Page 23 - the NOISE January 2016

“YOU ARE ON INDIAN LAND”
AT THE MUSEUM OF NORTHERN ARIZONA
LEFT TO RIGHT: The Spoils of War by Cannupa Luger and Nicholas Galanin’s Things are Looking Native, Native’s Looking Whiter are part of the Museum of Northern Arizona’s current exhibit “You Are On Indian Land.”
STORY BY ALLISON KLION
Ifeel it is important to preface this article by identifying the places where I am ignorant. I am a white, culturally Jewish woman born to an upper middle class family in a large city in Texas, studied art history at a small liberal arts school in Connecticut, and spent the first three years after graduation in New York City. My knowledge of contemporary art is, on scale of 1 to 10 (one being the “my kid could do that” rejection of abstract expressionism because they still think Jackson Pollock is edgy/not art, and ten being Hans Ulrich Obrist) is maybe (generously) a seven. In December 2014 I moved to Arizona, and I’ve by no means seen every exhibition or every gallery in the area. My knowledge of Native American art from any period has grown significantly over the past year by sheer virtue of proximity, but is still severely lacking. While I know there are, and have been since at the very least the 1970s, Native American artists using the language of contemporary art, I embarrassingly could only cite Jimmie Durham and James Luna as examples (my time in Flagstaff has introduced me to the likes of Ed Kabotie and Shonto Begay). Likewise, my knowledge of the history of the oppressive, abusive relationship between the United States government and the people indigenous to this land is general and anecdotal.
Moving to Arizona has been eye opening. I have witnessed a startling degree of racism, profiling and discrimination both on an individual level and through widespread, systematic, institutional injustice. However, I have seen a great appreciation for traditional craft and artistry in institutions like the Museum of Northern Arizona and in the myriad galleries in Flagstaff and Sedona. Generally, though not exclusively, the “Native” art favored is that which sells — marginalized and pigeonholed into traditional and often stereotypical forms of representation — leaving little room for anything else. This is by no means to denigrate or discount the merits of this work and the institutions that exhibit it, but rather to highlight exceptionality of “You Are On Indian Land” at the Museum of Northern Arizona. Curated by independent curator Erin Joyce and the Museum’s Fine Art Curator Alan Peterson,“You Are On Indian Land” presents work by nine Native American artists from a broad swath of the North American continent who work in a variety of mediums including installation, video, photography, assemblage, ceramics and colored pencil.
The exhibition at the Museum of Northern Arizona opened November 21, 2015 and is the show’s third iteration. It includes the most artists, and is the first in which Ms. Joyce has collaborated with another curator. It premiered at Radiator Arts in Long Island City, NY (April 17-June 14, 2015) and opened in a different form at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe (April 23-May 31, 2015). Each instance has featured a different combination of artists; at MNA it features Tamara Ann Burgh (Eskimo), Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit/Aleut), Ed Kabotie (Hopi-Tewa), Cannupa Luger (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara and Lakota), Michael Namingha (Hopi-Tewa), Steven J. Yazzie (Navajo), and the artist collective Postcommodity, which includes Raven Chacon (Navajo), Kade L. Twist (Cherokee Nation), and Cristóbal Martínez (Chicano).
For Ms. Joyce, the exhibition at MNA holds particular personal significance. She grew up in Flagstaff and attended Flagstaff Arts and Leadership Academy when it was located on the Museum’s campus. In her career as an art critic and curator, she has championed a growing group of emerging and mid-career Native artists whose practices fall more in line with contemporary artists of any background than with traditional Native arts and crafts. The argument she puts forth in her writing and curatorial endeavors such as “You Are On Indian Land” is, “The Indian art world is rich with artists creating controversial, provocative and diverse works in myriad mediums.” The artists she chooses to work with explore social concerns in their work, unpacking what it means to be both Native and contemporary. The works in “You Are On Indian Land” address issues of “post-colonial acculturation, cultural appropriation and social dissonance.”
In his review of the New York showing of this exhibit published on the well-respected art “blogazine” Hyperallergic, Ryan Wong began his article, “Where are the indigenous stories, communities and artists within “American” contemporary art?” he asked, identifying American Indian artists as an underrepresented group within the greater scope of contemporary art. In contrast, in Flagstaff at the Museum of Northern Arizona, these concerns are framed within the context of how contemporary artists can exist and thrive within an artist community where “traditional” is the status quo.
