Archiving Contemporary Indigenous Art

*Originally written December 13, 2023

In 1992, Cherokee artist Kay WalkingStick wrote "Native American Art in the Postmodern Era," an article in which she addressed the concerns of the representation of Native artists and their work. Western museum practice is fundamentally founded on colonial principles that situate objects of Native cultural production into a category of aesthetics and symbols. As WalkingStick writes, “for any artist, serious critical review is an important part of becoming established, and the lack of serious critical discussion of Native American art outside of its relationship to ethnographic or tribal art and artifacts is one of the biggest problems we artists face.” It should be noted that there are more than 574 federally recognized tribes with their own unique cultural heritage in the United States. The generalization of Native American art, as historically seen in museum spaces, perpetuates outdated, dangerous stereotypes and limits the creative freedom of artists. The othering of contemporary Native artists refuses any dialogue with non-Native artists that tackle similar themes/issues, such as the environment, self-identity, and politics. Native artists create works that range from personal narratives and perspectives to universal human experiences.

Kay WalkingStick’s article was released during a critical time in the shifting of the relationship between institutions and indigenous communities. During the 1990s, critical moments in politics and public discourse forced a revaluation of national identity and how it has continuously excluded indigenous voices. In 1989, the National Museum of the American Indian was founded on the National Mall in D.C., after the discovery that more than 12,000–18,000 human remains were held in Smithsonian storage. The intent of the museum was purely ethnographical, to be a living memorial to Native Americans and their traditions. A year later, both the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) and the Indian Arts and Crafts Act were passed in American legislation. Both Acts pushed for the ethical treatment of indigenous objects within museum and gallery spaces, both in the United States and Canada.

The turning point of the decade, however, was in 1992 as the marker of the 500-year anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in America, at which the United States federal government formed a commission and planned events to celebrate the Columbus Quincentennial jubilee. This sparked a national debate about misrepresentations in history and the American national identity, as witnessed by a series of public opinion and political articles submitted to major news outlets. Multiple museums held exhibitions and programs about Native Americans to counter the country’s colonial history. Submuloc show/Columbus wohs, a travelling show curated by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, explicitly described Columbus’ “encounter” with America as a genocide in the exhibition catalogue. The title is spelled backwards, as an attempt to reverse the disastrous 500 years of Columbus’ impact. Ancestral Memories - A Tribute To Native Survival (1992), held at the Falkirk Cultural Center in San Rafael, CA featured Northern California Native artists. In San Diego, Centro Cultural de la Raza’s Counter Colón-ialismo (1991-93) was to “celebrate 500 years of resistance to genocide, ecocide, rape and . . . the enslavement of African people.”

1992 also marked the 125th anniversary of the Confederation of Canada, with a similar reaction of major exhibitions to honour indigenous art and culture to curb the country’s colonial past and present. These exhibitions challenged the ethos of the imaginary Indian that evolved throughout harmful and stagnant displays of indigenous objects within major museums.

“Will you call me in ‘93?”

– James Luna

Indigenous artists, such as James Luna, gained traction during this time, with his work featured in numerous institutions. Skeptical of the sudden desire for limited and temporary Indigenous representation in segmented parts of the arts industry, Luna would later develop his motto, “Call me in ‘93,” to challenge curators to extend their temporary goodwill gesture into a lasting, genuine relationship.

James Luna, The Shame-Man, 1993 Performed at 1993 Whitney Biennial.

Now, 30 years later, the question posed is: how do museums and galleries continue to facilitate their relationships with indigenous culture and artists? More specifically, do indigenous artists and curators have self-determination once their work is positioned in an institution? For the purpose of this project, the focus will be on contemporary indigenous artists mainly working in the United States and Canada around the 1990s and how their work is perceived today. Retrospective survey exhibitions that tackle 1990s art have ignored the contributions of Native artists active in the decade. For instance, the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey held Come as You Are: Art of the 1990s in 2015, a survey of the period informed by the themes of “identity politics” debates; the digital revolution; and globalization. Or NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star (2013) at the New Museum in New York, which served as a time capsule of the social and cultural landscape of the city, using both recognizable works that were featured at the Whitney Biennial and lesser-known works that were showcased in galleries and studios. Both exhibitions ignored Native artists, despite the criteria for the New Museum’s show being artists who worked in NYC in 1993. Native artists meeting that requirement include James Luna, Alan Michelson, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, and Kay WalkingStick.

