from the nickel resembles snowcapped mountains. Tsinhnahjinnie changed the nickel’s text to “United States of Amnesia,” which is a little predictable; however, the text E Pluribus Unum takes an ominous tone, when one considers that the buffalo were slaughtered almost to extinction to destroy Plains Indians way of life and pen them on reservation to ultimately try to assimilate them in mainstream American society; that is, to make many people into one.

Laton Alton Huffman’s Taking the Tongues, is displayed next to Tsinhnahjinnie’s response. It’s a diminutive and faded sepia-toned Stereopticon (think View-Master) from Miles City, Montana, of the lone hunter butchering the eight buffalo carcasses; his rifle resting on one. I studied the piece carefully to clues to the hunter’s identity–was he Native or not? Ultimately it didn’t matter; one man killing eight buffalo at once is excessive no matter what their background is.

This image and the presence of the “Buffalo Nation/Bison Nation,” as the artist describes the animals so crucial to Plains culture, form a backbone to the show. The second work by Tsinhnahjinnie, Taking the Tongues, shows the same image darkened with the right image reversed to form a mirror with Ronald McDonald leaping through the frames. Ronald McDonald, who looks fairly demonic even in the best of times, presents a jarring representation of contemporary consumer culture, the demise of buffalo, and our own health – a food imperialist.

Another of Tsinhnahjinnie’s digital collages, Five Minutes Work, uses an earlier photo from the same series. The inversed image, mostly cyan, reminiscent of an architect’s blueprint, features the same eight buffalo carcasses with a lone horse instead of a man. In the first panel, “Excuse me” is scrawled above the horse and in the second, “I did not sign up for this!” Tsinhnahjinnie’s multilayered, darkly humorous work, braiding together history and 21st century banality, reminds me of my favorite contemporary British artist, David Godbold. Anticolonialism figures strongly in both the artists’ work.

Two photographers provide Tsinhnahjinnie with the majority of her inspiration: Laton Alton Huffman (1854-1931) from Iowa, learned photography from his father, was attached once by Dull Knife (Cheyenne), and settled in Fort Keogh, Montana in 1879-1880. He later became a hunting guide and rancher and sold buffalo hides to supplement his photography sales (Sharyl Ferrall). The second photographer is William Henry Jackson (1843-1942), who owned a portrait studio in Omaha, Nebraska and was the first published photographer of Yellowstone National Park and the Ancestral Pueblo cliff dwelling at Mesa Verde (Getty Museum).

The Jackson Brothers provide the albumen print, Pawnee Indian—the inspiration for Mega Sale. The Pawnee man in a fur hat and buffalo space is given a black scrawl down his face (a single tear?) and is treated to either the “dry brush” or “watercolor” filter in Photoshop, a program that also surprisingly has a “smudge stick” filter. A graffiti monkey and writing complete the piece, which is captioned by a Hawaiian Punch-esque font proclaiming: “The idea that history is about us.”

Since Photoshop is so associated with advertising and desktop publishing, it’s disconcerting when the rules of typography and graphic design are broken. For instance, The Special features a variety of disconcordant fonts from the original William Henry Jackson photograph, with “Pawnee, Omaha Special, specializing in authenticity!” added in a font featuring stars for the i-dots. This piece is flanked by several 19th century photographs of the photographer’s work places — ranging from a cowhide tent, with a railroad and power lines faintly visible in the background to images of large interior spaces with workers a sinks, revealing that photography of Native Americans and the West were big business.

The show concludes with a tetraptych, Today I Was Thinking… At first it seemed like an afterthought, but luckily the space is ideal for sitting with the art. After awhile it began working on me. The four horizontal printed textiles were inspired by L. A. Huffman’s hand-colored platinum print, copyrighted in 1912, Buffalo Grazing the Big Open, shot in northern Montana in 1880. They feature the buffalo herd on a black background, accents with yellow and orange. The first has a photographs of moon phases, the second warped citron moons arching over the sky, as if referencing the eons passing with the buffalo herds shaping the Plains landscape; in the third Ronald McDonald once again rears his ugly head; and finally peace is restored and the buffaloes quip that “Real Indians eat curry.” This piece seems like Paiute prophet Wovoka’s vision of the buffalo returning but really says they never left the Plains and contemporary consumerism is just a blip in the timeframe of the Bison Nation/Buffalo Nation.

• Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie's website

Images: © Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie. Nota bene: Images in art show reviews fall under the doctrine of fair use. Landes, William M. “Copyright, Borrowed Images, and Appropriation Art: An Economic Approach.” George Mason Law Review. Fall 2000: 6.

Meta-Criticism: Responding to the Response to the Tipi: Heritage of the Great Plains at the Brooklyn Museum, Conclusion

2011-03-23T11:19:00.010-06:00

First and foremost, open, honest dialogue that is ongoing is good. Not every Native artist wants a non-Native audience, but for those that do, the response is informative. Several of the writers were receptive and responsive to the works in Tipi but others had points of serious disconnect.

If this show were at the National Museum of the American Indian, the response would no doubt be different. Perhaps the show is experiencing some of the backlash Nancy Mithlo has described that happens with Native artists step outside the Native art arena for the larger art world.

With various levels of elitism in the art world, some writers from Manhattan might be prejudiced against Brooklyn or shows designed for the general public instead of a specific art world audience. Many writers geared towards children, which perhaps in their views negates the seriousness or sophistication of the art presented. Museums are constantly looking at ways to reach out to new audiences and create interactive exhibits, so is this regard, I’ll wager the show will be a success.

By disconnect, I refer to instances the writer is literately not responding to what in the show at all but writing about their own preconceptions. One writer laments the fact that buffalo hides are no longer used for tipi construction; another writers points out that a buffalo hide tipi is being constructed as part of this very exhibit. All the references to tourist kitsch were not only insulting but illuminating. It is important that non-Native youth experience Native culture outside the arena of highway souvenir shops (never mind that the souvenirs certain writers might be writing about were most likely not made by Natives).

While tourism was mentioned, hippies, New Agers, and hobbyists were not mentioned in context of tipis, even though these three groups are often the owners and residents of tipis. However, these groups might be just as exotic as Native Americans to the writers.

The requests for more tragic historical information surprised me, but part of the cultural imprint of Native Americans in the current US psyche is the tragic figure, or as Mary Brave Bird (Brulé Lakota) puts it, “Lo, the Poor Indian.” That Natives’ right to be happy is an issue is evidenced by Ryan Red Corn and Sterlin Harjo’s recent video, “Smiling Indians.” The artists aren’t being superficial or avoiding hard discussions when they tone of the work presented is cheerful. There’s a direct message there: we have the right to be happy and to be three-dimensional living people instead of walking stereotypes of tragic loss. Trust me, every one of the participating artists is keenly aware of their tribal histories, of land loss, massacres, and other human rights’ violations. They are saying that there is more to them and their tribes than loss.

A happy surprise was that none of the art writers mentioned problems with “craft” and “fine art,” and they do not question the state of contemporary works as art. Since that false dichotomy refuses to die here in New Mexico (I am personally committed to helping kill it), it’s encouraging to not see in the East.

Since I’m used to hearing complaints about Native art being too interested in the past, I was surprised and troubled by the repeated complaints about the contemporary work being “problematic.” I did notice none of the writers mentioned Vanessa Jennings (Kiowa-Pima) — were they not aware that she’s also a living, contemporary artist? 19th century Plains Indians are locked into the American consciousness but more and more, contemporary Americans seem to not know how to deal with living Indians. Are there mental blocks? Absolutely. Living indigenous artists don’t want to be the Exotic Other or assimilated, so a new conceptual space for contemporary Native art must be carved out in the mainstream art world.

Joseph Sutton’s point that Native American cultures are “integral to our country’s history” is one approach. Despite assimilationists’ best efforts, tribal cultures have touched every aspect of American society — government, agriculture, medicine, pop culture, etc. To fully live in the US, one should know about Native cultures. None of my ancestors signed the Declaration of Independence or the US Constitution, but I definitely study both, and pay attention to contemporary political art. Commonalities arising from sharing a land could be emphasized in promoting living Native arts to non-Native peoples.

Cross-cultural communication is possible. Curators Nancy Rosoff and Susan Kennedy Zeller are knowledge and sensitive to Native American art, artists, and greater cultures. I believe through their efforts, as well as the artists’ and consultants’ effort, cross-culturally conceptual bridges will the built and strengthened.

For a person such as myself, who is 2006 miles away from the art show, the museum published an amazing catalog, featuring a dozen essays and excellent photography. The artists contributed essays, as well as curators and other art writers.

Rosoff, Nancy B. and Susan Kennedy Zeller. Tipi: Heritage of the Great Plains. Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Museum, 2011. Hardcover, 304 pages. ISBN 978-0295990774.

Meta-Criticism: Responding to the Response to the Tipi: Heritage of the Great Plains at the Brooklyn Museum, Part Two

2011-03-22T18:25:00.007-06:00

Continuing to look at writing about the Tipi: Heritage of the Great Plains currently at the Brooklyn Museum...

Rosenbaum, Lee. “Beyond the Tepid Tepees: Brooklyn’s Engrossing Plains Indian Show.” CultureGrrl. 17 March 2011.

The New York Times disabled comments to Ken Johnson’s article, so award-winning art writer Lee Rosenbaum responded to him on her blog in “Beyond the Tepid Tepees: Brooklyn’s Engrossing Plains Indian Show.” She said she “loved this show!” and yet, she delivers one backhanded insult after another. Rosenbaum feels the contemporary art “don't measure up to their antecedents.” Teri Greeves’ Great Lakes Girls, a fully beaded pair of high-heel shoes, which Rosenbaum labeled as “kitsch”; however, Greeves’ beading ability compares very favorably with many 19th beadworkers, and she uses finer materials. Rosenbaum describes Lyle Heavy Runner’s tipi as “big” and “garish.” Perhaps if it were a century old, then it would be “prodigious “ and “graphically bold.” The contemporary artworks are “modern knock-offs.” What are these 21st century post-modern artists “knocking off”? Are they not allowed to bead, carve buffalo horns, weave baskets, or sew tipis? By what authority? Is there any aspect of these works that suggest they were finished quickly and without care?

Rosenbaum shares information text from and even photographs of the museum labels, demonstrating that Ken Johnson’s criticism that the exhibition "offers no revelatory perspective on its [the show's] contents” is unwarranted.

As she brings up in her Wall Street Journal article, Rosenbaum has major issues with the curators choosing to not display culturally sensitive shield covers imbued with medicine. You either respect Native culture and appreciate that some things are not made for general public to view, or you don’t. Attempting to divorce the aesthetics of an artwork from its content is to undermine the intentions of the artist. When it comes to culturally sensitive items that cannot be seen by the public, the only parallel in Western culture I can think of is the Ark of the Covenant (burned into our collective psyche by Indian Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark). Rosenbaum writes she “was of course disappointed that Brooklyn had to fall back on a newly created substitute.” So Marcus Amerman’s fused glass sculpture can’t be seen as an art piece in its own right, with its own aesthetic qualities and content? Am I to assume Sherrie Levine’s photography is also “a newly created substitute?” Does Amerman and the other contemporary artists simply have nothing valid to say? That would make them unique among artists—being devoid of independent viewpoints or experiences.

Rosenbaum wraps her response up with her view that those interfering tribal consultants “restricted Brooklyn's display of pipes” by having the pipe stems and pipe bowls displayed separately because inserting the stem into the bowl “activates the power of the pipe,” as curator Nancy Rosoff explained to Rosenbaum. Kudos to Rosoff for being respectful and showing the pieces separated allows the viewers to see more, not less, of the pipe’s components.

Rosenbaum, Lee. “Shows That Defy Stereotypes.” Wall Street Journal. 15 March 2011.

“Today's curators want visitors to view Indian artworks not as quaint ethnographic artifacts, but as vital expressions of a living culture, spanning prehistory to the present,” writes Lee Rosenbaum about Denver Art Museum’s new Native American galleries. I can’t agree enough. While praising the museum, Rosenbaum finds the juxtaposition of old and new works “exasperating” and is troubled by Bently Spang’s photography war shirt. She describes the Northern Cheyenne artist as “suddenly ubiquitous,” which is ironic, since the artist has been steadily exhibiting for two decades. His works “are meant to be seen, not worn, are also on view in Manhattan and Brooklyn.” So, is this a problem? He’s an installation artist, performance artist, photographer, and filmmaker. Should I be sad that I can’t wear Guy de Cointet’s or Nairy Baghramian’s artwork? Should Sprang not exhibit his artwork in Manhattan or Brooklyn?

