Review Essay: Indigenous Motivations: Recent Acquisitions from the National Museum of the American Indian Dasha
Chapman, Mina Ellison, Anne Kwiatt, Tate LeFevre, Claire Nicholas,
Sandra Rozental, Susanne Sabolcsi-Boros, April Strickland, and Sabra
ThornerIntroductionIndigenous Motivations: Recent Acquisitions from the National Museum of the American Indian
was a showcase of more than 250 works of traditional clothing and
masks, modern textile designs, sculptures, paintings and works of art
on paper acquired since 1990 by the National Museum of the American
Indian (NMAI).[1] Indigenous Motivations
aimed to emphasize the fluidity of American Indian traditions as they
have been continuously drawn upon to inform contemporary indigenous
practices and productions. Curators Bruce Bernstein, Cynthia L. Chavez
and Ann McMullen provided a wide-ranging view of American Indian arts
and crafts: the show contained “more than beads and feathers” (West 2006:7).
The ‘motivations’ alluded to in the exhibition’s title referred to the
multiple sources of inspiration behind contemporary indigenous artists’
work. The exhibition categorized these motivations as stemming from
three sources: practices of tradition, innovation and art.
As
its subtitle indicates, this was an exhibition curated around objects,
rather than around particular tribal or geographic groups. Since 1990,
when the Heye Foundation’s Museum of the American Indian became part of
the Smithsonian, the museum has acquired some 15,000 objects, including
more than 6,200 pieces transferred from the Federal Indian Arts and
Crafts Board Collection belonging to the Department of the Interior.
The exhibition offered viewers access to a panoply of pieces, all made
after 1950, ranging from Aymara hats and miniature Kwakwaka’wakw totem
poles to Hopi wastebaskets and Navajo textile patterns designed for
Sears Roebuck. The juxtaposition of these pieces illustrated the
dynamic and adaptable character of American Indian arts, and more
broadly, American Indian peoples today. These objects varied in region,
tribe, artist, and quality, as well as in purpose (objects made for
communities’ use and objects made to be sold to non-natives on
different markets), but they were woven together by a common narrative
thread: the creative coexistence of innovation and tradition.
The
openness of the exhibition design permitted the visitor's movement
along any number of potential paths: from case to case, wall-art to
sculpture and mixed media objects, jewelry to clothing. In effect, the
sequencing of the exhibition experience was left for the visitor to
construct. Dividing the long exhibition space into thirds were three
freestanding walls covered in a mélange of text and images, each
conceptually centered around either tradition, innovation, or art. From
just a little time spent with the extensive quotations it was possible
to glean the message of this exhibit: tradition is continuously
re-invented through innovation, but this refashioning is a
long-practiced method of survival to maintain community vitality. As is
stated on the “Tradition” wall text, “Nothing Stays the Same.”TraditionThe
pieces in the “Tradition” section, the first of the exhibition, were
described as “works that resonate with their [the artists] family and
community.” These are objects that were created for use in everyday
contexts, such as baskets, clothing, hats and moccasins. Here we were
introduced to the ways in which Indigenous Motivations
conceived of ‘tradition’. It is something alive and transformative, and
it is an indigenous convention to innovate through cultural and
artistic practice: “The only way tradition can be carried on is to keep inventing new things.” Robert Davidson (Haida), ca. 1990.
“In
order for traditions to remain traditional, they must always change and
adapt to present ways. Otherwise, they become part of dead cultures.”
Ronald Senungetuk (Inupiaq), 2005.
“Our
art and our culture and our language have always been changing.
Innovation is the second-oldest form of tradition.” Yaya (Charles Peter
Heit) (Gitxsan), 2005.
