RE:DEFINE – Reconsidering Native Art
This spring the Heard Museum will open an exhibition of contemporary Native American art.
Native art is far more than just ethnographic works, and a new exhibit at the Heard Museum will show how Native American artists are defying that trope to create fine art works of distinction and depth.
RE:DEFINE, opening to the public in spring 2019, will show the world how Indigenous artists navigate the intersection of cultural identity and traditional points of view with life in the 21st century. The 150 works, both current and commissioned, range from sculpture, metalwork, jewelry, ceramics, painting and photography to installation art.
In fact, the title RE:DEFINE itself provides much of the show’s context, guest curator Ellen Taubman says.
“I have a long experience in the field of contemporary art, and I’ve noted that when traveling across the United States and abroad, people for the most part still define Native art as ethnographic and not fine art.” However, “…artists don’t live in a vacuum,” says Taubman. “These are established artists, and I’m focused on creating an exhibit where these artists can be seen by a wider audience.”
Taubman has been involved with Native art since she first came to Sotheby’s in 1973. “There was no such thing as an American Indian art department,” Taubman says. “It was handled with non-western art.” However, Native art spoke to Taubman, and she began researching it—on her own time. Her task was made easier by the fact that Sotheby’s had inherited a library of works on the subject. Also, “people lent me expertise,” she says. “I treated the art then as I do now, as works of art.”
Building on that research, which included developing relationships with other Native art experts, and her own passion for Indigenous art, Taubman helped with the creation of Sotheby’s American Indian art department. And, when she retired to raise her children, Taubman passed the reins on to David M. Roche, who’s now the Heard’s director and CEO.
Taubman also utilizes her deep knowledge to create Native art exhibitions, the best known of which is the three-part series Changing Hands: Art Without
Reservation, organized by the Museum of Art and Design in New York City with Taubman as guest curator. However, she notes, those exhibits featured only three-dimensional art. For RE:DEFINE, Taubman was able to bring in more two-dimensional pieces. “This is a show I’ve wanted to do since Changing Hands,” she says.
Many of the 30 artists represented in the exhibit are already known for their work, she says. The artists represent some of Native America’s most acclaimed fine artists working today and are evenly split between Canadian First Nation and U.S. tribal communities. In fact, most of them have been recognized by major foundations for their work, and many of the artists travel the world to share their vision with people in nations as diverse as Dubai and Great Britain.
In fact, Taubman says, “choosing artists is not easy when there are so many great ones—people are doing work that really transcends what it means to be Native.”
One artist whose work is informed by not just his ancestral lands but by contemporary Southern California car culture is Lewis desoto (Cahuilla). In fact, many of his works are cars—and trucks, such as Cahuilla, 2006, a retooled 1981 GMC pickup that’s tricked out with motifs—including a tonneau cover featuring Cahuilla basketry patterns on a craps table— to symbolize the economic gains from gaming. That work isn’t coming to the Heard—the Autry Museum of the American West purchased it and will show it in 2020—however, the work desoto is creating for RE:DEFINE harks back to his experience growing up in San Bernardino, nearly 60 miles from his desert roots. But it may as well have been on the other side of the moon for the young desoto.
“My father left the ‘rez’ for the Air Force and never went back,” says desoto of the work, a 12-foot-high inflatable sculpture of himself as a “skookum,” a series of dolls that depicted stereotypical Native people created by folk artist Mary Mcaboy in 1914. The sculpture will show how his experience as an “urban Indian” made returning home to integrate wholly with his father’s tribe impossible.
“As a lot of urban Natives feel like ‘fake Indians,’ I decided to portray myself as a kind of action figure skookum, holding my camera, my tape recorder/ microphone and my asthma inhaler,” says desoto. “I wear a spark plug instead of a head feather, since
Cahuillas never had them, and I have a head band that is based on beadwork done by my Aunt Virginia. My T-shirt is from the band King Crimson.” The piece will also feature a tattoo of a rattlesnake design seen in Cahuilla basketry, surrounded by a band with desoto’s “BIA number” etched into the figure’s arm. “My ‘blanket’ is a kind of wrap-around drape with the pattern of the smallpox virus embedded in a Pendleton pattern,” he says.
Other artists whose work will be showcased in the exhibit include Santa Clara Pueblo pottery artist Susan Folwell, who Taubman says is a “painter who uses ceramic as her canvas—her content is always interesting.” Then there’s Jaune Quick-to-see Smith (French-cree, Shoshone and Salish), whose multimedia works spanning over her 30-year career are part of a group of artists about whom the National Museum of American Art says are “helping to redefine their culture’s relationship to contemporary American life and its problematic past.” Taubman simply states, “Her work is incredible.” Hopi/zuni artist Les Namingha is transitioning between ceramics and painting as he continues to deconstruct Indigenous design.
Younger artists are also part of the exhibit. For example, artist Pat Pruitt, who merges his skill as a metalworker with his Pueblo traditions, won Best of Show at the 2017 SWAIA Santa Fe Indian Market with his interpretation of a traditional Laguna Pueblo pot rendered in zirconium and titanium titled, Sentinel v1.0. Caroline “Coco” Monnet is an Algonquin-french artist and filmmaker based in Montreal who’s known for her work in sculpture, installation and film. Meryl Mcmaster (Plains Cree member of the Siksika Nation, British and Dutch) is a multiple award-winning artist who works in large-scale photography.
Taubman also notes that sourcing works for RE:DEFINE was made easier by the enthusiasm of the collectors who appreciate contemporary native art. “The collectors tell me that ‘I’m happy to lend the work!’” she says.
“We want people to be surprised,” says Taubman of the depth and breadth of art forms in the exhibit. “The exhibit will give visitors a chance to reconsider, readdress, change their preconceived notions of what they believe Native people to be based on when they went to school—rethink it all. Visitors will come away with a different point of view.”