By Steve Cook
Head Curator of Ethnography
On June 8, 2002, the exhibit Art in 2 Worlds: The Native American Fine Art Invitational 1983-1997 opens in the Mashantucket Gallery highlighting 15 years of the Heard Museum’s contemporary Native American fine art exhibitions. The Heard is widely recognized for taking a leading role in presenting Native American art as fine art in its own right and without cultural bias. In the same vein the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center (MPMRC) is both collecting and promoting Native American artists and their works from the Eastern Woodlands cultural region – the eastern United States down to the Carolinas and out to the Midwest as far as Wisconsin. This is an area that unfortunately has been overlooked by many Museums and galleries in favor of works from the Southwest and Northwest Coast.
The MPMRC began acquiring contemporary Native American art during the summer of 1997, a year before opening to the public. It was determined at this time that an essential part of the collections should be the contemporary work of Native artists from the eastern United States, including those items, such as beadwork, that have commonly been regarded as “crafts.” In part, this was an outgrowth of one of the Museum’s permanent exhibits that presents several pieces of contemporary art interpreting traditional creation stories from across North America. The contemporary art collection is an extension of our other collections, being viewed as a non-verbal account of Native American experience and expression in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. They serve to define the multiplicity of Native life in the modern age, illustrating the deep roots of tradition as well as the continued importance of innovation and creativity.
One of the key areas of focus for our contemporary collections is the traditional arts of the Northeast. For years traditional Native artists in this region have worked in relative obscurity, their pieces overshadowed by beadwork, pottery and basketry from the Southwest and Plains. Over the last five years the Museum has acquired some truly magnificent examples of northeastern beadwork, pottery, basketry and wood carving — works that clearly reflect the dynamic creativity of their makers. A few examples are:
• A fully beaded bandoleer bag by Delaware artist Joe Baker (who is featured in Art in 2 Worlds)
• A complete set of Iroquois woman’s Smoke Dance regalia by Mohawk artist and clothing designer Tammy Beauvais
• Traditionally inspired pottery by Mashpee artist Ramona Peters
• Splint basketry by Passamaquoddy artist Clara Neptune Keezer.
The contemporary collection also includes pieces from the more mainstream fine arts media of painting, printmaking and sculpture. Many of these works blend traditional values and motifs with European or American materials and techniques, making them a vibrant and unique testament to modern Native American expression in the Eastern Woodlands. The Museum owns paintings and sculptures by such contemporary masters as Norval Morrisseau, Ahmoo Angeconeb, John Fadden, Peter Jemison and Adam Fortunate Eagle, as well as pieces by relatively new artists Alan Siliboy, James Simon, Rabbet Strictland and Karen Lynch Harley. The public is in invited to special “Behind the Scenes” Tours of the Museum’s fine art collection on the opening weekend for Art in 2 Worlds on June 8 and 9 at 11, 1 and 2:30 p.m. See the Native Visions section in this issue for complete information.
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