Incised Tablet. Date: ca.1450–1700 Medium: Catlinite (red pipestone). Sanford Museum and Planetarium, Cherokee, Iowa (521-69-m)
Even as questionable auctions of indigenous art continue unabated in Paris, some American museums have begun to make an effort to “mainstream” similar (but responsibly collected) objects into their exhibits. New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art has led the charge, making it a top priority “to display art from the first Americans within its appropriate geographical context” alongside artworks by non-Natives (NYTimes, 4/6/17).
In the fall of 2018, the Met will debut a major exhibition of indigenous art that will be shown in conjunction with its Euro-American counterparts in the museum’s American Wing. The show was made possible by a generous gift of some 91 Native American works by Charles and Valerie Diker, New Yorkers who have been collecting American art—both Native and non-Native—since the 1960s. This year they loaned a few pieces of their collection to be arranged among the more typical works found in the American Wing as a preview to this fall’s unveiling of the whole exhibit.
19th-century Iroquois/Haudenosaunee pouch donated by the Dikers and displayed in the Met’s American Wing. Credit Joshua Bright for The New York Times
The Dikers’ generous gift is part of a trend that really got underway in 2015, with the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s show The Plains Indians: Artists of Earth and Sky. The New York Times’ reviewer, Holland Cotter, called it “an exhibition that has to be one of the most completely beautiful sights in New York right now.”
But the exhibition also raised many questions about the ethics of displaying uprooted objects (the show was comprised of items collected from mostly European institutions) without proper context. In her review for Hyperallergic, Ellen Pearlman traced this flaw to what she called “the cult of the aesthetic object.”
Patricia Marroquin Norby, Director of the D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian History and Indigenous Studies, and C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa, assistant professor of history at George Mason University wrote an in-depth analysis of the Plains exhibit’s reviews and concluded, “taken together, these reviews show the persistence and power of that language. They tell us that as a society, we’ve made little progress in moving beyond worn out stereotypes bequeathed from centuries past.” Their essay, “How We Still Look At and Talk About Indians and Their Art,” explores the language of romanticism that still pervades how such works of art are discussed by reviewers and the public at large. Time and again, Marroquin Norby and Genetin-Pilawa uncover phrases that could have appeared in 19th-century dime novels of the American West, leading them to conclude: “To accept outdated language is historical laziness that does broad damage. It’s a cavalier attitude, one that helps explain prevalent cultural appropriations like hipster headdresses, Hollywood Indians, and the dogged support for racist professional sports mascots.”
To accept outdated language is historical laziness that does broad damage. It’s a cavalier attitude, one that helps explain prevalent cultural appropriations like hipster headdresses, Hollywood Indians, and the dogged support for racist professional sports mascots.
Robe with Mythic Bird, ca. 1700–40. Mid-Mississippi River Basin, probably Illinois Confederacy. Eastern Plains. Musée du quai Branly, Paris, France (71.1878.32.134)
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To be clear, neither writer is taking to task the museum’s efforts to display Native material culture and fine arts in conjunction with other work produced in the United States. They recognize that we are in an early stage of a process that will take some time to develop. After all, offering indigenous artifacts, easel painting, performance art, and digital imagery to the public view carries with it an ethical imperative. The display of indigenous arts with a clear and forceful assertion of the simple fact that underlies all efforts at repatriation— Native peoples are still here.