Nancy Blomberg, curator of Native American art at the Denver Art Museum, is quoted saying, "Everything in this gallery was new when it was made. . . . I didn't want to separate prehistoric from historic from contemporary.” Yes! This simple statement is powerful. We want our present, our future, and our past, and to acknowledge the continuity between them all. Someday the mainstream art world will accept the fact that Native cultures evolve just like every human culture the earth.

The oddest comment by Rosenbaum was suggesting that museums working with Native advisors can “diminish” art exhibits and cites Nancy Rosoff and Susan Kennedy Zeller’s decision to not display warrior’s shield imbued with medicine in the Brooklyn Museum’s Tipi exhibit. I applaud Rosoff and Zeller for their decision, which honors the deceased warriors, their medicine, and their tribes and protects the audience from exposure to potential danger. By being respectful of culturally sensitive materials, tribes will want to work with these curators in the future and will most likely be more forthcoming with information and artworks to share with the museum.

Rosenbaum suggests the two curators had to “settle” for a fused glass shield by Choctaw artist Marcus Amerman. I would love to “settle” for one of his five-digit glass sculptures, which win awards and are in major collections throughout the country. But a profound ambivalence to contemporary indigenous art permeates all these critiques.

Karlins, N. F. "At the Brooklyn Museum: Tipis of the Brooklyn Plains." Artnet. 2011.

N.F. Karlins, a New York critic and art historian, wrote a highly informative and straightforward piece for Art.net, “At the Brooklyn Museum: Tipis of the Brooklyn Plains.” Karlins discusses gender roles in art, ownership of designs, aesthetics, and changing traditions. One line strikes an strange chord: “…Native Americans had architecture as well as art’’ – are there cultures without architecture? But overall, this is a well-written, concise critique. Of the 11 illustrations, the only contemporary images were two works by Teri Greeves.

Deliso, Meredith. “Home on the Range! Brooklyn Museum Reaches New Heights with Tipi Exhibition.” The Brooklyn Paper. 15 Feb 2011

Melissa Deliso’s description of the Tipi show is enthusiastic, and she took the time to personally interview curator Susan Kennedy Zeller. She writes about a “Southern Shayne tipi.” I make type-o’s and spelling errors too, but I don’t have paid copy editors reading my text. “Cheyenne,” besides being the capital of Wyoming, is a standard word in all computer spellcheckers. In composing her title, Deliso was most likely unaware that Kansas’ state song, “Home on the Range” has a verse devoted to the ethnic cleansing of Natives from Kansas: “The red man was pressed/from this part of the West,/He's likely no more to return/To the banks of Red River where seldom if ever/Their flickering campfires burn”.* Fortunately the ethnic cleansing was unsuccessful and Kansas is home to four federally recognized tribes and Haskell Indian Nations University.

* Higley, Brewster and Dan Kelley. “Kansas State Song: Home on the Range.” State Symbols USA.

Sutton, Benjamin. “The Brooklyn Museum Turns Tipis Inside Out.” The L Magazine. 2 March 2011.

Benjamin Sutton wrote about the functional and conceptual aspects of a tipi and about the complex and interdependent Plains gender roles. He points out that the exhibit included tipi liners painted by Rain-in-the-Face, a 19th century Lakota warrior, and Harvey Pratt, a living Cheyenne Vietnam veteran. He makes the interesting observation that tipis are “places to display pride and admit vulnerability.” Unfortunately, Sutton also seems to be troubled by contemporary Native art, writing that “Contemporary pieces problematize such functions” and is concerned that Crow artist Mary Lou Big Day’s dolls are sold in galleries instead of being played with. So the problem isn’t that Mary Lou Big Day has chosen a potentially utilitarian or “craft” form of art; it’s that they are valuable and featured in art institutions. Maybe the longstanding tradition of highly valuable Japanese ningyō would be an appropriate comparison?

Levin, Ann. “'Tipi: Heritage of the Great Plains’ on view at the Brooklyn Museum.” The Associated Press. Via North Jersey.com. 1 March 2011

Ann Levin wrote a descriptive piece literately with when/where/how much information about the show. She describes practical details of the “tepee” and paraphrases the rules of behavior in a tipi as outlined in the show’s signage. She described lessons Dennis Sun Rhodes (Northern Arapaho) learned from his grandmother and Levin concludes, “Maybe all of us should be living in tepees.” Her description of the show was concise, precise, and thoughtful.

Sutton, Joseph. “Review of the Tipi Exhibit: Wandering the Great Plains at Brooklyn Museum.” Brooklyn Exposed. 21 Feb 2011.

Joseph Sutton is the first writer who comes out and speaks to the unrealistic perspective about Native Americans that is so pervasive in the United States. He mentions that Brooklyn only has 0.3% Native American population, which acknowledges that Brooklyn has a Native American population. Sutton encourages his readers “to satisfy their curiosity of a culture integral to our country’s history.” This is profound; the Native American isn’t the Other. Natives and non-Natives are united by a common national history. Sutton describes Harvey Pratt’s Vietnam War Experiences Tipi Liner and discusses Native military traditions. He talks about earlier works being functional first and aesthetic second. A basket by Arapaho-Seminole artist Carol Emarthle-Douglas (not Carole Emarthele-Douglas),“Gathering of Nations” is presented as an example of the shift towards aesthetics over utility in contemporary Native art. Sutton’s statement that “the basket is strictly art” is huge in a climate when “crafts” are frowned upon.

Sutton writes, “It’s a privilege to have such insight on a culture we do not pay enough attention to outside of stereotypical portrayal in the media.” The “we” implies that the readers cannot be Native themselves, but other than that, his critique was well written and thought out. He suggests the show is didactic, which is a legitimate criticism.

ICTNM Staff. “Brooklyn Exhibit Focuses on Plains Culture.” Indian Country Today. 2 March 2011.

I had hoped to close by writing about Indian Country Today’s assessment of the Tipi exhibit; however, all they had was a brief blurb and a slide show. There’s an enigmatic, uncensored comment questioning Lyle Heavy Runner’s Blackfeet heritage, a subject I know nothing about. But if you want anyone to seriously consider what you have to say, LAY OFF THE CAPS LOCK. Native magazines tend to be uniformly promotional in tone. So no criticism from the Native side, yet… I’ll definitely watch for more Native responses formal and informal. Hopefully a Native critique will be forthcoming.

Meta-Criticism: Responding to the Response to the Tipi: Heritage of the Great Plains at the Brooklyn Museum, Part One

2011-03-22T12:13:00.008-06:00

New York is arguably the center of the art world, and the Brooklyn Museum’s exhibit, Tipi: Heritage of the Great Plains puts Native art, both historic and contemporary, in crosshairs of mainstream art writers. That it received so much attention from art writers is a coup for curators Nancy Rosoff and Susan Kennedy Zeller. However, the quality of much of the writing leaves something to be desired.

Johnson, Ken. “Plains Indian Culture, as Seen Through the Ingenuity of the Tepee.” New York Times. 14 March 2011.

I’ll begin with Ken Johnson’s New York Times review of Tipi: Heritage of the Great Plains, as it stands out as the most flippant and dismissive. He approves, albeit condescendingly, of the historical works but disregards the “kitschy pieces” by living artists.

Johnson’s critique opens with, “You know there’s trouble when the first object you encounter in a museum exhibition looks as if it had been misplaced from the gift shop.” The art piece to which Johnson refers is 21st Century Traditional: Beaded Tipi, a miniature tipi by Teri Greeves (Kiowa-Comanche-Italian), which he describes as “cartoonish” and “cheerfully saccharine.” Art is subjective and certainly he has no obligation to like the piece, but if it’s a true critique, the description should be accurate. The tipi, commissioned by the museum of the show, stands 46” tall and is made of brain-tanned deer hide, various seed and bugle beads, silver, pearls, raw diamonds, copper, cotton, rope, pine, poplar, and bubinga, a tropical African hardwood (Rosoff and Zeller 35). Kitsch refers to work that is cheap and mass-produced; this is a labor-intensive handmade piece with precious and semi-precious materials.

The beaded imagery is celestial (sun, morning star, and moon), zoomorphic (three buffalo), and various Native figures – faceless adults and children, a drum circle with microphone, and dancers. Nothing particularly screams “saccharine” — the palette is bold with the only pastel color being sky blue. Perhaps the imagery of adults holding or walking with children is too sweet? That’s a sad state of human affairs is that is the culprit. Otherwise, the “fault” must lie in the diminutive size of the piece. The art world is rife with size queens.

Johnson writes about the tipi, “the object has a relationship to the historic material that is perplexing at best.” Sorry, the relationship is painfully obvious and the title even underlines the point. The figures are all Plains Indians in 21st century dress—some Kiowa, some intertribal—and the piece shows that songs, dances, familial relations have maintained continuity over the centuries, as have Plains peoples relationships to celestial forces, despite changing technology, as exemplified by the microphone. Miniature tipis have an historical antecedent as young girl’s toys, but in the 20th century, they have increasingly been commissioned by museums. Just as the tipi is portable, the miniature tipi is a portable expression of Plains culture. The piece is upbeat, but that is part of the message: Kiowa people are alive and have much to celebrate. Greeves’ art statements are included in the labels and wall text; however, none of the art writers referred to these texts.

Johnson is disappointed that he believes the show “speaks down to its audience, assuming a low level of sophistication,” but frankly that’s not an inappropriate assumption—very unfortunately non-Natives tend to not have extensive knowledge of Native culture, as Johnson illustrates when he switches his spelling to “tepee” and simultaneously points out that Lyle Heavy Runner (Blackfeet not “Blackfoot” as Johnson writes) created a tipi with a “sacred design…handed down for generations” but describes it as looking “as if it had been borrowed from a roadside souvenir stand.” Which one is it? Apparently Johnson has only encountered tipis at roadside tourist traps and refuses to make the conceptual leap that tipis (and by extension Indians) have an existence independent of tourism and kitsch in the 21st century.

Húŋkpapȟa Lakota Butch Thunder Hawk’s Horse Head Effigy Stick is described by Johnson as resembling “a war club, with a horse-head-shaped business end.” The writer has never heard of the Horse Dance and doesn’t know that when a beloved horse dies, its owner will make or commission a wooden sculpture in the likeness of that horse to carry in ceremonial dances. Fair enough. But if I went to a museum and wasn’t familiar about art form, personally, I would opt to not publicly parade my ignorance; I would either read up or ask questions, but that would require the desire actually to learn about the art form in question.

Johnson suggests that the Native American Church material deserves its own exhibition, because he has never heard of the 2002 traveling exhibit Symbols of Faith and Belief: Art of the Native American Church with a superb catalog. Perhaps Google was down that day?

The gift shop with tipi-related products is repugnant to Johnson in light of “the tragic, still painful history evoked” by the exhibit. These reflect some of the “rules” about Indians that firmly implanted into the mainstream American psyche:

Indians are historic.
Indians are tragic.
Indians are dead.

“The Plains Indian culture that gave rise to these kinds of objects,” Johnson insists “was practically destroyed by the United States government’s campaign to clear land for settlement by white people over a century ago.” But it wasn’t destroyed. The artists Kevin Pourier, Butch Thunder Hawk, Teri Greeves, Lyle Heavy Runner, and others are explicitly spelling this fact out through their art—Plains culture and Plains Indians is alive in the 21st century. These artists still have a relationship to their spirituality, their land, and their people, as well the buffalo, deer, and horse that have been so integral to Plains culture. It is an important message, which was lost on a man wearing his “selective-attention goggles,” but hopefully will not be lost on other museumgoers.

Tipi: Heritage of the Great Plains, Brooklyn Museum website

Adventures in Egg Tempera

2011-03-19T17:04:00.021-06:00

I finally got to answer a question that crosses the mind of every beginning egg tempera painter. Perhaps chicken eggs are the best-suited eggs for painting, but what about other bird's eggs? I finally got the opportunity to deviate from the prescribed course when I found quail eggs for sale at Talin International Market in Albuquerque. Ideally you paint with the freshest, organic eggs available, so it's definitely a risk to paint with quail eggs shipped in from California and have been sitting on shelves for an indeterminate period of time.