“Was Indigenous Art Better in the 1980s and Early ’90s?” written by Richard William Hill, who previously worked as a curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario, describes current indigenous work as safer and constrained than their critical predecessors. Hill pulls three principal themes from the latter 20th century: cultural revival, colonial critique, and institutional access. According to Hill, indigenous art at this time thrived as “an outright rejection of the salvage anthropology assumption that an authentic identity was only guaranteed by the mimetic reproduction of tradition.” Artists strayed away from the conventional understanding of what indigenous art should be to acknowledge their contemporary realities. Hill assumes that present indigenous artists are cautious about creating radical work to have a better shot at entering institutional spaces. Whether Hill’s argument holds true or not, it is evident that indigenous artists working in the 1990s had access to resources, spaces, and the ability to exercise creative and intellectual freedom.

American Indian Community House (New York, N.Y.)

Source: National Museum of the American Indian.

American Indian Contemporary Arts

During what Hill calls the “Indian Renaissance,” there were multiple community art centers and small nonprofit institutions throughout the United States. American Indian Community House (AICH) in New York, American Indian Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, Two Rivers Gallery in Minneapolis, and the C.N. Gorman Museum at the University of California. In these spaces, curators who were artists themselves had full rein in developing ongoing shows. These exhibitions were meant to reach and educate a broad spectrum of viewers, but prioritized the Native community. As Joanna Bigfeather, AICH curator and gallery director (1993-99), recalls, "It was always important to me that the community be involved in these exhibitions and be proud of them." However, today, many of these institutions have either shuttered or currently lack a permanent gallery space due to insufficient funding and resources.

San Francisco’s American Indian Contemporary Arts, for example, was evicted from its downtown space in the late 1990s and never reopened. Rising rent costs and reduced government funding have forced the AICH to no longer have a permanent gallery space. Atlatl, a national Native arts service organization, worked with the Smithsonian to strive for visibility and participation of Native American artists within museums. It closed its doors in 2007.

In addition, there is a shortage of resources available for indigenous collecting, curating, and programming in the United States. The Canadian Museum Association and their provincial and territorial counterparts consistently revisit and release publications and reports relating to the matter, notably Moved to Action: Activating UNDRIP in Canadian Museums, which seeks to determine the level of compliance that museum policies and best practices have in alliance with the United Nations Declaration of Indigenous Peoples. The American Alliance of Museums, only this year, released its Standards for Museums with Native American Collections, with an emphasis on historical artifacts.

As museums are attempting to implement diversity, equity, and inclusion by acquiring indigenous work, there is also a need to hire Indigenous curators. Only recently, the Met and the Brooklyn Museum hired full-time indigenous curators for the first time in their history. Now, up-and-coming curators entering the field are faced with the responsibility of reshaping institutions to include marginalized narratives, yet scholarship on Indigenous curatorship is still in its early stages.

Well-established scholarship on contemporary indigenous artists and curators is necessary to legitimize the Native narrative in North American art history. Despite their revolutionary impact, most of these exhibitions from the 1990s have little information online. Their exhibition catalogues are not digitized and are held in a handful of museums and university libraries. Even an issue concerning recent exhibitions such as Urban Indian: Native New York Now (2020), a collaboration between the Museum of the City of New York and the AICH. The exhibition, in honour of the 50th anniversary of the AICH, “examines the shared meaning of being a Native person living in New York today, as individuals reflect on tribal affiliations, community well-being, personal growth, and intersectional experiences.” There is no catalogue readily accessible for the exhibition, straining the issue of accessibility.

To address this absence of vital resources, I propose the development of a digital archive of 1990s exhibitions covering contemporary indigenous artists, acknowledging the work of the curators and the community galleries that supported these shows. By taking on a digital form, not only does it reach a broader audience, but it also preserves the ephemeral content of these catalogues. As an archive, it also has the opportunity to grow, adding information on current artists and exhibitions, as well as exhibitions held pre-1990s, to create a comprehensive resource for both Native and non-Native artists, curators, and scholars.

In doing further research on how to archive these exhibitions, I came across Artists Space, a non-profit art gallery and arts organization located in Soho. In 1983, they held We the People, an exhibition of work by contemporary Native American artists. On their site, they have a comprehensive archive of their shows and programs dating from the 1970s to the present.

