Sandra Hale Schulman
ICT
The latest: Indian Fair documented and donated, artist paints inner and outer world, photos trace time and tribes
PHOTOGRAPHY: Historic fair photos donated to Mississippi Choctaw
The Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians were given over 500 historic photographs for their Chahta Immi Cultural Center at the annual Choctaw Indian Fair in November, documenting the tribe’s cultural traditions and community life. The photos were taken between 1968 and 1970 by Grammy-winning photographer Les Leverett, who was the official staff photographer at Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry for 32 years. Leverett felt a deep connection to the tribe and traveled to document their fair regularly.
The donation event was hosted by the Congress of Country Music, a cultural project that is creating a world-class center with a museum, educational facilities, and performance spaces led by country music singer Marty Stuart. Stuart is also a photographer of Native life and viewed Leverett as his mentor. He helped facilitate the donation of the images to the tribe, saying that they were “back where they belong.”
Leverett’s interest in the Choctaw people was connected by his friendship with Bob Ferguson, a country music producer and songwriter who had lived and worked with the Mississippi Band of Choctaw as a cultural historian.
“My father was very dear to me, and I know he would be honored to know that his images of the Choctaw are being preserved and located here where they belong. He loved this place and the people,” said Leverett’s daughter, Libby Leverett Crew, at the donation ceremony.
“I have fond memories of attending the Choctaw Indian Fairs with him during the summers of my childhood,” Crew said. “It’s been more than 50 years since I’ve been back, and I am pleased that it is for this occasion and during Native American Heritage Month.”
There were special remarks from tribal Chief Cyrus Ben, cultural leaders, and Stuart, before Stuart presented a Kodak box of Leverett’s historical photos to the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians.
“We have a saying at the Congress of Country Music: ‘Around here we honor the legends. They’re like family.’ I love it when we have the opportunity to do that,” Stuart said at the ceremony. “Les Leverett was the dean of country music photographers. He truly was one of my mentors in every way.”
“Les always looked for beauty in people. He found it when he’d come to visit his friend Bob Ferguson at the Choctaw Fair,” Stuart added. “Les fell in love with the Mississippi Band of Choctaws, and they loved him right back. His pictures tell the story. It is such an honor to witness Les Leverett’s Choctaw Fair pictures come home and to know that they will be loved and protected from now on in the tribal archives.”
Now that these images are in the center’s archives, current tribal members can see their parents, grandparents, and relatives participating in an event that continues to bring the tribal community together.
The event coincided with Native American Heritage Month and featured the official donation of archival materials, as well as live performances, Choctaw social dances, drumming, beadwork, and basket-making demonstrations.
ART: Going full circle with petroglyphs
“Circles, Spokes, Zigzags, Rivers” — an exhibit that runs through Feb. 8 at the Whitney Museum in New York City — has nine recent paintings and a large-scale sculpture by Grace Rosario Perkins, Akimel O’odham/Diné.
The title describes the petroglyphs that connect the artist to her tribal homelands in the Southwest, including the vital threatened waters of the Gila and Rio Grande waterways. The influence of visual storytelling runs through like a river in Perkins’s symbol-rich art.
Credit: Courtesy photo
Blooming flowers, twirling stars, the blinding sun, and spider webs abound as the artist records her visual life. Perkins builds the layers of surface with acrylic and spray paint, found materials, her personal belongings, and fragments. Traditional Indigenous iconography is absent; she offers instead a more personal vision of her world.
“I use painting to get everything out,” Perkins said in a statement. “I use painting as a way to move a lot of energy — good, bad, highs, and lows. Painting is a healing ritual. When I paint, it’s like singing a song or dancing. It is solitary, but I still find ways to bring people in, always. I believe everyone should have access to their own personal agency and healing.”
She added, “I didn’t go to art school but spent over a decade as an educator working with adults with disabilities, at-risk youth, in rehab centers, and in hospice. Just make something. That’s what this is about… just having the permission to take stuff that feels good or feels bad and moving it.”
BOOKS: Images span time and genre
A lush new large-format art book, “In Light and Shadow: A Photographic History from Indigenous America, is a powerful, worthy collection of photos — some published for the first time — that exhibits that Indigenous people have been making photos for their own purposes on their own terms since the beginning of the medium.
The book, by co-authors Brian Adams and Sarah Stacke and published by Black Dog & Leventhal, has more than 250 photos by 80 Indigenous American photographers across time, geography, and genre.
Each individual image has a biographical sketch that highlights the relationship between the photograph and its photographer, starting with Jennie Fields Ross Cobb (1881–1959), the earliest known Indigenous American woman photographer.
The book explores technology from glass plate negatives and celluloid films to digital capture family pictures, ethnography, portraits, landscapes,and more for a richer and fuller understanding of Indigenous experience and the history of photography.
“These extraordinary photographs can be seen as sites of collective resistance, agency, translation, and cultural celebration,” the co-authors write. “Diverse in chronology, geography, and style, all of them make the vibrant and complex experiences of Indigenous Americans visible.” Adams, Iñupiaq, is an editorial and commercial photographer based in Anchorage, Alaska, specializing in environmental portraiture. His work has been featured in both national and international publications, and his work documenting Alaskan Native villages has been showcased in galleries across the United States and Europe. His most recent book, “I Am Inuit,” was published in December 2017. He is a board member of Indigevsion and a member of Diversify Photo.
Stacke, Euro-American, is a photographer, author, and archival researcher based in Brooklyn, New York. She shares stories about relationships to the land and its histories to excavate under-considered pasts and better understand the present. Her work appears in Harper’s Magazine, The Nation, NPR, The New York Times, the Washington Post, and National Geographic.