Egg tempera is an ancient painting medium using egg yolk as a binder for pigments. The yolk has to be separated completely from the white (paint with egg white paints was used in European medieval manuscripts and is called "glair"). The quail eggshells are quite beautiful, cream with brown speckles and pale blue on the inside. They are softer than chicken eggs and don't break as cleanly. On the plus side, probably due to the smaller surface area, the yolk sac isn't as fragile as a chicken's.

The quail egg yolk handled very much like chicken yolk. I use a 1:1 yolk-water ratio with a drop of vinegar to keep the paint from spoiling quickly. I had a 7"x5" true gesso panel and found an 19th-century tintype of a Cherokee girl from Indian Territory, that was in the public domain, to provide subject matter for this experiment. The underpainting is built up with transparent layers. Ideally you get some paint on your brush, wipe it off, and then create barely perceptible layers, but my patience only goes so far before I finally resort to cross-hatching the top layers. I leave visible brush strokes, but I like the energy this gives the work. Egg tempera is about the least spontaneous art medium I know of.

The handling and the end results of the quail egg tempera were good. The only advantage I can see to painting with quail eggs is the smaller yolks allow you to use exactly as much as you need every time you painting, instead of leaving the remaining yolk mixture in the 'fridge.

Although I've never heard it suggested that precontact peoples in the Americas used egg tempera, many tribes domesticated turkeys, so at least it's possible that egg tempera might have a history here. Indigenous paint binders I do know about include bear grease, lime, blood, squirrel fat, cherry sap, milkweed juice, cucumber juice, and pine pitch. I'd be very curious to know if tribes used rabbit fat or walnut oil as a paint binder.

From Ahalenia

Cheyenne Quilling Society

2011-03-15T00:45:00.012-06:00

For thousands of years, indigenous people created and evaluated art according to our own standards. In the last few centuries, non-Native people have collected, critiqued, categorized, and theorized about Native art to such an extant, that in some venues they temporarily drowned out Native perspectives. Fortunately the tide is turning, with more tribes establishing their own museums, more Native peoples curating their own art shows, and more Native writers contributing to the canon of Native American art history. One window into historical indigenous perspectives on one genre of art can be found in Plain’s women’s quilling societies.

While warrior societies among Plains tribes are well known, many tribes also had artistic guilds. One such guild was the quilling society, which was the most prestigious women’s society among many Plains tribes. Specifically I want to look at the Cheyenne women’s quilling society. The Cheyenne name for their quilling society was Mëëno’istst , which meant “quiller”–specifically “one who applies quills to hide”. Eme e ni means “she sews on quills” (Grinnell 160). The women who belonged to the society were known not only for their artistic skill but also for their moral standing (Western History Association 6).

Quillwork, the aesthetic use of porcupine quills on textiles, hides, and other surfaces, is an art form unique to North America. Quillwork has been popular from coast to coast, taking hold throughout the range of the porcupine. The earliest examples of quills used as binding agents were found in caves in Utah and Nevada, dating back to 530 BCE, and the oldest quillwork found on moccasins date back to the 6th century CE (Palmer 75).

My incomplete understanding is that a cultural hero named the Buffalo Wife first brought the art of quilling to the Plains tribes. Picking Bones Woman, a Cheyenne told the story about Buffalo Wife to anthropologist George Bird Grinnell, and she describe the human man who married Buffalo Wife. This man learned quilling while living among the buffalo. When he returned to Cheyenne society, he created the quillworkers’ society and instructed the women in the sacred protocol of quillwork (Grinnell 163).

The quilling society was an intergenerational institution, with older women instructing younger women. “Not only were the quillwork guilds instructional, but they embodied a religious element as well, not unlike a sisterhood. To join this prestigious society was to assume a station of respect and power” (Her Many Horses and Horse Capture 9). Women created other art forms, which had their own societies, but quillwork was considered the pinnacle of women’s artwork (Williams 70).

The accomplishments of quillers were on par with battle honors among men’s societies (Grinnell 159). As Beatrice Medicine and Patricia Albers write, “[T]he contributions of women were recognized by the Plains peoples, even though they have not been so recognized by anthropologists and art historians. Excellent in craftwork brought prestige and wealth to the woman and to her family” (Albers and Medicine 109). The artist had a place in Cheyenne society.

When the women decided upon a quilling project, a specialized camp crier would publically announce their plans to the whole camp (Grinnell 160). Quills had to be harvested, dyed, and processed. They were softened with saliva and pulled between teeth to flatten.

When a young woman quilled her first robe, she threw a feast. She would sit in the back of the lodge with the elder who instructed her sitting on her right. A poorer member of the tribe would be invited to witness the young woman quill her first robe and this poorer individual would be given a present, often a horse. Afterward if the visitor were a man, he would ride through the camp and sing a song mentioning the young women’s name and that she quilled her first robe (Grinnell 161).

To protect the robe while it was being quilled, a woman would covered her hands with white clay or burnt gypsum (Grinnell 164). If a woman made a mistake when quilling, a ceremony had to be preformed, in which a brave man counted coup on the robe being quilled. The man would say, “And when I scalped him, I did it in this way,” as he cut the errant quills from the robe with a knife owned by the quilling society (Grinnell 166).

To ensure success of a relative or to health someone in ill health, a girl or young woman could create a quilled robe for a healer, religious leader, or warrior in a specific ceremonial manner. The girl would offer a gift to an elder member of the quilling society and ask her help in the project. The elder would respond with a particular ceremony and then she would instruct the girl. Upon successful completion, the girl could attend quilling society feasts and teach others the techniques she learned (Grinnell 160).

At certain gatherings, women would recount the quilling accomplishments, which would be attested to by a witness or said over an arrow or pipe (Grinnell 162).

The elder members of the quilling society “had strict rules in their designs and they kept secret the meaning and arrangement of the colors, as well as the relation of the designs to each other,” as Rodolphe Petter wrote in his 1915 Cheyenne-English Dictionary.

When preparing to quill a hide, a woman might ask an elder to visit her lodge and draw a design on the robe with a stick and white clay, for which she would be given a gift or clothing and food (Grinnell 163).

As Petter wrote, “The designs were always symbolic and talismanic, representing concrete organic objects, whereas the color were more emblematic of the abstract in creatures and creations, e.g., white for active life, very light blue for quietness, peace, serenity (from the cloudless sky); green for growing life; red for warmth, food, blood, home from blood); amber yellow, ripeness, perfection, beauty (from the sunsets); black for cessation of enmity, hostilities (from a dead glow being no more hot)” (Grinnell 168-9).

It’s intriguing that genres within quilling fell into a strict hierarchy. Woman began quilling moccasins, then cradleboards, stars or circular disks for lodges, buffalo robes, then finally lodge linings, backrests, and “possible sacks” (Grinnell 161). Those who completed these increasingly prestigious items increased their own prestige. Quilling an entire lodge by oneself was a great accomplishment but the highest accomplishment was quilling thirty complete buffalo robes. Doing so guaranteed the quiller a “long life full of good fortune" (Neithammer).

The quilling society came to an end in the late 19th century (Her Many Horses and Horse Capture 9), after the Southern Cheyenne relocated to Indian Territory and the Northern Cheyenne moved onto their reservation in Montana. However, quilling itself never died and has never been completely replaced by beadwork.

“Sacred protocol” and “moral standing” are not exactly common art terms today. It’s interesting to consider how many community members were involved in creating quillwork, or repairing it, or celebrating its creation. Wealth was tied to art before the reservation era, as was prestige; however, the nature of wealth is different in a reciprocal society than in a capitalist society. The Cheyenne quilling society is an example of how certain artists were perceived by a tribe and how their work strengthened relationships within the community.

Albers, Patricia and Beatrice Medicine. The Hidden Half: Studies of Plains Indian Women. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983.
Grinnell, George Bird. The Cheyenne Indians: Their History and Ways of Life. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972.
Her Many Horses, Emil and George Horse Capture, eds. Song for the Horse Nation: Horses in Native American Cultures. Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 2006.
Neithammer, Carolyn. Daughters of the Earth: The Lives and Legends of American Indian Women. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977.
Palmer, Jessica Dawn. The Dakota Peoples: A History of the Dakota, Lakota and Nakota through 1863. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008.
Petter, Rudolphe. English-Cheyenne Dictionary. Kettle Falls, WA: Valdo Petter, 1915. Link.
Western History Association. The American West. Volume 10. Cody, WY: Buffalo Bill Historical Center, 1973.
Williams, Lucy Fowler. Guide to the North American Ethnographic Collections at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum, 2003.

For Cheyenne art in the collection of NMAI, including quillwork, click here.

53rd Annual Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair & Market

2011-03-09T22:50:00.008-07:00

The Heard is perfectly timed because, after hibernating all winter, we all want some sun and to see each other. This year bought some structural changes, including an additional 100 artists. The larger tents were so much nicer with fewer tables and more escape routes. The economy kept many seasoned veteran artists at home, giving opportunities to new artists.

One of the first-timers did spectacularly well: thirty-two-year-old Jeremy Frey, a Passamaquoddy basket weaver from Maine, who won Best of Show will his Point Urchin, a gorgeous sweet grass and brown ash basket with unbelievably fine point curls and a lid with a wrapped ring handle. He learned basket weaving from his mother Gal Frey, and, recently, he was awarded a major grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Northeastern artists did well throughout the show. Theresa Second (Penobscot) won third place in baskets, while another newcomer Eric Otter Bacon (Passamaquoddy) won second place. I picked up an incised birch bark piece mounted on wood with black ash splint wraps by Otter Bacon. The way he takes basic design elements from traditional birch bark art and enlarges it to a new abstract form reminds me a bit of Tlingit sculptor James Schoppert’s work with formline elements.

Classification winners included Maria Samora (Taos)–jewelry; Lisa Holt (Cochiti) and Harlan Reano (Santa Domingo)–pottery; Thomas Tapia (Tesuque-Tewa)—painting, drawings, graphics, photography; Stetson Honyumptewa (Hopi)—wooden carvings; Marcus Amerman (Choctaw)—sculpture; Kenneth Williams, Jr. (Arapaho-Seneca)—diverse art forms; and basket classifications have been mentioned above.

I’m quite sure how they worked it but judges also competed, which seems a quite weird. I didn’t have very much inventory so I didn’t bother entering the competition, and I have to say, it was rather nice to not be emotional in the outcomes—I was happy for my friends and pleased to see some amazing work. Randy Kemp (Yuchi) and Ryan Singer (Diné) both had hilarious paintings that won. I was surprised to hear they don’t know each other too way. A show of Kemp, Singer, and Daniel McCoy (Muscogee-Potawatomi), who shares their humorous social commentary, would be a truly great thing.

The Heard is much more relaxed and genteel than Indian Market, although structure changes between the Heard Museum and Heard Museum Guild made for some interesting developments—the funniest being the bathroom cops. Apparently the Heard Museum has an aging plumbing system. May I suggest private donors be solicited to overhaul the system? They could then have plaques on each toilet, dedicated to the enemy of their choice.

The extensive network of demonstrators in the main museum courtyards represented area tribes and were extraordinarily interesting. Jacob Butler of the Pima-Maricopa Cultural Resources Department shared detailed information about etching shell with cactus juice, which I hope to try out some day.

It was great to see everyone – even if fleetingly. Thanks to Andrea Hanley for sharing information about interesting new artists’ works at the Berlin Gallery. I pillaged the new museum bookstore. Thanks to the best booth mates in the world, Marcus and Linda. Thanks to Francis and Jose for their incredible hospitality. Thanks to Staci for being a most excellent traveling companion. Oh yes, and thanks to Linda and Gloria for taking me to IKEA for the first time in my life. And I am still finding oranges in my boxes.

Questionartist #2

2011-02-17T10:36:00.006-07:00

Do you have any advice about writing artist's statements?

It is usually very difficult for artists to write effectively about their own work. There is a good reason for this; they are artists not writers. Having someone else write the artist statement is advised.

Ideally, the artist can work with an art historian, a curator, a gallery owner or even a professional creative writer so that their "authentic" (this work is used with caution) voice and comes through. Although, depending on the person chosen to write about the work, it can get to pompous and be filled with art-speak. It’s a tough call.

The bottom line is that artists need to have someone else write about their work in an effective, non-flowery and honest way. The artist statement can make or break interpretation or a sale.