Throughout
this exhibition there were contradictory uses of the word tradition. On
the one hand, the plural form, traditions, describes historically and
geographically specific practices and productions. On the other,
tradition was, to a certain extent, evacuated of this material and
historical grounding, and replaced with an evocation of a capacity for
dynamism. While this move clearly indicated a rejection of the
characterization of native cultures as static or ‘dead’, the emphasis
on innovation as the "second-oldest form of tradition" left one
wondering what the original form of tradition is or was. The paradox of
tradition in current debates over indigeneity emerged clearly in this
exhibition: how to erase the derogatory connotations of the term, the
condescending residue of grossly imbalanced relationships of power
sedimented over time, while at the same time claiming that Native
people hold on to their traditions (implying that others do not, or at
least not to the same extent?), and that this is an essential aspect of
their "native" identity. InnovationTaking
a left at “Tradition,” led to “Innovation,” which the large dividing
wall described as, “more than arts and crafts.” Indeed, the exhibition
stressed that these objects, most of which were made for tourist
consumption, are not any less “authentic” than other forms of American
Indian art. In particular, the exhibition focused on the ways these art
objects are located within a complex web of relationships, commercial
and otherwise, between Native and non-Native peoples. One especially
interesting art form featured in the “Innovation” section was textile
design. In the 1950s, Lloyd Kiva New (Cherokee, 1916-2002) experimented
with graphic and textile design. The patterns that he created were
quite popular and set the stage for other Native artists, such as Pop
Chalee (Taos Pueblo, 1908-1993) and Al Momaday (Kiowa, 1913-1981), to
produce designs for a line of printed cotton fabrics for Scottdale
Textile Mills. The fabrics were then used to create “southwestern-style
clothing and home décor,” which debuted for sale at Sears Roebuck
stores in Albuquerque.
A
series of miniature totem poles encased in glass constituted the center
of the section. One read that a man remembers, in his childhood,
stamping these small poles with “Genuine Ottawa Indian Craft.” As
indigenous people were able to fashion new traditions, they were at the
same time able to maintain community continuity though traditional
methods of production and daily survival. These mini totem poles are
potent symbols of ingenuity and entrepreneurship—art objects that
capitalize on the demand for commodified notions of “Indianness” and
culture that reap economic benefits. Totem poles have been produced and
reproduced as both sacred and caricatured representations of Native
tradition. Engaging—if only superficially—with these inherent
contradictions, Indigenous Motivations stressed that many of the objects in the exhibit are outcomes of the perpetually expanding marketplace for Indian craft. ArtThe
third section of the exhibition, “Art,” included a wide range of pieces
ranging from sculptural objects and fine jewelry to assemblage pieces
and oil paintings. Many of these works centered on contemporary
political and social issues, such as language revival, land claims,
substance abuse, and violence. A number of the objects relied on irony
and humor, playing with and subverting common tropes of “Indian-ness.”
Two pieces by Marcus Amerman (Choctaw) used sly wit and formidable
bead-working skills to engage the viewer in social commentary. In Lucky Blanket
(1998), a felt blanket, a traditional craft item, is embellished with
intricate beadwork and made to look like a blackjack table, playing on
stereotypical notions of American Indians as casino owners.
This
concept of “Art” celebrates the universality of the human creative
spirit, both as an individual expression and as a language that can be
rooted in one’s cultural heritage. “Art” here is redeeming. The
category allows a freedom to take what one chooses from tradition—from
that broad notion of “heritage”—and incorporate these elements into new
sensibilities. As presented in the exhibition, this concept of art was
also conventional however, as it excluded photography, video and
installation art, highlighting rather the continuity in ideas about art
that have framed our view of American Indian objects for more than a
century. As a consequence of educational programs, by the late 1960s
there was a marked increase of professionally trained and commercially
oriented artists who were adjusting stylistically to the changing
trends within mainstream American art. As the post-war generation of
American Indian artists grew tired of being asked to demonstrate their
“Indianicity” or “Indianess”, artists like Oscar Howe and Robert Penn
expressed their belief that the artist (rather than their cultural
identity) is the only one who should set individual standards for their
own artistic and spiritual journey and its expression. Painters of the
1980s and 1990s worked with a selective and personal incorporation of
indigenous vision and
internationalist modernist art styles. Capturing the dual cultural
identity of contemporary Native life, artists could choose between new
forms of expression in the traditional style, or use modernist, and
often abstract, techniques. The complexity of this engagement did not
filter through into the ways in which art was defined within the
exhibition space. MediaWithin
the physical exhibition itself, two distinct voices were heard, that of
the Museum itself, expressed in the words of curators Ann McMullen,
Bruce Bernstein, Cynthia Chavez and other NMAI staff (who are not
marked specifically as indigenous), and the voices of the Native
people, which were marked as indigenous by reference to their tribal
connections. Voices of the Native artists and people provided a
valuable look into the stories of these cultures, which, it was
suggested, share similar themes, experiences and beliefs. Compared with
a more conventional museum text that describes the time period and
location of an object’s creation and usage, Native testimony presented
was optimistic and personal, allowing visitors to connect on many
levels with the messages of the voices present.