Mr. Galanin’s Between Life, Between Death, exemplifies this struggle to progress and self-define. A wolf, eyes narrowed with exhaustion, stares at the viewer, dragging the back half of its body, flattened and mounted on scalloped felt backing like a rug. Behind it another wolf, its whole body flayed, lies inert and lifeless. Describing an earlier iteration of the work that only included the first wolf (made from two legally obtained bodies), Galanin explains the basic concept of the work examined, “Mainstream society often looks at Indigenous or Native American art through a romantic lens, not allowing a culture, like my Tlingit community, room for creative sovereign growth. The back half of this piece is contained, a captured trophy or rug to bring into the home, while the front continues to move. It is sad and the struggle is evident.” The inclusion of the completely flattened pelt shifts the tone of the work to one that is consciously optimistic. The wolf rises, not without difficulty, back to life to symbolically speak for itself and regain its agency.
As the title of the exhibition suggests, the contested nature of the colonized landscape is another node of exploration for these artists. Postcommodity’s four-channel video installation Gallup Motel Butchering (2011) and Mr. Namingha’s Chimayó Series (photography), both explore the interaction between the tourist industry in the American Southwest and indigenous ties to the land. Postcommodity’s film presents without comment and in gritty detail from multiple perspectives, a Navajo woman in jeans and a white tank top ritually butchering a sheep in a bathtub in a tourist motel in Gallup, New Mexico. Though I have driven through
Gallup before, I had not noticed the city advertises itself as “the epicenter of Native American history, art, culture and tradition in the Southwest,” and invites tourists to “discover
one of the last genuine Native American experiences on earth.” It is a place where Western fantasies about Native American life are fulfilled, a place where tourists’ preoccupation with an Indigenous past overshadows the stark realities of the Indigenous present. While tourism has subsumed the land for its own devices, the ritual act performed in Postcommodity’s video reclaims this transient “non-place” as sacred land, creating, in Postcommodity’s own words “a poetic, metaphorical transgression against the assumptions of the Western imagination.”
With observational photographs of morally presumptive roadside signs placed by evangelical Christians during the annual Good Friday pilgrimage to El Santuario de Chimayó, Mr. Namingha subtly dismantles the Western colonization of his own ancestral land. He highlights the absurdity of moral judgment and implication of guilt within the context of Indigenous spirituality, and its systematic, forcible eradication by Christian missionaries since the 16th century.
The title of the exhibition reminds us that everywhere this work has been shown was Indian land. The island of Manhattan, not far from Radiator Gallery in Queens was infamously “purchased” from the local Lenape tribe for about $24, glass beads and trinkets. Flagstaff’s proximity to the Navajo Nation makes the concerns of “You Are On Indian Land” and the voices it highlights so important. This title is drawn from the American Indian Movement’s Occupation of Alcatraz Island in the San Francisco Bay, which lasted from November 1969 to June 1971. The group of American Indian students and organizers who originally occupied the island claimed it in the name of all American Indians, as “Indians of All Tribes” by right of discovery, citing the Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868) as justification. The treaty returned all retired, abandoned, and out-of-use federal land — like the defunct Alcatraz penitentiary — to Native peoples. The seizure and occupation of Alcatraz Island served as a symbol of retaliation against all the U.S. government had promised and never delivered on. Though the U.S. government forcibly ended the occupation, it ushered in a new era of American Indian activism that focused mainstream national attention on Indian rights and collective concerns, including the neglect and marginalization by the government that continues to exist. “You Are On Indian Land” at the Museum of Northern Arizona is one of the few opportunities for contemporary Native American voices to be heard clearly, and it is essential viewing for all Flagstaff residents.
“You Are On Indian Land” is open through February 15, 2016. The Museum of Northern Arizona, 3101 N. Fort Valley Road in Flagstaff, is open Monday-Saturday 10AM-5PM and Sunday 12-5PM. musnaz.org 928/774-5213
| Allison Klion thinks this is a really important exhibit, and you should see it.
24 • JANUARY 2016 • the NOISE arts & news • thenoise.us thenoise.us • the NOISE arts & news • january 2016 • 23