–Traci L. Morris, PhD (Chickasaw),
Owner/Homahota Consulting,
Policy Analyst/ Native Public Media

Personalize the art form or yourself as an artist. People become involved with art and/or artists, when they can feel a sense of connection.

Make it relevant for others. One of the challenges with specific art genres or niches is that people are looking for ways to make the aesthetics, or content relevant to themselves.

Share the "quirky" or the "behind the scenes" story that shapes the artwork or influences the artist. People are often drawn in by the story that offers some interesting aspect about the process for making the artwork. Keep it simple assuming that the audience is not familiar enough with the process to identify what is the"out-of-the-ordinary" aspect. When I interview an artist I am always interested to uncover what engages them in the process.

One artists relayed that he is actually interpreting traditional songs through very abstract markings and the tools he prefers are not the conventional painting tools such as paint brushes, instead he uses many different kinds of objects we encounter daily to make these markings. Another friend who is a painter is so engrossed in the process of under-painting that there are often many different images, objects and whole paintings buried below the final piece.

A filmmaker friend of mine shared a really funny story about how he solved the dilemma for feeding the actors during the filming with little budget to work with - it involved "a borrowed frybread trailer." This made everyone laugh when they heard the story. I would have loved to have been able to feature a photo of the frybread trailer with the promotions but we couldn't find one. So save everything and document the off the wall stuff, it humanizes the artists or the story and might be the very thing that makes you as an artist stand out from the rest.

Make your statement somewhat relevant to the institution that is featuring your artwork. This really goes back to making it relevant for others. In this case it is making it relevant for the patrons at that particular venue. If your work is going to be featured at MOMA, tweak the statement slightly so that it speaks to the audience that will be viewing your work at that venue or the theme that was used to curate the show. If that same piece travels to the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, there is probably a very different curatorial approach, so find a way to communicate with that in mind.

Find a way to pose questions in your statement that positively encourage the viewer to interact in some way with the work.

—Shoshana Wasserman (Thlopthlocco Tribal Town
and the Muscogee (Creek) Nation),
Director of Marketing & Public Relations,
American Indian Cultural Center and Museum

Denver Art Museum in the News

2011-02-13T23:22:00.012-07:00

The Denver Art Museum just completed a massive renovation of their Native American galleries. The changes were heralded by a number of newspaper articles, including front page of the New York Times (thanks to M for point this out!). It’s heartening to see intelligent conversation about Native American art and the issues of its display in the mainstream media.

Roxanne Swentzell (Santa Clara Pueblo) is spending the next six months working on a monumental straw and clay sculpture, Mud Woman Rolls On. This beautifully drives home the point that Native art is alive and evolving, since visitors witnessed the construction as soon at they enter the third floor gallery.

Most of the articles focused on the museum’s and specifically Curator of Native Arts Nancy Blomberg’s efforts in presenting the work as art instead of ethnography, and de-emphasizing the history. For instance, the work is not arranged chronologically (Ellingboe). A common criticism of the National Museum of the American Indian was that it presented little or no history, but personally. Personally, I think that is fantastic. Not that learning our histories isn’t incredibly important, but it’s also important to drive home to the general public the fact Native Americans are living today. In one of their displays, DAM directly asks the viewers, “what is Indian art? Must it be old? Must it be functional?” (Ellingboe).

Several of the articles also focused on the museums’ efforts to attribute works to specific artists and list their names. Through persistence in research, Blomberg identified the creator of a 19th century representational ink-and-watercolor painting of a Ute Bear Dance. After visiting other museums and asking Colorado tribes, she happened to notice a similar styled painting in a Bonhams and Bonhams catalog that was sign "Fenno," which enabled her to identify the artist as being Louis Fenno, a Ute painter who passed on in 1903 (Dobrzynski).

Traditionally many artists did not sign their works. The Western notions of the lone artist superstar doesn’t translate well to Native American art world, and I can’t imagine an Indian Damien Hirst. For the most part, friends and family keep people’s egos in check; however, attributing art is good because it humanizes the work. For most of last four centuries, Western collectors and others have exoticized Native American art, so the pendulum swinging towards humanity is a great thing.

DAM doesn’t throw out the baby with the bathwater: directly after the artists’ name, when known, is their tribal affiliation, then date (Macmillan). They provide contextualizing information about the subject matter and the piece’s provenance — telling the stories that draw in viewer’s who might have minimal experience with Native art.

Ironically on the subject of attribution, the New York Times mistakenly gave the wrong name for the current president of NAASA, Karen Kramer Russell. But this illustrates that it’s better to try, and some mistakes on the way that can be corrected, than not even make the effort. Scholars are other institutions have been able to attribute art even back to the 18th century.

Congratulations to the Denver Art Museum on their two new Native galleries and kudos and thanks to the art writers for bring Native American art issues to the reading public.

Davis, Joyce. “Going Native: American Indian exhibits relaunch in Denver.” Daily Reporter-Herald. 4 Feb 2011. Web.
Dobrzynski, Judith H. “Honoring Art, Honoring Artists: Denver Museum Uses Scholarship To Attribute Native American Works To Individuals, Not Just To Tribes.” New York Times. 6 Feb 2011: 1. Web.
Judith Dobrzynski also has a daily blog.
“Corrections: Arts & Leisure.” New York Times. 12 Feb 2011. Web.
Ellingboe, Sonya. “Display showcases American Indian art.” Highlands Ranch Herald. 4 Feb 2011. Web.
Macmillan, Kyle. “Denver Art Museum offers a new way to see American Indian art.” Denver Post. 21 Jan 2011. Web.
Photos of Louis Fenno (Ute, d. 1903) and his family at the Mountain West Digital Library.

Heather Ahtone: Designed to Last

2011-02-07T21:47:00.012-07:00

“Designed to Last: Striving toward an Indigenous American Aesthetic”
The International Journal of the Arts in Society. Volume 4, Number 2, 2009: 373-386.
Heather Ahtone (Choctaw-Chickasaw)

When I got my hands on “Designed to Last,” I handed it out to people like Chick tracts. So many people write about the need to assess Indigenous American art based on indigenous values; however, this essay was the first time I have ever seen anyone propose a way to do so. I will attempt to summarize her main points.

Choctaw-Chickasaw scholar Heather Ahtone is a doctoral candidate at Kansas University and a research associate for the University of Oklahoma’s Diversity in Geosciences Project. She draws upon the traditional knowledge of her relatives, tribespeople, and members of other tribes to complement her academic studies.

Ahtone was conducting research for the American Indian Cultural Center and Museum, when a Ponca man explained to her how the design of his floral beaded pipe bag was a map with a related hunting song (373). This revelation crystallized the complexity of Indigenous American art for her.

In the past scholarship of Indigenous America art came from a Eurocentric perspective. Art historians examined art collected with little information or cultural context or judged the art solely by its decorative. This formalist approach, popular in the Modern Era, barely skims the surface of the artwork’s meaning. The need for Indigenous methodologies in art history is clear. Donald Fixico (Shawnee-Sac & Fox-Muscogee Creek-Seminole) writes, “The scholar must consider the worldview of an Indian group to comprehend its members’ sense of logic and ideology” (374). Aaron Fry writes that “…after 150 years of ethnographic studies of Pueblo peoples, art historical examinations of twentieth-century Pueblo arts have failed to fully engage Pueblo concepts and perspectives on the production of these arts” (374). Western scholars often tend to divide ancient or contemporary Native art, instead of acknowledging the cultural continuity between the works.

In his article “In Search of Native American Aesthetics,” Leroy N. Meyer describes tribal cultures as “deeply integrated, unlike the fragmented, cosmopolitan culture of the dominant society” (375). Indigenous art cannot be separated from philosophy, spirituality, or daily life—different expressions of Indigenous cultures are integrated and complement each other.

Steven Leuthold proposed a framework for understanding Native art in his book, Indigenous Aesthetics: Native Art, Media, and Identity (University of Texas Press, 1998), that “addresses the relationship between aesthetics and other cultural realms with reducing one realm to the other. In this sense an artwork can be valued for its expressiveness, complexity, creativity, or formal structure… without artificially separating the experience of art from other valuative dimensions of experience: the moral, economic, political, interpersonal, or spiritual” (376). Leuthold’s methodology makes it clear that Western art theory, as Ahtone writes “serves to seek out point of distinction and difference, to use a linear approach to hierarchy for identifying culturally based expressions” (376). Leuthold applies his method to indigenous film and video, but Ahtone wonders if his approach would work the non-Western media of tribally specific traditional arts.

Instead of focusing on points of difference, Ahtone suggests that Indigenous art theory should be based on “finding relationships and shared commonalities” (376) She writes, “The use of relationships is a part of the coded language embedded in all aspects of Indigenous American culture” (376). These relationships can be expressed through “living metaphors” that are expressed through visual arts, dance, song, and oral history. Relationships of natural forces, including humans, reflect two fundamental values in indigenous society: balance and reciprocity. Balance, or harmony, reflects “the mutually dependent relationship that all forms of life have with each other.” Reciprocity is expressed through generosity and “the necessary acts of generosity that maintain balance between interacting forces, including human, natural, and spiritual” (377). Together these are part of “an interdependent pattern that extends like a spider web and draws strength form the interdisciplinary, yet tangible connections” (377). Looking at Indigenous aesthetic, one should also study science, humanities, religion, politics, and other disciplines because an integrated, interconnected, interdisciplinary approach will enhance one’s understand of all these and other fields.

“The traditional knowledge of Indigenous American culture, largely anchored to concepts of regeneration and reciprocity, is expressed and practiced in a network of symbols, metaphors, and myths,” Ahtone writes, which manifest in “ceremonies, prayers, songs, dances, and the arts—largely communal experiences” (377). Regeneration, or renewal, also play a key role in indigenous cultures.

Art materials can have intrinsic meanings and significance in Native art. Many indigenous art forms are made from materials gathered from the natural environment. A protocol of reciprocity often guides the gathering of the material, which reflects the artist’s relationship to the land or water. For example, indigenous California basket weavers have specific songs for gathering certain plants and observe strict menstrual taboos. Ahtone gives the example of Southwestern potters praying and giving offerings before gathering clay. The clay is often shaped into a hollow round form with a circular opening, resembling the earth and the emergence of the people from the underground to the surface. Designs painted on the clay can reference natural phenomena such as weather patterns. “Through this process of reverence and utilization of materials,” writes Ahtone, “many Indigenous people share a reverence for the objects based just on materials alone that is without comparison in the Western culture” (379).

Indigenous artists might use new designs with traditional materials, or they might use traditional designs with new materials, but either way, they are “expanding the visual dialogue about the Indigenous experience”—as opposed to departing from it (379). Ahtone credits art’s ability to convey traditional knowledge and spiritual beliefs as one of the reasons tribal cultures have survived despite centuries of colonialist suppression (379).

Metaphors—symbols used to represent related concepts or objects—are central to Indigenous art. The metaphoric mind—an intuitive mind in direct communication with the subconscious and nature—can perceive “beyond the limitations of our rational mind” (380). The symbols that create a metaphoric narrative were created and regenerated over generations. They represent natural forces and cosmological, both of which are timeless and interconnected. Many tribes’ oral histories contain both the past, present, and future, and much Native art is equally timeless in scope.

Leroy Little Bear (Blackfoot) writes, “The Native American paradigm is comprised of and includes ideas of constant motion and flux, existence consisting of energy waves, interrelationships, all things being animate, space/place, renewal and all things being imbued with spirit” (381). In this state of flux, symbols “provide anchoring points for Indigenous peoples to acknowledge and be reassured that their current dilemmas and circumstances are no more than an evolution of the difficulties and bounties shared by their ancestors,” write Ahtone (381).

The strength of symbols is that they can have multiple interpretations, and the artist can add their own personal meanings to the larger cultural meanings. These multiple readings enhance each other. This flexible and additive nature of symbolism helps Indigenous American arts “serve as a conduit for cultural perpetuity” (382). The repeated use of symbols invites personal memories to become attached to them and can invite self-reflection. An example new symbols being created is Seminole and Muscogee patchwork, which is a 20th century development. Seminole patchwork developed as an art form primarily in the 1920s and 1930s. By creating colorful appliqué patterns from scraps, Seminole women could create beautiful attire for themselves and their families during hard economic times. The patchwork designs were given names connected to natural forces, such as lightning or storms. Stories related to the imagery followed, and clans connected to the natural phenomena adopted certain designs. Worn during dances, state occasions, and ceremonies, the patchwork patterns become intertwined with self-identity and tribal self-determination.

