Session Ten

Collecting and Displaying Indigenous Art - Museums Today

"In one place, visitors will experience the collective histories of 39 distinctive First American Nations. First Americans Museum (FAM) will share the cultural diversity, history, and contributions of the First Americans. The 175,000 square foot museum showcases state-of-the-art exhibitions in First American history, culture, and art; live public and educational programs; a family discovery center with immersive family-friendly activities; a full-service restaurant presenting unique Native inspired cuisine; and a museum store featuring authentic one-of-a-kind hand-made items or products by premiere First American artists." First Americans Museum (FAM)

For more information on FAM, New Museum for First Americans by Andy Rieger, HUMANITIES, National Endowment for the Humanities. Spring 2022, Volume 43, Number 2

Welcome to Session Ten

Throughout our study we have read about the historical forms of Indigenous art as well as contemporary forms. Much of this background information has come from presentations in museums, and in art galleries. In this Session we will discuss some of the issues relating to the selection and display of Indigenous art. In particular, we will look at some of the artwork at the most recent exhibit at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum.

Readings and Viewings for Session Ten

Part One -Some Background Information on Museums- Where does Native American art belong?

Where does Native American art belong? It's one of the questions that continues to puzzle the art world as Native-American artists address the value of their Indigenous history and seek to define their place as contemporary artists. Fundamental to these questions is the deeply troubled history of indigenous peoples and the Euro-Americans who colonized the continent, took away their lands, and pursued assimilation policies to make them disappear. The original clash of cultures between Euro-Americans and Native Americans continues to feed situations of appropriation, misrepresentation, and alienation. By Victoria Hutter, National Endowment of the Arts, 2016.

Historical photo of mountain of bison skulls documents animals on the brink of extinction, The Conversation by Danielle Taschereau Mamers, Post doctoral Research Fellow, English and Cultural Studies, McMaster University, December 2, 2020

The Osage Nation Museum (ONM) in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, is devoted to Osage history, art, and culture. Highlights include an extensive photograph collection, historical artifacts, and traditional and contemporary art.

Founded in 1938, the ONM is the oldest tribally owned museum in the United States.

'Located at the heart of the Osage Nation since 1938, the Osage Nation Museum [ONM] is a place of gathering, community, and sharing the enduring story of the Osage. ONM is the oldest tribally-governed museum in the United States. During the 1930s, Osage Tribal Councilman and writer John Joseph Mathews championed an effort to create a central repository for the art, artifacts, material culture, and other resource material related to the history of the Osage. This effort to preserve Osage material culture was vital due to the numerous dislocations and disruptions to our previous lifeways along the Ohio River Valley and beyond." The Ossage National Museum

Magazine Cover. Hyperallergic, December 30, 2024.

Art World Dos and Don'ts for 2025 Hyperallergic editors round up the trends and habits we hope will be left behind in 2024—and those we want to embrace more fully in the new year. Hyperallergic, December 30, 2024.

See excerpt below, Let’s Bring Forward, Hyperallergic, December 30, 2024

Let’s Bring Forward (excerpt)

# 8. More Native Curators and Artists at Museums — There are more Indigenous curators and artists at museums than ever. In the last few years, artists as varied as Shelley Niro, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Jeremey Frey, Robert Houle, Nicholas Galanin, and many others have had retrospectives at major American museums, while artists like Kay WalkingStick have been exhibited at the New York Historical alongside their renown Hudson River School collection to explore the political realities that each body of work evokes. This is a trend we adore. More, please. Hyperallergic, December 30, 2024.

Part Two- New practices for museums. The most recent exhibit at the Baltimore Art Museum, Preoccupied- Indigenizing the Museum.

The artwork, perspectives, and histories of Native artists, scholars, and community members are at the center of Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum, a major BMA initiative. The wide-reaching project seeks to begin addressing the historical erasure of Indigenous culture by arts institutions while creating new practices for museums.

Preoccupied radically centers Native perspectives in a space that has often overlooked or erased that community: encyclopedic museums,” shares the project’s co-curator Dare Turner (Yurok Tribe), Curator of Indigenous Art at the Brooklyn Museum. “It challenges all museums to interrogate their colonial roots and make space for new ways of thinking, learning, and being.”

