Denver Art Museum in the News

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.

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

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 European-American 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 tribal 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 (Southern Cheyenne) 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.—T.C. 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.