The ability of these multilayered, collective and personal symbols, metaphors, and content-laden materials to relay cultural knowledge is reflected in many Indigenous artists’ statements. Ahtone cites the artist statement of the late Michael Kabotie (Hopi) as a prime example. He painted the Hopi feathered serpent, which, as Ahtone writes, “represents the dynamic between heaven and earth and the constant power struggle between these two energy sources” (383). In his work, the feathered serpent also speaks to our dangerous dependence on oil—a contemporary interpretation of a timeless symbol.

In oral societies, the arts have served as a visual language and connect tribal members across space and time. Ahtone concludes, “Using this aesthetic, those concepts of the metaphoric mind, uses of symbols and myths, within a culturally specific context, allows for a discussion about the art that incorporates the metaphysical without becoming romantic or sentimental” (383-4). She invites critical review and is currently putting her methodologies to work in critiquing contemporary Indigenous American art.

The entire essay can be ordered through: The International Journal of the Arts in Society.

Heather Ahtone is presenting her paper, “Reading Beneath the Surface: Joe Feddersen’s Parking Lot” at the College Art Association Conference in New York on Wednesday, February 9, 2011.

The Michael Kabotie interview is online here.

In Session: Jolene Rickard and Lucy Lippard In Conversation

2011-01-30T23:59:00.012-07:00

“In Session: Conversations with Contemporary Native Artists and Scholars” is a lecture series organized by the Museum of Contemporary Arts. Jolene Rickard (Tuscarora) is an Associate Professor at Cornell University, a visual historian, artist, curator, and scholar of Indigeneity on a global scale. Lucy Lippard, art critic and curator, has written 21 books, is a Guggenheim fellow, and lives in Galisteo, New Mexico

Lippard met Rickard three decades ago at the American Indian Community House (AICH), when it was on Broadway in the SOHO strip of New York City. Rickard and Peter Jemison (Seneca) then introduced Lucy to the Native American art world. Native art history books don’t place time period in context, but Rickard observed a disempowerment of Native artists then, especially in comparison to African-American artists. She cites the lack of theoretical tools and a “lack of recognition of a discrete indigenous political space” as contributing factors to this disempowerment. Now, the art world’s strategy to deal with Native art is for “artists to be seamlessly integrated into the international art scene” without cultural context, which results in “erasure,” Rickard observes. However, Lippard frequently encounters Native artists who actively want to be part of the mainstream.

Rickard is currently at Cornell and focused on intercultural analysis — a center-fringe analysis. She has traveled to indigenous communities beyond those in Canada and United States, as well as exploring the biennial art circuit. She says the situations in Central and South America is dramatically different from the situation north of the Rio Grande. Indigeneity in Australia, Africa, and Indian are highly complex, especially in countries where ostensibly the indigenous population is the majority. Despite the challenges, “if we don’t mark spaces,” Rickard says, “the other side of it is erasure.” Land is the defining concept for indigenous peoples, and she says, “We need to maintain these land bases.” The Maori are ahead of theorizing their own work.

“There will always be artists directed towards satisfying collectors in a particular way,” but Rickard does not write about those artists. “Our work articulates our philosophy. If an artist has a thin knowledge of this philosophy, they aren’t serving their community.” Rickard says, “Inserting yourself back into your community and maintaining a dialogue, you effect the people around you.” She says her tribe is “always willing to take people back in,” but when one returns to their tribal community, they do not return as an expert.

No artists are unanimously accepted by their home communities, so Rickard points out that it’s wrong to expect that of Native artists. “Our communities aren’t perfect,” she says and wants the next generation of artists and writers to critique the problems and challenges the stereotypes. “That has to be an indigenous writer,” says Lippard. Rickard disagrees, but that would have to be an incredibly thick-skinned non-Native writer to try to write about what’s wrong with a Native community

Native Americans are a comparatively small percentage of the United States’ population, globally indigenous people are a huge population and merit serious scholarship. The primary texts are still lacking in the indigenous art world. Lippard points out that the scholarship is happening in other fields, but points out, “Art is decontextualized when it enters the art world.” Once the underlying information is broached, people complain because, “they aren’t talking art.” A challenge of discussing indigenous art in the Americas, Rickard observes, one has to talk about colonialism—which the art world is reluctant to do.

"To be a post-colonial scholar is dubious,” Rickard says. “To the powers that be,” Lippard concludes. The public is happy enough to look at contemporary indigenous art but is not always prepared or willing to deconstruct colonialism, as it is seen as being too divisive. Lippard wonders if artists have more “wiggle room” on the subject than writers, and notices that post-colonial writers are going into teaching or art making.

Native artists in the United States maintain an adversarial relationship with the government. Rickard feels that First Nations artists in Canada, with the exception of the Haudenosaunee, appear to be more integrated with their government and part of the Crown. Continuing with the idea of sovereignty, Rickard points out that the Czech Republic has allowed a Six Nations girl’s team enter the country with their Six Nations passports. Hillary Clinton was supportive of other countries honoring Six Nations passports, but the United Kingdom refused — possibly due to an Anglo-Canadian agreement. “Canadian indigenous peoples have less rights than indigenous peoples in the United States,” she says.

Some indigenous groups that Rickard has observed, such as the Brazilian Yanonamo “don’t care what the rest of the world is doing. They move ahead with their own cultural projects.” The indigenous people of Taiwan have their own television station and are better versed about current issues of indigenous peoples across the globe than anyone else.

Rickard was asked about her plans for an upcoming scholarly journal of indigenous arts, and she says she is working on a website and wants to write about artists that don’t already have a monograph book about them. Certainly something to look forward to in the future!

Who's on First?

2011-01-28T14:30:00.004-07:00

When I interned at the Jacobson House Native Art Center, I was instructed to tell visitors how the Kiowa Six were the first Native artists to exhibit and achieve international recognition in the art world, when they exhibited at the 1928 First International Art Exposition in Prague, Czechoslovakia. Although their European exhibitions were an important milestone in Native American art history, it simply isn't true that they were the first. My copy of Tamara Leigerot Elder's Lumhee Holot-Tee: The Art and Life of Acee Blue Eagle states on its back cover that Acee "Blue Eagle was the first Indian artist to actively pursue a solo career as an artist, dependent upon his artwork for his livelihood." However, this is also not true. Edmonia Lewis (African-Mississauga Ojibwe) is the easiest example to refute these two previous statements, since she achieved remarkable success as a fine sculptor in Rome in the 1870s. But more importantly, Indigenous Americans artists have been trading their art work for tens of thousands of years, across nations and even across continents (South and North America and from Alaska to Asia).

Because so much interest in Native art flowered in 1930s, much of the art writing focuses on that time period and dismisses anything that occurred beforehand. I cannot count the number of articles I've read that present the Santa Fe Indian School's Studio program as being the first Native American art program. Actually almost all Indian boarding school had art programs at the turn of the century and several date back into the 19th century. At the dawn of the 20th century, Quechua artists studied at the Escuela de Bellas Artes in Quito, Ecuador and several studied in Europe. But before these schools, fine arts were taught through master-apprenticeships and through families, exactly how they were taught throughout the rest of the world. Hopefully today, scholars of Native art will hesitate to place the word "first" before any achievement by a Native artist.

Timeline of Native American Art History

2011-01-26T20:45:00.012-07:00

This handy timeline comes from Wikipedia (with some correction and additions) and is public domain (yay!). The citations are on the original site. It's a chronological list of significant or pivotal moments in the development of Native American art or the visual arts of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Earlier dates, especially before the 18th century, are mostly approximate. Feel free to add to or change any listings.

Before Common Era

11,000 BCE: Mammoth bone etched with a profile image of a walking mammoth left near Vero Beach, Florida is the oldest known art in the Americas

10,200 BCE: Cooper Bison skull is painted with a red zigzag in present day Oklahoma, becoming the oldest known painted object in North America.

9250–8950 BCE: Clovis points - thin, fluted projectile points created using bifacial percussion flaking - are created by Clovis culture peoples in the Plains and Southwestern North America

9250–8550 BCE: Monte Alegre culture rock paintings created at Caverna da Pedra Pintada become the oldest known paintings in South America.

8000 BCE: Fiberwork left in Guitarrero Cave, Peru is the earliest known example of textiles in South America

7650 BCE: Cave painting in the Toquepala Caves, Peru

7370±90: Stenciled hands are painted with mineral inks at the Cueva de las Manos, near Perito Moreno, Argentina, as well as images of humans, guanacos, rheas, felines, other animals, geometric shapes, the sun, and hunting scenes

7300 BCE: A painted herringbone design from Tecolate Cave in the Mojave Desert of California is the earliest well-dated pictograph in North America.

5630 BCE: Ceramics left at Caverna da Pedra Pintada, Brazil are the earliest known ceramics in the Americas.

2885 BCE: Valdivia culture pottery is created in coastal Ecuador

2600-2000 BCE: Monumental architecture, including platform mounds and sunken courtyards, built in Caral, Supe Valley; Asia; Aspero; Salinas de Chao; El Paraíso; La Galgada; and Kotosh, Peru

2500-1800 BCE: Elaborate twined textiles are created at Huaca Prieta in northern coastal Peru, part of the Norte Chico civilization

2000-1000 BCE: Poverty Point culture in northeastern Louisiana features stone work, flintknapping, earthenware, and effigy, conical, and platform mounds, as well as pre-planned settlements on concentric earthen ridges

1500 BCE-250 CE: Maya art is created in their Preclassic Period, in central and southeastern Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador

1400-400 BCE: Olmec culture thrives in Norte Chico, the tropical lowlands of Mexico. Their art includes colossal basalt heads, jade sculpture, carved writing in stones, and ceramic effigy jars.

1000-900 BCE: The Cascajal Block is carved with writing by the Olmec people, becoming the earliest known example of writing in the Americas

1000-200 BCE: Adena culture, known for its mound building, originates in Ohio and expands to Indiana, West Virginia, Kentucky, and parts of Pennsylvania and New York.

900 BCE: Construction begins on Chavín de Huantar, a Chavín city in Callejón de Conchucos, Peru

900-200 BCE: Chavín synthesis flourishes in central coastal Peru and is characterized by monumental architecture, goldsmithing, stirrup spout ceramics, and Karwa textiles.

750-100 BCE: Paracas culture flourishes in south coastal Peru

730 BCE: Porcupine quills used as binding agent in Utah and Nevada.

500 BCE: Zapotec civilization emerges in the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico. They are known for their ceramics, jewelry, and stonework.

200 BCE-500 CE: The Hopewell tradition flourishes in Ohio, Ontario, and surrounding area, featuring ceramics, cut mica, weaving, carved pipes, and jewelry.