The
website for the exhibition
(http://www.nmai.si.edu/exhibitions/indigenous_motivations/flash8/index.html)
takes this form of multivocality into a different space allowing the
visitor to navigate even more creatively between themes and objects. In
the center of each color-coded frame, curatorial text assigns objects
to designated themes and unites cultural productions from throughout
the Americas under the overarching themes of cultural resilience and
adaptation. On the right of the screen is a list of Native names;
clicking on one of these names opens a new text-box with a quotation,
its author’s name, community of identification, and utterance date. The
quotes address a range of ideas, and their presence incorporates these
Native activists and artists in the exhibition’s authorship, as
participants ably equipped to address the political stakes of
production and exhibition of Native works. These quotations, authored
curatorial statements, tabs pointing to exhibition credits, and
bibliography all contribute to an online exhibition that reflexively
acknowledges historical museum conventions of both Native and
curatorial absence, while forging a new museological paradigm of
collaboration and accountability.
The
online exhibition extends the museum’s reach beyond object-based
knowledge production to include digital technology as an innovative
platform for public education, increases indigenous participation in
museum practice, and expands ideas about “art” and “artist.” In this
regard, the website’s color-coding and its multiple strategies of
providing data about objects and their makers offers more in-depth
thematic guidance for viewers than was available in the exhibition
itself. While it specifies each object’s maker and origin community,
the website—like the museum exhibition did—implicitly relies on the
pan-indigenous mandate of the National Museum of the American Indian,
which minimizes the materiality of different (climatic, social,
cultural, economic, political, etc) circumstances through which each
object was produced in favor of promoting commonalities between
indigenous peoples of the Americas. Furthermore, while the website is
an excellent addition to the exhibition, there is no attempt to
integrate the web presence into the physical exhibition. There were no
computers or consoles within the exhibition to allow visitors to access
the website, and the website only receives a brief mention in the
exhibition’s catalogue. Also, though the captions accompanying the
website’s photographs of the objects in the exhibition provide
dimensions, all imaged objects appear of similar size on computer
screen, and there is no reliable sense of scale indicating that the
piggy banks from various places in South America are significantly
smaller than the totem poles of the Northwest Coast. How might this
erasure of size differences affect how visitors to either the website
or the museum relate to objects as sources of knowledge about their
producers or places of origin? In spite of these limitations, the
website is a valuable informational resource—both educative and
aesthetically interesting—capitalizing on innovative digital
technologies.
In
turn, the catalogue provides yet another level of engagement with the
collection and exhibition, presenting a collection of thoughtful essays
written by both Native and non-Native curators and museum
professionals. These contributions elaborate and better articulate the
manifold messages of the exhibition. Compensating for a lack of
contextualization within the exhibition, several articles address the
historical, social and institutional circumstances of the production of
Native American art in the twentieth century, including mention of the
formative role of Dorothy Dunn at the Santa Fe Indian School in the
1930s and later the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe in
1962. McMullen’s article “See America First: Tradition, Innovation, and
Indian Country Arts” effectively presents the sometimes problematic but
often fecund interactions between Native populations and non-Native
tourism in America and Mexico, resulting in the use of new materials
and the emergence of new genres of Native arts. McMullen tackles the
thorny topics of “authenticity” and the rightful place of “Indian
Country arts” in museums as representative of particular historical
conditions, power dynamics and inter-cultural exchange. Overall, the
catalogue competently situates the objects of the exhibition in their
historical and social settings, although more attention could have been
given to the creation and operations of the U.S. Indian Arts and Crafts
Board and its role in standardizing an “Indian” label (guaranteeing
products were produced by Native American hands) and promoting and
developing new markets for Native arts. ConclusionThe eclectic, yet well-chosen, pieces in Indigenous Motivations
richly illustrated the myriad inspirations, relationships, and
traditions drawn on by indigenous artists today. Yet the manner in
which the exhibition classified these “motivations,” categorizing them
into tradition, innovation, and art, seems problematic. One of the
goals of the exhibition seems to have been to destabilize the viewer’s
assumptions and blur boundaries between identities, authenticities and
traditions. So why the need to arrange all the pieces this way,
reifying, at least to some degree, what the exhibition otherwise
characterized as analytically useless categories? At the same time, the
placement of several pieces seemed to be the result of “category
errors.” Why for example, was a miniature doll by Sioux artist Juanita
Growing Thunder Fogarty, located in the “Art” section, rather than with
the “Innovation” (tourist art) section, which has an entire area
devoted to miniatures? Why were several masks, created as a fine art
objects, grouped with the pieces in the “Tradition” section? Why was
beautifully crafted silver tableware located in “Innovation,” while
beautifully crafted silver jewelry “filed” under “Art”? Perhaps this
slippage between categories was in fact intentional, an effort on the
part of the curators to illustrate that the “indigenous motivations” of
these artists cannot be neatly shuffled into the kind of classificatory
schemes to which the art world has often limited them.