Inspired by their archive practice, the proposed archive would be on a much larger scale, including all institutions and community galleries that held exhibitions showcasing indigenous artists. The digital archive would be organized by exhibition title, date, site/location, organization/institution, works, artists, curators, materials, and theme/topic, which would all be tagged and linked for easier searching. In addition, each exhibition archive would include its original exhibition description, installation images, exhibition catalogue, donor/sponsor information, and reviews, to take into account how exhibitions were received and critiqued. The intention of this archive is not only to show the successful exhibitions that portrayed indigenous work and culture in a positive light, but also to show “failures” to learn from and avoid in future exhibitions. For instance, in 1988, in conjunction with the Calgary Winter Olympics, the Glenbow Museum held an exhibition titled The Spirit Sings: Artistic Traditions of Canada's First Peoples, to celebrate the indigenous communities of Canada by highlighting their materials and histories as an integral pillar of the national heritage. However, the show was problematic as no indigenous individual worked on the exhibition, the show featured stolen artifacts, and their main sponsor, Shell Canada, was at the time, drilling in the Lubicon region in northern Alberta, creating lasting health problems for the local community of the Lubicon Lake Cree Nation. In response, the Task Force on Museums and First Peoples was developed, a national body made up of over 25 individuals from the indigenous and museum communities. In 1992, the Task Force released a report establishing the guidelines for repatriation and also formulated specific recommendations for professional training for Indigenous curators and support for contemporary artists.

Here is a mockup of how the archive would look; each exhibition is clickable and takes you to a page detailing all of its related information. For this project, I expanded on the exhibition, Land, Spirit, Power, that was held at the National Gallery of Canada in 1992. Currently, their site lacks sufficient information on the exhibition. By accessing their exhibition catalogue at the Thomas J. Watson Library at the MET, I was able to expand and create a comprehensive archive entry. As you can see, the images include installation views, the exhibition dates, the curators' names, and a description written by the curator. Additionally, a list of the artists featured is provided, along with a dropdown option to view the tombstone information of their works. Lastly, reviews by art critics and ideally, a free, PDF version of the exhibition catalogue.

The hope for this project is to resurrect these organizations that are no longer active, as they were the pillars of progress that pushed for the representation of indigenous artists and culture around the country. By framing this archive as a collaborative project between organizations and institutions that worked on these exhibitions and those who hold records, documents, and other ephemera, a lasting network can be developed between these spaces. As well, this archive could be supported by non-profits, such as the Ford Foundation, which has supported Native American arts for the last five decades. Federal agencies such as the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Museum of American Indian have explicitly made sustaining indigenous art and culture part of their mission.

By creating a platform that showcases the intellectual practice of contemporary indigenous artists and scholars, the archive challenges the authority of the museum, bringing back sovereignty for indigenous communities that have been continuously marginalized in the Western canon. As indigenous art continues to be examined in its relationship to ethnographic or tribal art and artifacts, this archive will find points of contact with non-Native artists who tackle similar themes and issues of the environment, self-identity, and politics, with the goal for future retrospective contemporary exhibitions to avoid ethnic and cultural divide.

Sources:

Ash-Milby, Kathleen, and Ruth B. Phillips. “Inclusivity or Sovereignty? Native American Arts in

the Gallery and the Museum since 1992.” Art Journal 76, no. 2 (2017): 10–38. http://www.jstor.org/stable/45142470.

Hill, Richard William, “Was Indigenous Art Better in the 1980s and Early ’90s?” Canadian Art,

2016. https://canadianart.ca/essays/was-indigenous-art-better-in-the-1980s-and-early-90s/.

Montiel, Anya. “After Columbus.” Art in America, October 2017, 86-91.

https://www.garthgreenan.com/attachment/en/57ab21f484184ea8138b4568/News/5ad1057ac3c138385f6bc9d5

Museum of the City of New York, "Urban Indian," 2023,

https://www.mcny.org/exhibition/urban-indian

Ollman, Leah. “Confronting All the Demons.” Los Angeles Times, June 16, 1996.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-16-ca-15485-story.html.

U.S. Government Accountability Office. “Tribal and Native American Issues.” U.S. GAO.

https://www.gao.gov/tribal-and-native-american-issues#:~:text=There%20are%20574%20ethnically%2C%20culturally,relationship%20with%20the%20U.S.%20government.

Village Preservation. "The Art and Archives of the American Indian Community House." 2023,

https://www.villagepreservation.org/2023/09/26/the-art-and-archives-of-the-american-indian-community-house/

WalkingStick, Kay. “Native American Art in the Postmodern Era.” Art Journal 51, no. 3 (1992):

15–17. https://doi.org/10.2307/777343.

Google Sites

Report abuse