Common era

1: Ancestral Taíno people paint over 6,000 pictographs in the Pomier Caves in the Dominican Republic
1-600: Moche culture flourishes in northern coastal Peru, characterized by monumental adobe mounds, murals, metalwork, and ceramics
1-700: Nasca culture thrives in southern coastal Peru, characterized by double spout and bridge vessels and the Nasca lines, monumental geoglyphs
200-700: Maya civilization's Classic Period. Architecture, painting, stone glyphic writing, books, painting, ceramics, and Maya textiles created in central and southeastern Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador
400-900: Tiwanaku culture emerges from Lake Titicaca and spreads to southern Peru, eastern Bolivia, and northern Chile
500-900: Wari culture dominates central coastal Peru
755±65—890±65: likely dates of the Blythe Geoglyphs being sculpted by ancestral Quechan and Mojave peoples in the Colorado Desert, California
800-1500: Mississippian cultures flourish in the Eastern Woodlands, featuring ceramics, shell engraving, textiles, woodcarving and stonework.
900: Earliest event recorded in the Battiste Good (1821–22, Sicangu Lakota) Winter count
1000: Island of Marajó flourishes as an Amazonian ceramic center
1000-1200: Dresden Codex written and illuminated. This Yucatecan Mayan codex from Chichén Itzá is the earliest known surviving book from the Americas
1000-1200: Acoma Pueblo and Old Oraibi are established, become the oldest continuously inhabited communities in the present day United States.
1070: Great Serpent Mound built in Ohio.
1100: Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon reaches apex in size at 800 rooms
1100-1470: Chimú culture thrives in Chimor, today's north coastal Peru. Their art is characterized by monochromatic pottery; fine metal working of copper, gold, silver, bronze, and tumbago (copper and gold); and monumental abode construction in their capital city Chan Chan
1100: Hohokam Culture reaches apex in present day Arizona
1142: Wampum invented by Ayenwatha, which the Haudenosaunee used to record information.
1200-1533: Inca civilization originated in the Peruvian highlands and spreads across western South America
1250: Cliff Palace, Mesa Verde, and other Ancestral Pueblo architectural complexes reach their apex
1325-1521: The Aztec Empire thrives, based in Tenochtitlan, central Mexico. Their arts are characterized by monumental stone architecture, turquoise mosaics, stone carving, ceramics, cotton textiles, and Aztec codices
1430: Construction of Machu Picchu begins, a classic example of Incan architecture
1479: Aztec Sun Stone, a monolithic calendar stone, almost 12 feet in diameter, is carved
1492: Glass beads are introduced to Taíno people
1500: Muspa people flourishes in Key Marco, Florida, and their art is characterized by woodcarving, painting, incised ceramics, and netted textiles
1500-1800: Navajo people learn loom-weaving techniques from Pueblo people
1600-1615: Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (Quechua) illustrates his 1,189-page book, El primer nueva corónica [sic] y buen gobierno.
1600-1650: Fernando de Alva Cortés Ixtlilxochitl (Texcocan, 1568/1580-1648) illustrates the Codex Ixtlilxochitl with watercolor paintings
1688: European and Mestizo members of the Cuzco School part ways with the Indian painters, allowing them to develop their own styles.
1725: Quebec Grey nuns and Mi'kmaq women devise new floral appliqué techniques in moose hair embroidery

19th century

1820s: Haida argillite carving emerges, in the wake of the declining Fur trade
1820s: Tuscarora brothers David and Dennis Cusick, both self-taught artists, begin painting, founding the Iroquois Realist Movement
1825: Ursuline nuns teach floral embroidery to Métis and Dene women in Fort Chipewyan and Winnipeg, which will revolutionize Great Lakes quillwork, embroidery, and beadwork
1830-1900: Tribes near Niagara Falls create beadwork whimsies, birch bark boxes, and other art forms, jumpstarting an active souvenir trade, following the decline in the fur trade
1840s: Zacharie Vincent (Huron, 1815–1886) begins his career as a realist oil painter
1826/8: David Cusick (ca. 1780-ca. 1831) published his self-illustrated Sketches of Ancient History of the Six Nations.
1853: Atsidi Sani (ca. 1830-1918) becomes the first known Navajo silversmith
1858-1869: Aron of Kangeq (1822–1869), a Kalaallit sculptor and carver, paints over 300 watercolors about traditional lifeways in Greenland, later to be published in books
1860s: Depletion of buffalo and forced relocation onto reservations causes Plains Indians to shift from hide painting to painting and drawing on cloth and paper, giving birth to Ledger art
1876: Mississauga Ojibwe sculptor Edmonia Lewis is the talk of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia for her monumental marble sculpture, The Death of Cleopatra.
1870-1900: Navajo weavers incorporate new Eyedazzler patterns and Germantown yarns.
1875-1878: Southern Plains artists imprisoned at Fort Marion become prolific Ledger artists
1885-1890: Nampeyo and her husband Lesou (Hopi) revive Sikyátki style pottery
1885-1905: Alaska native arts thrive in the curio trade precipitated by the Klondike Gold Rush
1890s: Silver Horn (Kiowa, 1860/1-1940) creates paintings for anthropologist James Mooney
1895: John Leslie (Puyallup) published a book of his photography at Carlisle Indian School and exhibits his photographs at the Atlanta International Exposition
1899: Tsimshian photographer Benjamin Haldane establishes a professional photography studio in Metlakatla, Alaska

20th century

1904: Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, Missouri features Native American art, such as paintings by Silver Horn (Kiowa)
1906-1915: Ho-Chunk artist Angel De Cora serves as director of Carlisle Indian School's Native American art program
1906: Carlisle Indian School builds state-of-the-art photography school and offers photography classes to its Native students
1910s: Maria Martinez (1881–1980, San Ildefonso Pueblo) revives her tribe's blackware ceramics
1910-1932: San Ildefonso Pueblo Painting Movement thrives in New Mexico, led by artists Crescencio Martinez, Julian Martinez, Alfredo Montoya, Tonita Peña, Alfonso Roybal, and Abel Sanchez
1914: Louisa Keyser, Washoe basket maker, experiences peak of her fame
1915: Iñupiaq men invent baleen basketry
1916: In a controversial move, Navajo weaver Hastiin Klah (1867–1937) incorporates Yeibichei imagery into a rug
1917: Quechua photographer Martín Chambi establishes his own photography studio in Peru
1917-1930s: Seminole women in Florida develop their unique patchwork appliqué designs
1918: Julian Martinez (San Ildefonso Pueblo) invents the matte-on-glossy blackware ceramic technique
1920s: The Kwakwaka'wakw Four (Chief George, Charley George, Sr., Willie Seaweed, and George Walkus) collaborate to revive and modernize Kwakwaka'wakw art
1922: Social Indigenist movement begins in Peru and thrives for three decades
1922: First Santa Fe Indian Market held, sponsored by the Museum of New Mexico
1926: Indigenist Movement formed in Ecuador by Camilo Egas, Oswaldo Guayasamín, and other Quechua and Mestizo artists
1927: First Nations art exhibited with Euro-Canadian art in the Exhibition of the Canadian West Coast Art in the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa
1928: Kiowa Five participate in the International Art Congress in Prague, Czech Republic
1931: Exposition of Indian Tribal Art opens at the Grand Central Art Galleries in New York City
1932: Kiowa Five participate in the Venice Biennale. Their art, according to Dorothy Dunn, "was acclaimed the most popular exhibit among all the rich and varied displays assembled."
1932: Professor Mary Stone McClendan "Ataloa" (Chickasaw, 1895–1967) founds the Ataloa Art Lodge, a Native American art center at Bacone College, in Muskogee, Oklahoma
1932: The Studio at the Santa Fe Indian School is established by Dorothy Dunn
1934: Arts and Crafts of the Indians of the Southwest opens at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco
1936: Indian Arts and Crafts Board created in the US
1938: Osage Nation establishes the oldest continuing tribal museum in Pawhuska, Oklahoma
1939: Many Native artists participate in the 1939 New York World's Fair including realist landscape painter Moses Stranger Horse (Brulé Lakota, 1890–1941) and Fort Sill Apache sculptor Allan Houser (1914–1994)
1939: Hopi artist Fred Kabotie curates a Native American art show at the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco
1941: Indian Art of the United States exhibition shows at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City
1946: Qualla Arts and Crafts is founded on the Qualla Boundary in North Carolina by Eastern Band Cherokee artists, becoming the first arts and crafts cooperative founded by Native Americans in the US
1948: Allan Houser completes his first monumental sculpture at the Haskell Indian School in Lawrence, Kansas
1950s and 1960s: Maya weaving cooperatives established by the Mexican government
1957: West Baffin Eskimo Co-op Ltd., an Inuit graphic arts workshop, is founded by James Archibald Houston in Cape Dorset, Nunavut.
1958: Yanktonai Dakota artist Oscar Howe (1915–1983) writes his famous letter after his work was rejected from the Philbrook Museum art show for not being "Indian" enough
1958: Heard Museum Guild hosts their first annual Indian Fair and Market in Phoenix, Arizona
1958-1962: Norval Morrisseau (Ojibwe) develops Woodlands Style painting in Ontario
1962: The Institute of American Indian Arts is founded in Santa Fe, New Mexico
1965: University of Alaska, Fairbanks creates their Native Arts Program
1967: Red Cloud Indian School in Pine Ridge, South Dakota hosts its first annual juried, competitive, intertribal art show which continues today
1971: The Cherokee Heritage Center in Park Hill, Oklahoma hosts the first Trail of Tears art show, an annual juried, competitive, intertribal art show which also continues today
1971: The Institute of American Indian Arts Museum (now called the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts) is founded by the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, as the only museum to focus on contemporary intertribal Native American art
1972: Two American Painters shows at the Smithsonian Institution's National Collection of Fine Arts in Washington, DC, featuring T. C. Cannon (Kiowa-Caddo-Choctaw) and Fritz Scholder (Luiseño)
1977: Sna Jolobil (House of the Weaver) in San Cristobal de Las Casas, Mexico becomes the first artist-run Mayan weaving cooperative
1990: Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act passed in the US
1990: American Indian Arts and Crafts Act passed in the US
1992: Crow's Shadow Institute of the Arts, a center for fine printmaking, is founded by Walla Walla artist James Lavadour on the Umatilla Indian Reservation.
1992: Eiteljorg Museum hosts their first annual Indian Market and Festival
1995: Edward Poitras (Plains Cree) represents Canada at the Venice Biennale, with Gerald McMaster (Plains Cree) curating.
1999: Native American Arts Alliance, curated by Nancy Mithlo (Chiricahua Apache) sponsors Native American artists Harry Fonseca, Bob Haozous, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Kay WalkingStick, Frank LaPena, Richard Ray Whitman, and poet Simon Ortiz in the Venice Biennale

21st century

2000: Mapuche printmaker Santos Chávez is granted the Altazor award and named "illustrious son" of Tirúa, Chile
2004: National Museum of the American Indian opens its doors in Washington, DC
2005: James Luna (Luiseño) represents NMAI at the Venice Biennale.
2006: Chile hosts its first Biennial of Indigenous Art and Culture in Santiago, featuring over 120 artists from Chile's nine indigenous groups.
2006: The first Bienal Intercontinental de Arte Indigena (Intercontinental Indigenous Arts Biennial) is held in Quito, Ecuador, which continues today
2009: Pottery by Jereldine Redcorn (Caddo), who single handedly revived her tribe's ceramic tradition, is exhibited in the Oval Office of the White House

A Glimpse into 16th Century Nahuatl Art Theory

2011-01-24T23:22:00.013-07:00

Since the majority of Indigenous Americans did not have writing before the 16th century, oral history, songs, dances, and visual art record precontact philosophies, history, and worldviews. In Mesoamerica, writing dates back 3,000 years, beginning with the Olmecs. Mayan, Mixtec, and Aztec peoples created vast libraries of books; however, many of these were burned by Spanish invaders. From the surviving manuscripts, or codices, we can glean a little of early Mesoamerican thought, including their views about art. Below are some excerpts from Nahuatl poetry recorded after Spanish contact.

Here through art I shall live forever...
A singer, from my heart I strew my songs
I carve a great stone, I paint thick wood
My song is in them…
I shall leave my song-image on earth (Brotherston 160).

Toltecayootl a ycaya ninemiz ye nicã ayyo.
Ac ya nechcuiliz ac ye nohuan oyaz onicas a anniihcuihuana ayayyan cuica-nitl y yehetl y noxochiuh nõcuicayhuitequi on teixpã ayyo.
Hueyn tetl nictequin Tomahuac quahuitl nic ycuiloa yã cuicatl ytech aya oncan no mitoz in quemanõ in can niyaz nocuicamachio nicyacauhtiaz in tlpc (Bierhorst 220).

–Nahuatl poem (circa 1570)
Cantares Mexicanos, fol. 27r-27v

The Cantares Mexicanos is a collection of lyrical poetry from the courts of the Triple Alliance (Aztec). The manuscript is in the collection of the Biblioteca Nacional de México in Mexico City. Approximately one and a half million people speak Nahuatl today.

The Artist

The artist: disciple, abundant, multiple, restless.
The true artist, capable, practicing, skillful;
maintains dialogue with his heart, meets things with his mind.

The true artist: draws out all from his heart;
works with delight, makes things with calm, with sagacity,
works like a true Toltec, composes his objects, works dexterously, invents; arranges material, adorns them, makes them adjust.

The carrion artist: works at random, sneers at the people,
makes things opaque, brushes across the surface of the face of things, works without care, defrauds people, is a thief.

