Another Perspective
A popular exhibition on painter George Catlin returns with a new section featuring Native American artworks.
In 2013, the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, unveiled a major exhibition examining the work of artist-adventurer George Catlin, who traveled to the West five times in the 1830s and documented the land, the buffalo and Native Americans.
That popular exhibition has returned, this time to the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., and with an important new perspective, that of more contemporary Native American artists who explored similar themes as Catlin.
Picturing the American Buffalo: George Catlin and Modern Native American Artists is now open at the Smithsonian, where works by Catlin will hang near works by historic and contemporary Native American artists such as Woody Crumbo, Paul J. Goodbear, Awa Tsireh, Thomas Vigil, Julián Martínez, Jaune Quickto-see-smith and Allan Houser. All of the Native
American works come from museum’s collection, and many of them show buffalo or ceremonies devoted to the buffalo and its life-bringing presence on the plains. The Native American works, while linked in spirit to Catlin’s pieces, also offer an interesting counterpoint to Catlin’s way of thinking.
“Catlin had a very fatalist perspective. Essentially that the buffalo are doomed, the Native American people are doomed, we’re all doomed. We adopted the spirit and ethos of our sister museum, the National Museum of the American Indian, by suggesting that maybe we not get ahead of ourselves when it comes to Catlin’s perspective,” says Eleanor Jones Harvey, senior curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. “Catlin was really truly afraid that Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act would destroy everything, including their way of life, the plains, their food source, their clothing, their housing…but
it didn’t end as badly as Catlin feared it would. One of the legitimate criticisms of Catlin, particularly from a Native American perspective, was that Catlin believed he could not change the course of history. He has been described as a cultural eulogist, because he couldn’t save anything but he felt he had to document it before it was gone. The good news is that Catlin was wrong.”
Native Americans were not doomed. There were decades of unbelievable hardship, and the buffalo were nearly completely eradicated, but the people, their culture and their beliefs were not destroyed. Works in the exhibition reflect this, from Crumbo’s 1939 gouache on paper Buffalo Hunt, showing two riders chasing down buffalo with arrows drawn and ready, to Goodbear’s quite modern watercolor Buffalo Dance, Oklahoma, showing stylized figures dancing within a minimalist landscape.
“These artists provide the missing narrative perspective on many of Catlin’s conclusions. They were
not a doomed civilization. Catlin’s worst case scenario would not come to pass,” Harvey says. “By adding these pieces to the exhibition, we’re resetting the fulcrum by offering viewpoints from a Native perspective. We’re looking at the same issues through both ends of the telescope. By choosing artists like Houser or Fritz Scholder, we deliberately chose artists within our collection that carry forward the narrative of how important the buffalo was for individual and cultural identification.”
Visitors to the exhibition will not only see the thematic differences between Catlin and the Native American artists, but also the artistic differences as well. Many of the works not by Catlin, who painted in a realistic style common for his time, feature modern compositions, unique color arrangements and even abstract qualities. “These artists were updating the tradition in order to keep the artwork vital. What we see is the reinvention of long-standing traditions to take advantage of modern materials and modern perspectives,” Harvey adds. “They were trying to paint like they were part of their own era. From Woody Crumbo to Awa Tsireh to Quick-to-see Smith to Fritz Scholder—these are people who are operating in real time in their own lives and through their art they are creating that bridge between past and present.”
And while the show offers alternative perspectives to those presented by Catlin, it doesn’t suggest that Catlin is at fault in his thinking or his motives. He simply didn’t live long enough to see what would eventually happen: that Native Americans would survive, as would their histories, their ceremonies and their culture. Harvey adds, “His heart was always in the right place.”