Art & Culture

After jamming together at the Survival of First Voices festival, the jazz group the Delbert Anderson Trio and the hip-hop performer Def-i are touring as DDAT, in a new musical style.

In dedicating a Mimbres-style funerary bowl to the victim of Nazi genocide, the Canadian artist evokes echoes of inhumanity that span millennia.

A new exhibition of Native art at Walt Disney World’s Epcot Center is introducing the holdings of the National Museum of the American Indian to a whole new audience and showing how new ideas continue to grow from old traditions.

Art Basel Miami is one of the premier global contemporary art fairs, but the only Indigenous artists on the program were the ones asking why so many others were absent.

Reclaiming the Landscape Supernatural beings inhabited the mountains around California’s Cahuilla Indians before settlers renamed the land. Lewis deSoto’s installations are recovering the ancient memories.

Cuba is picturesque everywhere, but most visitors trek to the more accessible western end of the island – Havana and the nearby white-sand beaches, the historic bay and its boardwalk (malecón). This is the tourist mecca of colonial architecture and burgeoning arts, old time cars in a modern metropolis.

During the wave of 1970s activism that produced the occupations of Alcatraz, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Wounded Knee, Indigenous people learned the power of media to convey their message to the world. The first Native film festivals emerged to present nascent Native moviemaking. From a start in San Francisco in 1975, these conclaves have burgeoned into major forums allowing Native peoples to tell their own stories in their own voices.

Art transforms, translates, transgresses, transfixes and transcends. Most importantly, art moves. It moves our ideas and our ways of seeing as it moves from one way of being to another. Tradition likewise moves as it transmits beliefs and customs across time.

Three generations from one famous Cape Dorset, Nunavut, family of artists track changing attitudes of Canadian Inuit toward the modern world, and themselves. An impressive selection of their works is now on display at the George Gustav Heye Center in Lower Manhattan.

Moving beyond discussions about the politicization of visual culture in the United States, the Museum’s exhibition Americans (opening this fall in Washington, D.C.) delves deeply into the reasons behind this phenomenon. Whether viewed sweepingly or considered in detail, the exhibition’s central gallery, titled Indians Everywhere, reveals the historical extent of this imagery – its use began with Paul Revere and the revolutionary generation and has continued to the present day – as well as the unexpected, sometimes paradoxical contexts in which it appears. American Indian imagery has been used by the federal government to distinguish the United States from other nations and to define the nation for its citizens, by U.S. armed forces to express military might, by American corporations to signify integrity and by designers, such those who created the 1948 Indian motorcycle, to add luster and cachet to commercial products.