The Long Road to “Native America: In Translation”

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The Blanton Museum of Art’s presentation of Native America: In Translation unfurls in pops of hot pink and highlighter yellow. The traveling exhibition (hereafter referred to simply as Native America) was originally organized by Aperture as an extension of the exceptional 2020 Aperture issue “Native America” guest edited by the photographer Wendy Red Star, who also served as the show’s Guest Curator. Native America the exhibition comes to the Blanton in its sixth iteration, and likely one of its last, after a marathon series of nationwide reprisals at primarily academic art museums. The site locations feel particularly notable, as the critical writings in the Aperture issue run through the heart of the exhibition and set the tone for a critically-engaged dialog between academic discourse, artistic production, and historic photographic practices that exceeded this viewer’s expectations.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Native America feels restrained in relation to its print origins. The translation from a publication to an exhibition embraces the aesthetic of the contemporary museum with soaring white walls and echoing spaces over the intimate, richly-detailed spreads of text and image. The interconnected gallery spaces at the Blanton flow smoothly together and feel thoughtfully laid out, if somewhat sparse. The exhibition includes some particularly notable shining stars, including a selection of key works from the artist Kimowan Metchewais, whose practice is still woefully underappreciated in conceptual photography circles. Red Star’s mining of the late artist’s archive at the National Museum of the American Indian feels like a touching tribute and much-needed reappraisal of Metchewais’s life over a decade after his passing.

Unlike other recent exhibitions focusing on contemporary Indigenous photography–think the Amon Carter Museum of American Art’s Speaking with Light: Contemporary Indigenous Photography, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s In Our Hands: Native Photography, 1890 to Now, both of which circulated between 2022-2024–Red Star chose to decenter the North American focus that is often implicitly assumed in US institutions. Instead, she navigates viewers across Turtle Island (the North American continent) and towards Abya Yala (or Latin America), shedding layers of colonial frameworks along the way. The final nine artists represented hail from Native Nations and/or countries that span the Americas, offering a tantalizing glimpse of what photography by, for, and in collaboration with Indigenous peoples could be beyond political borders.
The geographic breadth of Native America is only one of the reasons why the exhibition is a success. There is also a noticeable (and commendable) mix of artists at various stages in their careers who are/were undertaking various levels of engagement with fine art photography. At one end of the spectrum are artists such as Alan Michelson, Marianne Nicholson, and Rebecca Belmore, who are established in their careers and approach photography with a similar eye toward multimedia processes involving performance, installation, and video. At another end are the powerhouses Duane Linklater, Guadalupe Maravilla, and Kimowan Metchewais, who wield the camera and its products as one layer of a broadly conceptual practice. Somewhere in between are the Nalikutaar Jacqueline Cleveland, Koyoltzintl, and Martine Gutierrez, formidable younger artists who embrace photography as a tool for documentation, storytelling, and self-actualization.

And yet, each of these artists could be described in any of these other ways. Their practices share an interest in challenging the historic uses and processes of photography, and there is a seamless similitude at the core of the entire group that energizes each of the artist’s practices in new ways. Ultimately, Red Star’s curatorial inquiry feels less focused on the history of photography and more on photography’s potential futures. She was quoted in the exhibition press release as saying, ”I was thinking about young Native artists and what would be inspirational and important for them as a road map. The people included here have all played an important part in forging pathways, in opening up space in the art world for new ways of seeing and thinking.” Native America is then both an homage and a catalyst for artistic germination.

I find it impossible to consider the full breadth of Native America without also considering Wendy Red Star as an artist herself. While she is not included in the exhibition display (though her work is reproduced in the original Aperture issue), Red Star’s conceptual photographic works have been central to the recent trajectory of contemporary Indigenous photography. Early series like Four Seasons (2006) and Last Thanks (2006) show the artist’s wry wit and unflappable critiques of American stereotypes of Indigenous peoples. More recent series like 1880 Crow Peace Delegation (2014), Apsáalooke Feminist (2016), and Accession (2019) reveal her sustained interest in archives and the history of photographic representation, which tends to prefer photographs of Indigenous people over Indigenous photographers themselves.

Case in point: Aperture began in 1952 as a publication focused on representing and uplifting photography as a fine art form, rather than as simply a mechanical tool for documentation. At its helm were some of the most well-known artistic and curatorial names in American photo history, including Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Barbara Morgan, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, and Minor White, among others. Their focus on modern, mostly black-and-white photography lent the medium an air of credibility in an era where photographers were largely synonymous with photojournalists, not artists. Photographs were not the subject of critical inquiry in museum or gallery exhibitions, and the market for collecting modern photographs at the time was nonexistent. Over the years fine art photography has gained significant traction and growing respect, but it still often exists as a belated afterthought in art history departments and museum collections (though it is by no means alone in this status).

