Motifs
This student-curated exhibition represents 200 years of Indigenous North American art across four themes.
At the entrance to the exhibition Places, Nations, Generations, Beings: 200 Years of Indigenous North American Art at Yale University Art Gallery is a Mohegan splint basket. A wall label explains that its placement is to “acknowledge the Mohegan people and other Algonquian speakers as the rightful custodians of the land Yale occupies.” At the other entrance to the exhibition is a maple bowl by contemporary Mohegan artist Justin Scott given to the university when its Peabody Museum of Natural History transferred hundreds of objects to the tribe’s Tantaquidgeon Museum in Uncasville, Connecticut.
The historic objects in the exhibition have been gathered from among the gallery, the Peabody Museum and the
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. It is the gallery’s first major exhibition of Indigenous North American art. It was assembled by two student curators and a co-curator: Katherine Mccleary (Little Shell Chippewa-cree), Leah Shrestinian and co-curator Joseph Zordan (Bad River Ojibwe).
Objects are displayed according to the four themes in the exhibition’s title. For the Places theme the museum notes, “Much of the art in the exhibition was collected between 1870 and 1930, a period during which Indigenous North American peoples were forced from their homes, severing their relationships with their lands and waterways. Through their designs, materials and histories, however, the works in this section illustrate Indigenous nations’ and
artists’ continued connections to place, which persist despite colonization.” They were often collected without reference to their makers, tribes or location.
The objects are honored in the exhibition and by the curators themselves who say to them, “Thank you for allowing us to visit with you, hold you, and speak to you. Thank you for teaching us.”
Mccleary acknowledges, “Generations of Native students and staff at Yale have challenged the gallery and Peabody to better present Indigenous art so even as a first-year student it felt imperative that my peers and I continue this work. For me, this exhibition first and foremost, was an opportunity to advocate for more resources to be put towards these works and, by extension, their communities. Over the three years of working on this project, I had the privilege of learning so much from the objects themselves and the many people who selflessly gave time to answer our questions and provide feedback. With the exhibit now up, it has been such a joy seeing people engage with the works in new ways and leave the exhibit excited to learn more.”
For Zordan, the exhibition “wasn’t about making more people care about Indigenous North American art. It was about giving space to the people who already cared about these works and to the objects that the three of us came to love over the course of this project. It’s nice that along the way other people started caring too, but it was never a central concern of mine for what I wanted this exhibit ‘to do’.” Zordan took part in a Yale-smithsonian Institution internship on the display of Indigenous objects and the historical and living presence of the people who made them.
Shrestinian explains, “Our exhibit is really about relationships and relationship building, and the process of putting it together was no different. Over the course of three years, we each formed our own relationships with the objects. They taught us about their histories and artists, and we tried to give them some of the care they needed and had not had while in storage, isolated from the people and communities with which they have relationships. Of course, as a non-indigenous person, my relationships with the objects look different than an Indigenous person’s would. For me, there was a real joy in being able to bring students in to see art from their nations and working with the descendants of artists, as well as a sadness that these objects were separated from their communities, often without record, in the first place.”