Preoccupied emphasizes that Native people have created meaningful art since time immemorial and that Native communities thrive to this day.Beyond its large-scale exhibition program, the BMA’s celebration of Native art and artists offers a framework that the Museum can carry forward for future exhibitions and community engagement.

Exhibition, Preoccupied, Indigenizing the Museum, Baltimore Museum of Art, April 21, 2024 to February 16, 2025.

Dyani White Hawk (Sičáŋǧu Lakota) presents one new and two existing sculptural works from her Carry series. Each Carry piece, composed of a large copper bucket and ladle adorned with glass beads, bears extravagantly long fringe whose draping emulates arboreal root structures. Alongside the artist’s works, White Hawk selected historic Lakota belongings from the BMA’s collection. Through these works, White Hawk insists upon an interdependence between art and function—and by extension art and life—effectively calling into question art history’s tendency to devalue craft. These works operate as physical metaphors for the carrying of history, cosmology, generational teaching, and deep thought.

Baltimore Art Museum

Caroline Monnet: River Flows Through Bent Trees, May 12, 2024 — December 1, 2024, Baltimore Art Museum

For this new solo site-specific installation, Caroline Monnet (Anishinaabe/French) interweaves inspiration from eel trap pots made by Indigenous people of the Chesapeake Bay watershed along with traditional Anishinaabe longhouses. The artist responds to the Museum’s architecture as a departure point for her distinct aesthetic vocabulary, which inscribes traditional Anishinaabe motifs and cultural practices within contemporary forms and materials. Optically vibrating and resonating outwards, the forms forcefully claim space while also reflecting both a sense of reception and transmission. Through doing so, the artist and her work affirm the long-denied place of Indigenous people within the world of museums and the fabric of society at large. (See Session Nine for additional background Information about the artist.)

Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum

"Bring family and friends of all ages to celebrate Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum, a wide-ranging BMA initiative that significantly increases the presence of Native voices, experiences, and artworks across the Museum". Baltimore Museum of Art

Part Three - Exhibition Design in Fostering Museum Environments Reflective of Indigenious Creativity, Values and Aesthetic Systems.

Resisting tbe Colonial Imagination: The Role of Exhibition Design in the Decolonial Project, American Alliance of Museums, Exhibition Journal, October 26, 2023.

Installation view of the Art of the Pacific gallery with benches and pedestals designed by Franz West at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2009. Photo © Museum Associates/LACMA

"The most egregious example of colonial aesthetics in exhibition design is the wonder cabinet model, characterized by arrays of decontextualized objects in oak cases arranged in neat taxonomies. When encapsulated behind the glass panes of the wonder cabinet, cultural materials are reduced to amusing curios, and natural-history specimens become illustrations of inborn hierarchies and progress over time."

For more information

Resisting tbe Colonial Imagination: The Role of Exhibition Design in the Decolonial Project

Part Four

MFA installs The Knowledge Keepers, sculpture by Alan Michelson, 2024

Artist Alan Michelson with his unfinished sculpture, The Knowledge Keepers, at UAP’s Pollich Tallix foundry in Rock Tavern, N.Y. The finished pair has now been installed in front of the MFA.

MFA installs Alan Michelson’s answer to Appeal to the Great Spirit.’ ‘No one would ever take them for Native American stereotype'. By Murray Whyte, Globe Staff, Updated November 14, 2024, 2:46 p.m.

Cyrus Dallin's Appeal to the Great Soirit, MFA Boston

Alan Michelson' s Answer to the “Vanishing Indian" Myth. The artist discusses his gleaming installation outside MFA Boston, his journey to reconnect with his Mohawk roots, and how he responded to the racist trope. Hyperallergic, June 3, 2025.

Cyrus Dallin's Appeal to the Great Spirit, 1912, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

"In 1912, when the MFA installed Cyrus Dallin’s Appeal to the Great Spirit at its Huntington Avenue Entrance, the sculpture was a contemporary work of art. The Museum’s leaders at that time did not intend for it to remain in front of the building permanently but it has stood there ever since. Depicting a Native American man astride a horse with his arms outstretched, Appeal to the Great Spirit has become an icon of the MFA and one of the most reproduced objects in the collection. A part of the Museum’s history, it has entered today’s international debates about cultural appropriation, public monuments, and Indigenous erasure." MFA

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