Conspicuously absent in the above version of photo history is any representation of Indigenous peoples as photographers, thinkers, or creators. Native America’s first peoples have more often been objectified through the camera lens, appearing as the subjects of ethnographic photography, or as formal props of the modernist black and white gaze. It was not until the late twentieth century that artists identifying as Indigenous and making work for and about Indigenous peoples were taken seriously; photography circles followed not far behind. Early torchbearers such as Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie, James Luna, Zig Jackson, Larry McNeil, and Alan Michelson rammed down the gates of photo history with their witty, pointed, and unsentimental takes of contemporary North America, and thus laid the groundwork for the Indigenous photography of today.

While these artists are not the focus of Red Star’s inquiries (with the exception of Michelson), their legacies are ever-present in Native America, particularly through Duane Linklater’s ghostinthemachine (2021). The artwork title references an essay from Paul Chaat Smith in Aperture issue 139, “Strong Hearts: Native American Visions and Voices,” published in Summer 1995. Linklater scanned sections of the issue á la photography powerhouse Joan Lyons, collaging them with sketched designs recalling traditions of quillwork and beadwork, oftentimes obfuscating the underlying text and images with material layers and blurred focus.

The final twenty-three prints include tantalizing snippets of language and images cut from their original source, reorganized, and repasted into new configurations. They are installed in a line spanning nearly the entire back wall of one of the museum’s temporary exhibition rooms. Unlike previous installations of the work that were presented in grid configurations recalling artists such as Agnes Martin and Sol LeWitt’s use of grids as formal and conceptual frameworks, the singular line of Linklater’s images allows them to unfold in a narrative (if wonderfully nonsensical) fashion.

As Linklater’s work demonstrates, the 1995 “Strong Hearts” issue was important as an early progenitor of the 2020 “Native America” issue, whose value similarly extends beyond its visual offerings to include writings by crucial literary figures such as Leslie Marmon Silko, N. Scott Momaday, and Luci Tapahonso. It was also the issue in which scholar Jolene Rickard first outlined her argument for “visual sovereignty,” a major academic contribution that bridged Indigenous studies and art history in a vital moment. In short, “Strong Hearts” modeled the seamless blending of creative visions and critical thought that Red Star’s issue would expand on twenty-five years later, and which viewers to the Blanton’s exhibition now get to experience in three dimensions. Linklater’s photographs make these historic moments bear upon one another through his use of layering, drawing, and collage.

The Blanton chose well in this traveling exhibition along with its timing, and the site curator Hannah Klemm does a commendable job of laying out the works in a way that foregrounds the vision of Red Star’s original editorial project and maintains a central flow. While some quintessential photographers feel conspicuously absent from the Blanton’s version of the exhibition–primarily Will Wilson, whose absence is particularly striking given his recent relocation to the University of Texas at Austin as a professor in Studio Art — I left Native America feeling exhilarated by all the possibilities its artists represent for what Indigenous photography could be. Red Star’s curatorial perspective is keen, incisive, and defiant in the best possible ways. Her vision is expansive and invested in the declassification of the artistic realm into reductive labels, whether they be based on process, geography, identity, or materials.

Just as the 2020 Aperture issue was a shining light through the pandemic gloom, the Native America exhibition provides luminous examples of contemporary Indigenous photography and photography about Indigeneity within an institution, a city, and a country that has historically undervalued and misunderstood such work. Both the publication and the exhibition honor the original “Strong Hearts” issue and extend its vision, encapsulated in these 1995 words from Theresa Harlan’s Aperture essay:

“Mainstream museums and publications often set apart ‘artists of color,’ ‘multicultural artists,’ and ‘ethnic artists,’ thereby designating us as the ‘other’ or ‘different.’ The art and writings of these ‘other’ artists are locked into discussions of ‘their’ art, ‘their’ people, and ‘their’ issues. While there are still few opportunities to exhibit works by Native artists, there are even fewer exhibitions that treat these works in terms of their intellectual and critical contributions.”

Red Star’s curatorial voice creates space for critical considerations without overpowering the voices of the artists themselves. She and the entire team behind Native America: In Translation remain true to the critical inquiries of their original project, and in doing so, have created fertile ground for more layered and complete dialogues to bloom. The Blanton chose a fruitful time to engage this conversation, and alongside other recent installations like Marie Watt’s Sky Dances Light (2022), I hope it spells a continued commitment to engaging Indigenous arts at the Blanton and other Texas institutions.

https://glasstire.com/2024/12/03/the-lo ... anslation/