YUAG Walks The Walk

A coyote sits in a plastic lawn chair, paw to face. Maybe it’s resting. Maybe it’s exasperated. Whatever the coyote is feeling, it’s not enough to stop the animals at its feet, who look like they’re starting to wreak some havoc.

Julie Buffalohead’s Indifferent is part of Place, Nations, Generations, Beings: 200 Years of Indigenous North American Art, which just opened at the Yale University Art Gallery and runs through June 21, 2020. ​“Featuring characters from Ponca stories, Juile Buffalohead’s collage depicts a scene of serious play, satirizing clichéd and romanticized perceptions of Indigenous people. Coyote, a Ponca trickster figure, rests in a lawn chair, indifferent to the motley crew of animals below her. Wily and unruly, yet wise, Coyote is known for her irony and holds within her the contradictions of the world.”

The same upending attitude can be found throughout this arresting exhibit. Curated by Katherine Nova McCleary (Little Shell Chippewa – Cree), B.A. 2018, and Leah Tamar Shrestinian, B.A. 2018, with Joseph Zordan (Bad River Ojibwe), B.A. 2019, Place, Nations, Generations, Beings uses pieces from the Yale University Art Gallery, the Peabody Museum of Natural History, and the Beinecke Rare Books Library to dive incisively into the complex and devastating history of North American indigenous people.

The exhibit doesn’t disappoint in presenting stunning examples of art, either, from vests and blankets to moccasins and miniature canoes. Richard Hunt’s Sea Monster Mask is articulated so that the mouth and other parts of the mask can move at the will of the wearer. Hunt is an internationally acclaimed artist and in the quality of his work, it’s easy to see why. Judging from his biography on his website, he’s also doing well for himself.

This kind of self-sufficiency, the exhibit points out, is the exception rather than the rule. Sometimes the way indigenous artists make money through art confounds the romantic idea of an ​“authentic” cultural experience that many non-indigenous people are searching for when they get interested in indigenous art. Elsewhere in the exhibit, the notes to a model totem pole explain that Sam Jacobs, a Tlingit artist, made art in the style of the Kwakwaka’wakw — a different indigenous group — because that style, called the Alert Bay style, ​“became popular among tourists in the early twentieth century…. The original Alert Bay poles communicated a family’s particular history and status, but due to their popularity, other artists began reproducing the design in miniature form to sell on the tourist market and support themselves financially.” A bandolier bag made by artist Sally Cypress that looks utterly traditional to the untrained eye was in fact ​“commissioned by Yale anthropologist John Mann Goggin” and made from ​“trade materials and cloth repurposed from a U.S. Navy uniform.”

The effect of these small revelations is to peel back the layers of the exhibition. What does it mean that the artists made what they did in the way they did it? What does it mean that the pieces are in a museum now? And why might we have come to see them?

The questions develop a powerful edge as other facets of the exhibit offer perhaps the closest thing we’ll get to some of the depredations visited upon indigenous Americans by colonizing U.S. forces. Three sketchbooks from three different artists, dating from the 1870s, show people being rounded up and imprisoned in military forts in the West; other sketches by the same artists show life as it was before the army arrived.

The painful history lends that much more clarity to a section in the exhibit on religious beliefs. ​“There are many popular misconceptions about Indigenous religions and spiritualities. Non-Indigenous people often overlook the diversity of beliefs not only among nations but also within them. Settlers may also homogenize, mythologize, or fetishize Indigenous peoples’ relationships to beings. For these reasons, many Indigenous peoples and nations choose not to share the details of these relationships outside of their family, clans, and communities.” The exhibit respects their privacy.

The show’s sharp point of view comes perhaps into greatest focus with the work of photographer Will Wilson. ​“Will Wilson began the Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange project in 2012 with the intent to, in his words, ​‘supplant’ the work of Edward Curtis, a settler photographer who took portraits of Indigenous people in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,” the accompanying notes explain. ​“Wilson uses a wet-plate collodion process, the same as Curtis, but employs a radically different, collaborative practice. The individuals in Wilson’s photos have the agency to choose their poses and clothes, and they write captions for their own images. Wilson gifts the tintype to the participant and, with their permission creates reproductions of the image. Through this project, Wilson empowers Indigenous peoples to represent themselves on their own terms.”

The results are striking. The technique is immediately recognizable for anyone who has seen old photographs of indigenous chiefs, but Wilson’s collaboration with his subjects gets visible results. The photographs are strong and vulnerable, accusatory, defiant, and celebratory. All told, Place, Nations, Generations, Beings represents something of a breakthrough for the Yale University Art Gallery. It’s the first show at the Yale University Art Gallery in this reporter’s memory that turns the position of this venerable institution inside out, as it uses the museum and its collection of indigenous art to successfully and very pointedly question whether it’s really OK for a museum to have a collection of indigenous art. There’s no sense that it’s all in the past, either. We’re responsible, today, for helping find the answers to those questions.

Place, Nations, Generations, Beings: 200 Years Of Indigenous North American Art runs at the Yale University Art Gallery, 1111 Chapel St., through June 2020. Admission is free. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and more information.