In
turn, the majority of these recent arrivals to the NMAI’s collection
were previously owned by the Indian Arts and Crafts Board Collection
belonging to the Department of the Interior. Although the Smithsonian
frames its collection as an avant-garde perspective on Native culture,
this ancestor already focused on the blurred lines between tradition
and modernity in Native-made artifacts. The Arts and Crafts Board
already contained objects collected as anthropological specimens in the
1940s-1960s, as well as paintings and design objects by individual
American Indian artists from the 1970s and 1980s. That most of the
objects were not museum purchases, nor objects donated by American
Indian communities and artists themselves, might also explain the
rather narrow concept of contemporary Native art included in the show
where the absence of photography and other media such as installation,
video, digital, and multimedia art was surprising. This is especially
the case given the prominence of these genres in the new museum that
the NMAI has recently inaugurated on the Washington Mall where media
such as video and installation are a main vector of the museum’s
curatorial personality. The absence of photography as art was also
striking given the generous use of photography in the exhibition’s
design as documentary evidence of the daily life and practices of
Native communities.
The
fact that most of the works on display were gifts and donations from
private individuals and institutions is not problematic in itself.
However, the personality and priorities of these prior collectors and
institutions are never explicitly disclosed. Thus, at first, the
spectator might have been taken aback by the central importance given
to two cases devoted to Andean hats from the 1950s, and to ceramic pigs
of all shapes and sizes. By paying attention to the provenance of these
objects on the labels, one realizes that they were donations from
private individuals, Blanche and Bruce Berman, and Gertrude Litto,
respectively. Although the show was titled Indigenous Motivations, it is clear that Native peoples’ agency was supplemented by outside opinions in the making of the collection.
Despite
the exhibition being ostensibly separated by the three themes, the room
and the displays themselves suggested an even flow between tradition,
art and innovation, showing how all three are able to integrate and
influence the others. The objects and methods in the exhibition often
blended seamlessly from traditional to contemporary in subject matter,
materials and techniques. By allowing the different sections to flow
into each other and be separated only by the superficial wall
partitions, the constant theme of connection ran strongly through the
exhibition, permitting the viewer to walk amidst a living history of
Native craftsmanship and artistry. Demonstrating the links between the
past, present and future of Native arts, the continuity of time and
history were seen through the objects and processes demonstrated in the
Indigenous Motivations
exhibition. Although tradition becomes the praise-song of an
overarching indigenous heritage, the works indicated a profound impetus
to stay connected to where one comes from in creative ways.Note1. The exhibition Indigenous Motivations opened at the George Gustav Heye Centre (NMAI) in New York City on July 22, 2006 and continued through mid-summer 2007. Reference Cited West Jr., W. Richard2006 Foreword: Eclectic Abundance. In Indigenous Motivations: Recent Acquisitions from the National Museum of the American Indian. Pp. 7-9. New York: NMAI Editions. This
review was written collaboratively during the graduate seminar
Anthropology in and of Museums, taught at NYU’s Program in Museum
Studies. The project was directed and edited by Professor Haidy
Geismar.