-Nahuatl poem from the Codex Matritensis,
fol. 115 v. (208), ca. 1540—1585

Miguel León Portilla writes that artists had a central role in Mesoamerican society, and “they had to learn to converse with their own hearts.” He writes that since the painters manifested sacred imagery into their artworks, they strove to become Yolteotl or “one with God in his heart” (Portilla 209). The above poem comes from the Codex Martritensis, also known as the Florentine Codex, which is a collection of a dozen books written between 1540 and 1585. Other Nahuatl poems from the Codex Matritensis describe jewelers and metalsmiths, stonemasons, textile artists, and potters. These poems juxtapose the habits of worthy artists with inept artists, described as “careless,” “greedy,” or “like a turkey with a shrouded heart” (208). In describing great artists, one such poem says, “The artists knew how to place them,/truly they put their deified heart into them./What they made was marvelous, precious/worthy of admiration” (211).

Bierhorst, John. Cantares Mexicanos: Songs of the Aztecs. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1985.
Brotherston, Gordon. Book of the Fourth World: Reading the Native Americas through their Literature. Cambridge, UK: University of Cambridge, 1992.
Inman, Mason. "Oldest Writing in New World Discovered, Scientists Say." National Geographic News. 14 September 2006. Web.
Portilla, Miguel León. Native Mesoamerican Spirituality, Ancient Myths, Discourses, Stories, Doctrines, Hymns, Poems from the Aztec, Yucatec, Quiche-Maya and Other Sacred Traditions. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1980.

Questionartist #1

2011-01-23T23:53:00.014-07:00

Who is an artist that people might not know yet about but should?

Native artists people should know are: Nakia Williamson-Cloud (Nez Perce) and John Wilson (Nez Perce). Both artists are known in north-central Idaho state. They are recognized a little bit in the interior Northwest, but little National acknowledgement. Neither artist participates in the larger Native Art Shows in the USA or Canada.

—Roger Amerman (Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma), Idaho, bead artist

It isn't easy being humble........

—James Luna [Pooyukitchum (Luiseno)], La Jolla Reservation, CA

Performance and Multimedia Installation artist

There’s this one guy, Darren J. Oliver. I know him from Flagstaff and his work is great. He really knows how to draw.

—Brandon Williams (Diné), New Mexico, artist and NAGPRA enthusiast

Wheel: Polly Nordstrand

2011-01-23T23:24:00.012-07:00

Looking Back to Look Forward
Polly Nordstrand (Hopi-Norwegian)

Polly Nordstrand examines Native art writing published since 1990 as a means of assessing progress in Native art. She begins with Lucy Lippard’s 1990, Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America, which looks at Asian-, African-, and Latin American art, as well as Native American art. It stands out because it is not a catalog and covers contemporary and experimental Native artists that have been underrepresented.

Since Native art is left out of mainstream art history texts, exhibit catalogs are particularly important. Rennard Strickland and Margaret Archuleta’s 1993 Shared Visions: Native American Painters and Sculptors in the Twentieth Century is a catalog accompanying a major exhibit responding to the quincentennial of Columbus’ arrival in the American. Strickland and Archuleta voice the desire for Native artists to achieve visibility, an ongoing sentiment, echoed in David W. Penney’s 2004 North American Indian Art. Shared Visions traces the influence of federal Indian policy on 20th century Native arts, and Nordstrand feels this casts the artists in the role of the victim (146). She wonders if survival narratives are compelling or relevant to mainstream society.

In the 2002 After the Storm: The Eiteljorg Fellowship for Native American Fine Art, 2001, edited by Jackson Rushing, writer Colleen Cutschall (Oglala Lakota) compares cross-cultural communication in art as aboriginal multi-lingualism” (151).

Nordstrand points out the lack of critical review of Native American art by the art world, but looks at one art magazine with an issue dedicated to Native art: the 1992 volume of Art Journal Vol. 51 (1992) No. 3 (Fall), co-edited by Jackson Rushing and Kay WalkingStick (Cherokee/Winnebago). The lack of art criticism and lack of judgments is a widespread problem that exists throughout the art world. Nancy Mithlo (Chiricahua Apache) writes, “the purpose of contemporary Native arts criticism in a more proactive frame of reference is less about what others think (getting in and being witnessed by others as in a ceremony) and more about what we thinking of ourselves in relationship with others” (152).

Since catalogs are geared towards a general readership, Nordstrom argues that they are no substitute for scholarly art history. She criticizes Janet Berlo and Ruth Phillips’ 1998 Native North American Art for bending interpretations of art terminology, specific the term “modern,” in respect to Native art.

She mentions the catalog for the 2004 National Museum of the American Indian exhibit, Native Modernisms: The Art of George Morrison and Allan Houser, edited by Truman Lowe, 2005. Finally looking at Linda B. Eaton’s 1990 A Separate Vision: Case Studies of Four Contemporary Indian Artists, Nordstrand asks, “Can we identify true movements and aesthetics in history of art by American Indians?” (156).

The last two decades have seen a groundswell of books about Native art, including an increasing number of monographs. More Native writers are publishing and some tribes and tribal schools have their own presses. This bodes well for generating realistic art histories, and there are far more works than could ever be examined in a single essay.

Wheel: Lucy Lippard

2011-01-23T23:17:00.012-07:00

All Six Legs
Lucy Lippard (European-American)

Lucy Lippard examines the factors that make Native art partly invisible in her essay “All Six Legs.” Lippard is sensitive to the challenges of being a non-Native writing about Native art and wonders if Native perspectives are “even available to non-Indians?” (128) She points out something very crucial in Native art writing, that “non-Indian writers tend to depend on our own culturally approved taste, education, and background, which is rooted in Western civilization” (128), which, possibly unconsciously, promotes assimilation to the Western mainstream. She encourages Native writers to examine and question Western influences on their work.

The space between cultures is a liminal space — a threshold or, in Gerald McMaster’s Reservation X, “a socially ambiguous zone” (133) African, Asian, Latin, as well as Native American artists move around the long-entrenched Eurocentrism of the art world. Oscar Howe demonstrated this by creating new expressions of abstraction that drew upon his own tribe’s art history. “It is history, whether or not it’s written down by white people” (131) – Lippard pretty well nails it with that statement. Most tribes have predominantly oral cultures, and Native scholars have struggled for decades to have oral histories recognized as valid in academia. Tribes reflected upon the art they created, even if they did not write everything down.

Lippard brings up the reoccurring notion of the indigenous artist versus the artist who “happens to be indigenous” (131) (kill the Indian, save the artist, to paraphrase Captain Richard Pratt). I’ve long noticed how the artists who say that they are “artists who happen to be Native” tend to show in Native venues and speak to Native audiences quite a bit. Lippard observes that Fritz Scholder was a prime example of “a non-Indian Indian but was not adverse to reaping the rewards of Native affiliation” (139).

Agreeing with Mithlo that modernism (or post-modernism) and tribal traditions are not incompatible, Lippard writes, “…for many Native artists, tradition is not the antithesis of modernism, but its mulch” (131). Sometimes what passes for “traditional art” becomes so romanticized in non-Indian circles that some young artists break away from their traditional arts just to avoid the sentimentalization, commercialization, and trivialization of those arts.

Ghettoization is a concern among many different groups, not just Native Americans, and while some Native artists aspire to show in the global art world, Native art shows and venues still hold value. “[I]f a woman artist makes a big reputation under a male name or Native artists never mention their tribal affiliation, nothing is gained for the constituencies we care most about” (133). Artists should not have to hide who they are to make it in the mainstream.

"One of the most effective weapons against stereotypes," Lippard writes, "is recontextualization" (136). She agrees with Mithlo that stereotypes can be springboards for new communication; however, she also warns that, “Obsession with the cruelties and stupidities of the dominant culture—even as it remains meaningful as a warning—is related to what we in the feminist movement used to call ‘being ruled by the opposition,’ or forced into a position that’s reactive rather than proactive, cliché rather insight. At some point it may become more challenging to construct intricate criticisms of internal as well as external problems, fueled less by individualism then by collective energy” (136). Being simply reactionary is throwing away much of our power as artists. Native artists face the question of art world individualism and tribal collectivism, but “[o]ver the centuries, tribal traditions themselves have been flexible and open to change without damaging the core” (139, 142).

Although identity politics have detractors in the mainstream art world, identity remains an important, reoccurring theme. Lippard suggests that if identity is a central part of an artist’s work, it should be analyzed, not ignored. “The problem of too much attention being paid to Native identity and to little to art” (142) can be solved by bypassing romanticism and nostalgia and studying contemporary Native art in its indigenous art historical context.

As an aside, on the subject of liminality, Edward De Bono’s great and accessible book, I Am Right, You Are Wrong, demonstrates how the grammar of English language that hinges on anagrams (opposites) encourages artificial dichotomies.

Image: Act, Don't React, America Meredith, gouache on paper.

Wheel: Nancy Marie Mithlo

2011-01-23T23:14:00.010-07:00

A Realist View of Image Politics Reclamation of the ‘Every Indian’
Nancy Marie Mithlo (Chiricahua Apache)

In Nancy Mithlo’s essay, she examines the role of Native women artists and stereotypes of Native Americans in her “an attempt to define a critical indigenous arts theory” (105).

Asking if negative stereotypes of Native Americans in popular culture matter, Mithlo answers, “Yes” – a view backed up by cognitive science. She sees mascots and other stereotypical caricatures of Natives as having real world ramifications, including violence; however, she argues that artists can use stereotypes as tools for cross-cultural communication, and cites examples of artists using the two most common stereotypes of Native women, the “squaw” and “princess,” to educate their audiences.

Mithlo points out that tribes and Native people themselves sometimes contribute to these stereotypes. For instance, the poster child of the "Indian princess" stereotype, the Land O’ Lakes butter maiden, was actually designed by Red Lake Ojibwe artist Patrick DesJarlait (Anthes 99).

Often non-Native’s ignorance of diverse tribes is blamed for the stereotypes; however, this has not proven to be the case, especially in areas where non-Native peoples are competing for limited resources with high concentrations of Native peoples (114). In the art world, this means when Native artists are designated by tribe and exhibiting in their own venues, such as Indian markets, prejudice is reduced; however, when Native artists seek to show their work in elite, mainstream environments, prejudice is more likely to occur. Mithlo provides several appalling examples of the backlash that occurs when Native artists exhibit in the mainstream arts arena instead of “knowing their place.”

Over and over the discussion of “segregation” of Native art comes up, but Mithlo puts things in perspective: why should the contemporary arts world be a place devoid of any ethnicity? It’s “an odd kind of segregational racism” (114). I think it’s important to hear about experiences from Latino, Black, Asian, and other artists and writers with similar experiences – they are also often directly or indirectly asked to downplay their own cultural heritage to “make it” in the mainstream.

“To talk about Indian art, you must talk about race,” (107) she writes, and “a negation of ethnicity also implies a negation of history.” Besides being an ethnic definition, “Native American” is also a political definition, with rights and access to resources relayed through citizenship in sovereign tribes.

The Native women Mithlo interviews discuss being part of a tribe – a communal approach to art making that flies in the face of the iconic mainstream Rugged Individualist Art Hero. Mithlo argues that in contemporary Indian art the communal aspect should take precedence over the individual. Instead of trying to separate the art and the artists from the fabric of their daily life or home, their “extended lives as mothers, tradition-bearers, and wage earners” are important components to examine in interpreting and appreciating their art (111). It is not that the artists Mithlo profiles do not express individually, but their work gains depth and meaning when seen in the context of their respective community circles.

However, many Native artists are clear that they cannot speak for their tribes; it’s a more nuanced matter of seeing the individual as a community member – in Diné artist Gloria Emerson’s words, "a case study, of what’s going on throughout the reservation" (111).

Mithlo admits, “Both the motivation to alter preconceived notions of the Native as well as the availability of counternarratives are strikingly missing from general discourse…” (121) Mainstream media and the global art world tend to simply ignore real Natives in favor of the stereotypes. Native artists in the mainstream art world defy preexisting categories and are therefore threatening and subsequently ignored.

"Native artists who move in both mainstream fine arts and rural reservation communities defy the dated analysis that strictly sees the tribal as separate in time and space from the modern. The concept of Native Americans as mobile, contemporary, and, simultaneously, tribal has not yet been recognized by the non-Indian public," she writes (121).

It is not enough to simply study the aesthetic qualities of Native art – to take the formalist, Modernist approach of the mid-20th century. Mithlo concludes, “To fully engage in Indian arts, one must participate in a fairly rigorous intellectual exercise in which personal doubt may productively serve to further one’s depth of understanding. Counterintuitive measures such as an embrace of stereotypes, generic Indian identity, and realism are reasonable places to start the difficult process ahead” (123).

