Arts and Cultures

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.

An Extinction Event threatens indigenous languages. Here are some of the efforts the federal government, Native organizations and individual tribes and scholars are taking to avert this cultural disaster.

The altar looks simple. A wooden “box” is surmounted by a “rack,” from which hang several ceremonial objects. But the sacred installation, constructed specially as a donation to the National Museum of the American Indian, comes with multiple dimensions of meaning, involving many actors.

Indigenous artwork is taking to the streets, the sides of buildings and the landscaped grounds of major institutions, a movement toward accessible expression that our Museum is supporting. We present a long, but by no means exhaustive, sampling.

Long a leader in Southwest design, Patricia Michaels (Taos Pueblo) made a national breakthrough, for herself and for indigenous designers, as a star of the television competition show Project Runway. She recently returned to Manhattan, along with Diné designer Orlando Dugi, with a spectacular Style Fashion Week presentation in the elegant Hammerstein Ballroom.

Steven Paul Judd (Kiowa) gives a unique twist to some well known images. The results are pointed and hilarious.

New York’s exposure to the broad range of Indigenous couture continues in February at the Museum’s George Gustav Heye Center in lower Manhattan with the arrival of the travelling exhibition Native Fashion Now.