We Ask Leading Museum Curators About What’s Going On In Their World
What event (gallery show, museum exhibit, etc.) in the next few months are you looking forward to, and why?
I’m excited for the Heard Museum’s Larger than Memory: Contemporary Art from Indigenous North America, curated by Erin Joyce and Diana Pardue and as well as Pat Pruitt: Jewelry and Metalwork, curated by Diana Pardue. Though I may not get to view them in person, I look forward to online programming, virtual tours and a lot of social media activity.
What are you reading?
Curator, Native American and Oceanic Art and Culture
161 Essex Street, Salem, MA 01970 (978) 745-9500, www.pem.org
I’m finishing Louise Erdrich’s The Round House which won the 2012 National Book Award for fiction. It is extraordinary. Next up is Alicia Elliott’s A Mind Spread Out on the Ground and Monumental Mobility: The Memory Work of Massasoit by Lisa Blee and Jean M. O’brien.
Interesting exhibit, gallery opening or work of art you’ve seen recently.
I’m totally obsessed with Patrick Dean Hubbell’s Honoring our Foremothers, 2020, which I saw online through Gerald Peters Contemporary. We are working with a donor to borrow this for our forthcoming gallery of Native and American art, slated to open at PEM in November 2021.
This work is part of a new series in which Dean Hubbell is pushing his painting practice into new dimensions, incorporating three-dimensionality and kinetic elements. In this particular work, Navajo textile fragments morph into an American flag and back again. In Hubbell’s reconstructed canvas, he connects the metaphysics of personal mark making and Diné cultural motifs with his propensity for abstraction.
What are you researching at the moment?
I am doing research on President George Washington, in conjunction with PEM’S recent acquisition of the video installation Hanödaga:yas (Town Destroyer), 2018, by Alan Michelson, Mohawk artist and a member of Six Nations of the Grand River. Many people may be less familiar with our first president’s role as Hanödaga:yas, or Town Destroyer, a title he inherited from his great-grandfather John Washington and certainly lived up to during and after the Revolutionary War.
In 1779, Washington ordered a campaign against the Haudenosaunee (Six Nations, or Iroquois Confederacy). Maj. Gen. John Sullivan and Brig. Gen. James Clinton and their troops devastated some 60 villages and hundreds of prosperous houses, farms, fields, orchards and livestock, forcing people to evacuate en masse. Hundreds starved to death and died of disease and exposure. Through historic maps, documents, portraits, site markers and other materials, Michelson’s work traces the course of the campaign and the seizure of Haudenosaunee homelands in its aftermath.
Michelson’s work provides us with an opportunity to take a closer look at a leader many in American have been conditioned to idolize. This piece has particular resonance in this moment of national reckoning with monuments, statues and actions upheld by founding fathers of America.
What is your dream exhibit to curate? Or see someone else curate?
I have so many exhibitions I dream about doing, but for now I’ll share that I’m currently researching 21st-century Northwest Coast art that could make for a compelling and edgy exhibition. And lately, I have been daydreaming of curating Native Fashion Now Ii…in this daydream, my next iteration celebrating contemporary Indigenous fashion would be global in scope.