• Anthes, Bill. Native Moderns: American Indian Painting, 1940-1960. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.
• Blomberg, Nancy J., ed. [Re]inventing the Wheel: Advancing the Dialogue on Contemporary American Indian Art. Denver: Denver Art Museum, 2008. ISBN 978-0914738596.

Wheel: Alfred Young Man

2011-01-23T23:09:00.012-07:00

Segregation of Native Art by Ethnicity: Is It Self-imposed or Superimposed?
Alfred Young Man (Cree)
Note: This is my summary of Alfred Young Man's essay

With 2,000 art spaces in Canada and 17,500 art spaces in the United States, Dr. Alfred Young Man wonders why so little space is available to exhibit indigenous art. Most of the art spaces are controlled by non-Natives and all too often by “people who often know little to nothing about Native Americans and First Nation peoples” (79). When Native art does get shown, it's often shown separately from other art forms.

Anthropological Classification

Even today, Native art is typically shown in anthropological or natural history museums, and is still sometimes labeled “primitive art” instead of “art written large” (81). This stems from the colonial ideology upon which Canadian museums were founded. “Part of the problem with answering the question about the segregation of Native art can be laid squarely at the feet of anthropology,” Young Man writes (86).

Anthropological institutions such as the Canadian Museum of Civilization depend upon Victorian classification systems (96). Young Man says the question of inclusion would have been settled by now if it pertained to any other group and blames the extraordinary persistence of the problem on “institutional racism” (96). He points out that Vine Deloria, Jr. was concerned that “the parochial nature of Western scientific thought” (98) would become integral to Native peoples’ own perceptions of themselves.

Young Man suggests that many non-native art professionals would prefer the question of “Native art writ large” to simply disappear, in part because they refuse to learn anything about Native art history. A compromise strategy currently used by museums is to present Native art as part of the Post-Modern mainstream without any cultural context (97).

Anthropology was instrumental in creating Modernism, as Young Man explains. The Victorian era spawned both ethnography and Modern art. In 1894, Otis T. Mason, an anthropologist, created the notion of the “cultural status” of human societies, designated by their tools, which would place them in the Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, or Atomic Age. This gave birth to an idea of societies progressing along a set line — an idea long since abandoned by the academic world but unfortunately very much alive in popular culture. With the minimal use of metallurgy, especially for tools, pre-Columbian cultures were categorized as being “Stone Age” (97), despite their superior developments in other areas such as medicine, hygiene, and agriculture.

National Gallery of Canada

Only in 1987 did the National Gallery of Canada begin seriously collecting Native art. When the museum moved into a new venue in 1989, it showcased its fledgling contemporary Native art collection together in one space. Native artists complained about this segregation, or “ghettoization”—saying the museum created an art “rez.” In response to artists’ complaints the museum dispersed the collection throughout its displays with no tribal affiliation listed on the pieces’ labels. “Assimilation by any other name,” writes Young Man, who saw this move as a denial of Native art history (82). This disassociation is damaging because so little has been written about many of these First Nations artists that the average view while have no context in which to place their work. By showing Native work together, a Native art history can begin to emerge (85).

Solo exhibits of First Nations artists, such as Daphne Odjig (Odawa) and Norval Morrisseau (Ojibwa), at the National Gallery are positive new developments (101) but no other plans for more such exhibits existed at time of writing. [Note: As Greg Hill has pointed out in his comment below, much has changed since [Re]inventing the Wheel was published. Hill (Kanyen'kehaka-Mohawk) was appointed Curator and head of the department of Indigenous Art at the CNG in 2007, has actively acquired aboriginal art for the permanent collection, curated a traveling solo retrospective of Carl Beam (Ojibwe), and created other aboriginal art shows.]

The Question of Positioning

National Gallery of Canada curator Diana Nemiroff writes that the issue of where to positioning Native art has reemerged on and off since 1927, inspired by the series of exhibitions throughout the 1910s and 1920s displaying non-Western art alongside Modern Western art. In 1978, the Ojibwe Cultural Foundation sponsored the first national Canadian gathering of indigenous artists and other art professionals, who debated the question of positioning for three straight days. Young Man described a dizzying list of symposia and articles discussing positioning of Native art, all of which were influenced by anthropology and ignored the possibility of Native art history. “Ironically,” Young Man observes, “the gridlock that Native art is experiencing today should not have to happen to what are arguably the most studied people on the planet…” (86).

Assimilation

Young Man describes the trend of artists having to hide their ethnic roots to create “art for art’s sake” and be seen as an isolated individual. The curator’s policy at the National Galley appears to be, “if you are an Indian who insists on working as the Native artist you are, well, you need not apply for the gig” (85).

All art is ultimately ethnic and influenced by the culture in which it was created. Picasso did not have to surrender his Spanish identity. No art is universal. Ironically in other countries, mainstream Canadian artists are looked at as being “Canadian” instead of universal, and Canadian art history as a whole is ignored (93).

It is good to bear in mind the incredible diversity of perspectives and cultures of Aboriginal artists of Canada. Inuit peoples are not Indian, and their arts are accordingly unique.

Solutions

Young Man writes, “it will take a great change of consciousness before this question of Native art writ large is going to be able to make that fundamental metamorphosis from one paradigm to another…,” and Native peoples will have to initiate this evolution (95). Western art writers won’t initiate these changes, and really how can they be expected to understand the motivations and meanings of Native art without guidance from the Native art community?

“We need … to do away with the term traditional altogether,” writes Young Man, “for by one account we are the traditional” (96). He encourages Natives to coin new art terms and to do away altogether with the anthropological approach to classifying Native art. “[T]he politically and historically autonomous Native artist and Native art historian, critic, scholar, and academic need to be publicly acknowledged and respected…” (101).

With so many art spaces not showcasing Native arts, organizations such as the Canadian Museums Association, Canada Council for the Arts should take a leadership position to place Native arts on equal footing as non-Native Canadian art and end tokenism. Today, a Native artist should not be seen through the lens of anthropology or as a “Western art hybrid” (102). While anthropologists have rejected the idea of “primitive” and “civilized,” the art world must also do so (103).

Images reproduced from Wikimedia Commons, under a Creative Commons attribution license.

[Re]inventing the Wheel: Advancing the Dialogue on Contemporary American Indian Art

2011-01-23T23:03:00.006-07:00

The Denver Art Museum, a long-term supporter of contemporary Native arts, hosted a symposium, "[Re]inventing the Wheel" in 1996. Inspired by Edgar Heap-of-Bird's monumental sculpture, Wheel, commissioned by the museum, this symposium yielded critical discussion that was compiled in the book, [Re]inventing the Wheel: Advancing the Dialogue on Contemporary American Indian Art. Like most good books about Native American art, this one is out of print, and a used copy is currently available on Amazon for a mere $268.24 last time I checked.

The symposium examined questions of the nature of Indian art that date back at last half a century with no consensus to the answers. Editor Nancy Blomberg writes, "We're not really going around in circles—or are we?" and describes “stagnation in the field of native arts in articulating a satisfactory contemporary native art theory." And she goes on to ask, "why are we now well into the twenty-first century still using the unproductive rhetoric of the last century?" The individual essays attempt to address these reoccurring questions and move forward with them — what is the role of Native art in the mainstream art world? How should Native art be exhibited? What terminology should be used to describe it? How can such diverse art practices of hundreds of tribes be grouped together? Should they be?

As Cherokee-Osage art writer Rennard Strickland wrote almost three decades ago, "A reasoned evaluative perspective must be established so that current Indian art controversies do not continue forever. The debate over modernism and traditional must be brought to an end..." (24) Why do these discussions never die or evolve? Possibly because people don’t really want them to, possibly because the scholarly circles discussing Native art are too small or removed from their home communities; possibly because the powers that be in the mainstream art world ignore Native artists completely. No matter, this book attempts to address issues and map a way forward.

Edgar Heap of Birds (Cheyenne-Arapaho) provides the first essay, "Life as Art: Creating through Acts of Personal and Cultural Renewal.” He describes his personal development as an artist and discusses public art collaborations he created in several countries, leading up to his monumental public art piece, Wheel, commissioned by the Denver Art Museum. Two interesting points he brings up are a warning against overly creating art that simply refers to itself and his comment: "…I think it is very important for Native artists to realize that when one is making, or creating, modern art, it is essential, especially for me, to make sure it does not subvert religious aspects of sacred tribal knowledge" (35).

In his essay, “The Prehistory of Wheel: Symbolic Inversions and Traumatic Memory in the Art of Edgar Heap of Birds,” W. Jackson Rushing III examines Heap of Birds’ art practices that led up to the 50 foot wide art installation, consisting of ten red porcelain-enameled structures and additional text in Cheyenne and English. Rushing also lists other monumental public art reflecting an “'un-celebration’ of colonial culture” (75) placing Wheel within a larger art movement.

Other essays from the book are summarized in subsequent blog entries.

… [A]n Indian painting is any painting that's done by an Indian.—TC Cannon (15)

• Blomberg, Nancy J., ed. [Re]inventing the Wheel: Advancing the Dialogue on Contemporary American Indian Art. Denver: Denver Art Museum, 2008. ISBN 978-0914738596.

Introduction

2011-01-23T22:57:00.013-07:00

Hello and welcome! I created this blog with the goal of making Native America art writing and art history more accessible to a wider audience, especially indigenous artists. Is Native American art a small, recent addition to the art world? Absolutely not. Native American art extends back at the very least 12,000 years and spans two continents—from the southernmost people in the world, the Yaghan, to the Polar Kalaallit, the northernmost people of the world. The Native art world is older, newer, richer, and stronger than art literature has yet been acknowledged. I support a hemispheric approach to Native art, because cultural exchanges constantly happen between North and South American, and have for centuries — after all, where did tobacco originate?

Many exciting developments are happening in the Native art world — new institutions, new scholarship, more and more Native peoples earning higher degrees are publishing. The theoretical framework may not yet in place to make sense of the dizzying diversity of Native arts, but that should not hold anyone back from appreciating the amazing works from the part and present and making contributions towards an indigenous art theory that can encompass all Native arts, not just the most Westernized.

Hybrid artists tend to get written about when the critics or the audience is non-Native, but we should also celebrate those artists who provide art for their own tribes, especially those artists whose creations are used in our ceremonies, dances, and community events. An art theory that ignores traditionalists and the core people that hold our tribes together is not a Native American art theory.

For those Native artists whose chosen audience is the non-Native art world, perhaps they can find allies among historical theorists and writers of the Western art canon, such as Ferdinand Saussure, Herbert Marcuse, or André Malraux, and present their art within these people’s theoretical context? It’s a matter of providing familiar ground that the audience can relate to, much in the same way many Native painters employ pop iconography as an entré for non-Native people into the work.

Many institutions in the Native art community are governed by people who simply do not have an art background. So a great deal of discussion about Native art is governed by hand-me-down notions of art that have been abandoned by Post-modern art institutions in the last few decades. We do not live in the Modern Era — that ended over a half century ago, so there’s no need to try to hamstring Native art today with outmoded ideas of universality, formalism, or Eurocentricism.

Above all, it’s good to remember that art is subjective. We’re all going to have wildly different views, but this diversity of opinion, experience, and perspective makes for a richer dialogue about Native arts. I’m going to strive to present artists who are off the beaten path, including artists who have found success outside of the gallery and market framework. Any writing or information about Greenlandic or Latin American indigenous art would be very welcome!

To get things rolling, I have summarized the different essays in [Re]inventing the Wheel: Advancing the Dialogue on Contemporary American Indian Art, which presents many of the dominant themes and obstacles Native art writers are currently wrestling with.

Here's to the start of a great discussion!
Cheers,
America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)
Santa Fe, New Mexico

A note about images: Images that appear on this blog are either ones that I hold the copyright to (my own art or photographs) or are public domain or have Creative Commons or GNU licenses obtained from Wikimedia Commons or Flickr. Any copyrighted images from other artists will limited to those reposted with permission or are part of a review (Landes 6). Images in art show reviews fall under the doctrine of fair use. The site will fully comply with international copyright laws.

• Landes, William M. “Copyright, Borrowed Images, and Appropriation Art: An Economic Approach.” George Mason Law Review. Fall 2000.