Sandra Hale Schulman
Special to ICT
The latest: Roots of contemporary Native abstraction, an acclaimed new Sacajewea book, and a Canadian film fest broadens the arts
ART: Abstract Native art in new light
Earthy colors, patterns, and imagery flow through the art in the Saint Louis Art Museum’s latest exhibition — its first to focus on modern and contemporary Native art.
The exhibition, “Action/Abstraction Redefined: Modern Native Art 1940s-1970s,” explores how abstract expressionist artists broke with conventions following World War II, and how ancestral aesthetics pushed the boundaries of Native art, using subjects and styles that set a new, contemporary look.
The exhibit opened June 23 and runs through Sept. 3 at the museum in St. Louis, Missouri.
“Presenting this exhibition is an important opportunity for the Saint Louis Art Museum to continue our work to expand the narratives of American art while engaging our visitors with works of exceptional quality,” said Min Jung Kim, the Barbara B. Taylor Director of the Saint Louis Art Museum, in a statement.
In the 1940s, Indigenous artists stretched out work they saw as traditionally Native. Studying global art trends, these innovative artists — including Fritz Scholder, Lloyd Kiva New and Linda Lomahaftewa — were associated with the new styles emerging from the Institute of the American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, founded in 1962.
The IAIA encouraged experimentation as artists combined styles and methods with abstract forms based in historical Native art. Horses, sunsets, mesas, and tribal regalia are alluded to with moody colors and shapes.
“‘Action/Abstraction Redefined’ will help visitors to see our historic collection of Native American art in new ways, as vital sources for contemporary artists,” said Alexander Brier Marr, the museum’s Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Assistant Curator of Native American Art, who curated the latest exhibition.
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“It will also help visitors to connect historic and contemporary Native art,” Marr said in a statement. “As our collection of contemporary Native American art from the last 30 years grows, this exhibition furnishes a critical middle chapter in the continuous history of artmaking by Indigenous North American peoples.”
The exhibition fills chronological gaps in the museum’s collection by including Fritz Scholder’s 1966 oil on canvas, “New Mexico #45,” the first postwar painting by a Native artist to join the collection.
BOOKS: A raw retelling of Sacajewea’s fatal journey
The sweet-faced woman with a child strapped to a cradleboard on her back on the U.S. dollar coin is America’s homage to Sacajewea, Lemhi Shoshone.
A searing new novel, “The Lost Journals of Sacajewea,” from Debra Magpie Earling, the award-winning author of “Perma Red,” challenges the prevailing historical visual and written narratives of Sacajewea, revealing her as a forced captive who was assaulted and impregnated.
Written in a hybrid slang of English and Shoshone with words deliberately shaded and poetically spaced out, the first-person story works in a rhythm of thoughts and actions.
“In my seventh winter, when my head only reached my Appe’s rib, a White Man came into camp. Bare trees scratched sky. Cold was endless. He moved through trees like strikes of sunlight. My Bia said he came with bad intentions, like a Water Baby’s cry,” she writes.
While the young Sacajewea is one of the most memorialized women in American history, she served as a forced interpreter and guide for Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery as they made their way across the country. In this visionary novel, the White settlers are brutes, who first came as trappers and then as relentless settlers.
The daughter of a Shoshone chief, Sacajewea’s name means “boat puller.” The young Sacajewea is a quick learner, gathering berries, fetching water, digging roots, butchering buffalo and deer, catching salmon and snaring rabbits, weaving reed baskets and listening to her elder’s stories.
Her village is raided and her family are killed, Sacajewea, who was about 12, is kidnapped and taken from her people to the Hidatsa villages near present-day Bismarck, North Dakota. Impregnated after being gambled away and made to marry Toussaint Charbonneau, a French Canadian trapper, she is forced to serve as an interpreter.
Stunned with grief, the teen-age mother must cross a vast and brutal terrain with her newborn son, the White man who now owns her, and a company of men who wish to conquer and commodify the former world she knew. She would be forced to bear another child before dying a few months later at age 24, according to the novel.
Written in a lyrical, dreamlike prose, “The Lost Journals of Sacajewea” is an Indigenous woman’s story that hasn’t been told in all the raw brutality of how America was really born.
Praise for the book has been high.
“A formally inventive, historically eye-opening novel,” according to The New York Times.
“Earling adds a much-needed Native woman’s perspective to Sacajewea’s story, bringing a note of resilience to her unflinching account of the White men’s violence and depredation: ‘Women do not become their Enemy captors. We survive them.’ This is a beautiful reclamation,” said Publishers Weekly
The book is a June 2023 Indie Next Pick, Selected by Booksellers; a Minneapolis Star Tribune Recommended Fiction Read for 2023; a Millions Most Anticipated Read for 2023; and a Library Journal Recommended Read for 2023.
FILM: Canadian festival promotes cultural exchange
The 6th Annual Weengushk International Film Festival opens its three-day run on July 14 on Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron with 57 films, five workshops, musical performances, an opening night gala and an awards event.
The Indigenous-run independent film festival and cultural event will also feature filmmakers and artists, including Gail Maurice, Jennifer Podemski and Gary Farmer. The awards gala on the final day, July 16, will host in-person and video presentations to recipients actor Graham Greene, musician Keith Secola, musician Derek Miller, and actor Ryan Reynolds.
The 2023 festival theme is youth, with a 12-hour Youth Filmmaking Program.
“We had a committee that decided the winners from the 50 films submitted,” executive director Phyllis Feldman told ICT. “This festival started 20 years ago, when we saw a gap for Indigenous youth to be heard, to hear themselves, to see themselves, and to be able to tell their own stories, and not just relative to film and television, but also teaching life skills as they move forward.
“This year, we have a 10-hour youth workshop where youth produce a film over 10 hours, and we’ll show it at our awards gala,” Feldman said. “It’s not just a film festival, it’s a cultural exchange as well.”
The festival will include a special presentation of “Little Bird,” a six-part fictional TV series created by Jennifer Penski on Canadian foster children; Gary Farmer’s world premiere of his film, “Vertebrae”; and a new film, “The Nature of Healings”, by Faith Leone Howe, Mohawk, a filmmaker from Six Nations who is bringing elders depicted in the film to the island.
Awards include:
—Clearing The Path Award to Graham Greene, Oneida, presented to an individual who has taken bold steps to improve diversity and inclusion through an innovative approach that promotes and provides stifled youth voices in mainstream media.
—Culture Enrichment Award to Derek Miller, Six Nations, which recognizes a person who enriches one’s view of cultural differences and enhances awareness for the world
—Legendary Award to Keith Secola, Ojibwe, who has given dignity to his community through music and is “most original and influential.”
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