Southeastern Indian Art exhibition Sept. 1-23

The John Brown University Art Gallery will open its exhibition season with a powerful and significantly relevant exhibit titled “Return from Exile: Contemporary Southeastern Indian Art,” according to Charles Peer, gallery director.

The collection is a national traveling exhibition of 32 of the top contemporary Native American artists working today. It will be on display at John Brown University in both the main gallery in Windgate Visual Arts West and in the Student Gallery in Windgate Visual Arts East Sept. 1-23. An opening reception will be held from 6 to 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 1, and will feature the curators and several of the artists in attendance.

In coordination with the exhibition, Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville is hosting a Gallery Conversation from 1 to 2 p.m., Sept. 17, featuring Return from Exile curators and artists responding to works in the Museum’s collection.

All the artists featured in the collection are from peoples with original homelands in the American Southeast—tribes whose forced removals have become known as the “Trail of Tears.” But this exhibition is not about retelling history, but about responding to that history with themes of removal, return and resilience.

“This collection of artwork is both beautiful and moving,” said Peer.

Curated by University of Georgia professor Dr. Jace Weaver, independent curator and artist Tony A. Tiger, and JBU art faculty and artist Bobby C. Martin, Return from Exile features 44 works in a wide variety of styles and media by artists who created work especially for this show.

“I think there is a palpable, undeniable power to this exhibition,” Martin explained, “which I believe occurs in large part because the artists invested so much of themselves into the themes of the show. Their spiritual and emotional investment is plain to see, and it makes for a moving experience, even for viewers uninitiated into the histories involved.”

History records that within the first 40 years of the 19th century, almost all of the original inhabitants of the southeastern United States—the Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Cherokees and Seminoles—had been removed, either voluntarily or forcibly, to new lands in what is now the state of Oklahoma. In a stunning triumph of ethnic cleansing, the U.S. government’s policy of removal of Indian tribes from their ancestral homelands succeeded in uprooting and relocating whole tribal cultures to a strange and distant Indian Territory in the West.

For almost 200 years now, that strange and distant territory has been home to the “Five Civilized Tribes”— while the original homelands in Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, Florida and the Carolinas have in large part become a distant memory only recalled through historic documents and oral tradition.

More information is available at www.jbu.edu/art/ gallery or at www.crystalbridges.org/calendar/gallery-conversation-returnfrom-exile.