Land, memory, language, and ancestry: ‘Native America: In Translation’ at the Blanton

Sherry Cheng·
ArtAustin
·

“I was thinking about young Native artists and what would be inspirational and important for them as a road map,” said Wendy Red Star, curator of Native America: In Translation. The lens-based exhibition she curated features nine contemporary Indigenous artists whose wide-ranging practices in photography, installation, performance art, collage, multi-media assemblage, and video contemplate Native existence past, present, and future.

Showing now at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin through Jan. 5, 2025, the exhibition is an extension of the Fall 2020 issue of Aperture magazine, for which Red Star was the guest editor. “Photography was there because the issue had determined that,” says Hannah Klemm, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Blanton, “but as the show became a show, she (Red Star) started thinking more broadly. These ideas of land, memory, language, ancestry–she was really thinking about that from an Indigenous perspective and how to showcase that in a contemporary way.”

It was important to Red Star to showcase intergenerational artists. Two of the artists, Alan Michelson and Rebecca Belmore, have been driving forces in Native American art for decades. Michelson draws upon historical memory and Indigenous philosophy, taking deep-dive archival research as a starting point to present an encompassing narrative that includes Indigenous histories.

In the six-panel work Hanödaga:yas (Town Destroyer), Michelson takes French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon’s iconic bust of George Washington, who the Iroquois called “Town Destroyer,” and projects onto it historical maps, documents, site markers, and other materials that trace the course of Washington’s brutal scorched-earth campaign against the Iroquois in 1779. The story of invasion, forced eviction, and devastation plays out over Washington’s face, challenging what Michelson calls American amnesia and denial.

Known primarily for her performance-based work, Rebecca Belmore’s 2018 series nindinawemaganidog (all of my relations) features large-scale staged art photographs documenting singular moments from performances throughout her career. In each photograph, Belmore poses her sister Florene in the reenactment of a scene. Each image is an enduring act of remembrance. For mother, Belmore references her 2006 performance Freeze, dedicated to Neil Stonechild, who was killed by the cruel practice of “starlight tours,” where Native men were driven by the Canadian police to the outskirts of town and left to walk back in freezing temperatures. For the performance, Belmore had carved Stonechild’s name in blocks of ice and left it out in the cold. For the photograph she posed Florene behind blocks of ice, gazing directly at the viewer. “She was thinking in the reverse,” says Klemm. “She was thinking about Neil’s Mother and his family and all the people still left behind the ice because there had been no justice gotten for any of the victims.”

Youngest of the nine artists, Martine Gutierrez constructs a glamorous high-fashion world through her staged self-portraits. She famously said, “no one was going to put me on the cover of a Paris fashion magazine, so I thought, I’m going to make my own.” Her 2018 project Indigenous Woman took the form of a 124-page fashion magazine. It’s a humorously performative art book. “Every aspect of it was made by her,” says Klemm. The artist is producer, model, photographer, stylist, and creative director.

With style and panache, Gutierrez uses the masquerade to question ideas of gender and identity. In an advertisement for “Identity Boots,” she poses nude in go-go boots, gender symbols taped all over her body. The wild and fun set of images called “Queer Rage” is a perfect synthesis of teen angst and high fashion. Throw in her father’s Guatemalan Mayan fabrics, some wild jungle animals, and her collection of American Girl dolls, the fun DIY elements become beautiful expressions of self.

Duane Linklater’s conceptual work is often site-responsive. In this case he is responding to the 1995 issue of Aperture, which was dedicated to Native photography. He took the entire magazine and scanned each page, establishing a space for experimentation. His line work atop pages of the magazine recalls the preparatory sketches for quill and beadwork from a variety of Indigenous communities. The original image is obscured and the viewer is left with a snapshot of Linklater’s intervention into this moment in 1995, juxtaposed with a new moment in time.

Throughout the exhibition there is a sense that history is present. “I think the artists are trying to show the everyday presence of histories on people, and how they are creating beautiful communities and art out of everyday life,” says Klemm.

This is true of Nalikutaar Jacqueline Cleveland, who does not think of herself as an artist, but rather a subsistence hunter-fisher-gatherer. The photographs in this exhibition are part of an anthropological and documentary project funded by the National Science Foundation to study variations in the diets of native communities in the Bering Sea. She helps small, isolated communities in this area of Alaska to re-embrace foraging techniques to subsist and flourish. The photographs feel intimate and soulful. “That’s one of the things that’s so beautiful about it,” says Klemm. “It really is a portrait of contemporary Native life, and what’s important to Native people in thinking about the land, about subsistence, and about ways to use Native modes of being to propel cultures and societies forward.”

Marianne Nicolson considers herself a cultural researcher and historian as well as an advocate for Indigenous land rights. Her light and glass installation projects powerful archival images and symbols of the Kwakwaka’wakw people onto the gallery space. Meanwhile, the artist Koyoltzintli, descendant of the Manta people of Ecuador, uses myth to document endangered Indigenous oral traditions. Her black and white photos channel origin myths through Spider Woman and Sky Woman, using her body within nature to express lived understandings of memory.

Koyoltzintli thinks of herself as a healer. “Healing practices are part of her art,” says Klemm. “I found that thinking about trauma and healing is present throughout the show in a beautiful way.” Koyoltzintli finds healing in the way land, nature, and language can connect people to the past and to ancestral modes of thinking.

Guadalupe Maravilla, who was part of the first wave of unaccompanied, undocumented children to cross the border during the Salvadoran Civil War, survived the trauma of 40 days of traveling and being passed from coyote to coyote when he was only 8 years old, and later on survived his fight with colon cancer. His retablos are a kind of protection and way of healing, devotional objects imbued with great power.

And finally, the first artist Red Star selected for this exhibition and the only artist who is no longer living, Kimowan Metchewais, “the artists’ artist,” encapsulates with his works all the enduring themes in this exhibition–land, language, memory, and healing. Metchewais died in 2011 after his decades long fight with a brain tumor.  He gifted his enormous collection of polaroids to the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian, some of which are shown in a video projection for the exhibition.

Metchewais called himself a sculptor working with photography. In his works he sought to capture contemporary Native life and the Indigenous presence. For his Cold Lake series he created collages out of photographs and dipped them in water colored by ceremonial tobacco which is sacred to the Cree and many Indigenous communities. One of these collages, Cold Lake Fishing, combines multiple snapshots taken by his mother. With the long horizon line as backdrop, Metchewais and his cousin are shown wading and fishing in Cold Lake. An intense humanity pervades the poignant image. Metchewais has written about “live relics” embedded in his works. The sacred lake itself is a relic, as is the paper “baptized” in ceremonial tobacco water. But it is his connection to home, his land, and his family that makes the work a living relic, still transmitting traces of memory, knowledge, and culture. As the artist once said, “Cold Lake is a kind of prayer.”

-SHERRY CHENG

Sherry Cheng

Sherry Cheng is a music educator, free-lance pianist, and artistic director of the HCC Chamber Music Series.