Theme of defiance permeates ‘Indigenous Identities: Here, Now & Always’ at Zimmerli Art Museum

Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie’s “Anticipation” is part of the “Indigenous Identities: Here, Now & Always” exhibition at The Zimmerli Art Museum.

In a gallery on the lower level of the Zimmerli Art Museum in New Brunswick, a curious, wryly humorous, subtly confrontational piece hangs. It is not exactly a portrait, but it does contain a depiction of a human being. “I See Red: Chief Sleepy Eye War Shirt” centers on an image of an actual 19th century Dakota leader: Chief Sleepy Eye, who appears in the middle of an old company logo. Native American artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith has liberated the Chief from the advertisement and superimposed the cut-out on the crude and dripping red outline of a battle shirt. Girded with a picture of a tribal leader, a Native American might feel safer while navigating a hostile society. But this picture of Sleepy Eye, dignified as it is, was designed and recontextualized by non-Native businessmen.

It was used to sell eggs. In what way does it still carry any subversive signification? Can it be dug up and re-potted, reanimated on behalf of Native resistance or self-esteem, or is it forever lost in the funhouse mirrors of consumer capitalism?

“I See Red” is not officially part of “Indigenous Identities: Here, Now & Always,” a powerful, painful, complicated group show that will hang at The Zimmerli until Dec. 21. But it helps us understand how Smith, the “Indigenous Identities” curator, saw the predicament facing her people.

Raven Halfmoon’s “E-a’-ti-ti.”

Smith, a Salish and Kootenai artist who died in January at the age of 85, has attracted some of the most revered, frequently exhibited Native American artists to the Raritan, including Wendy Red Star, Edgar Heap of Birds and Raven Halfmoon, whose “E-a’-ti-ti,” a stack of clay heads fused into a stela and doused in red, white and gray paint, holds this giant exhibition down like a paperweight. She has also solicited contributions from idiosyncratic artists: paper-weaver Sarah Sense, visual storyteller Julie Buffalohead, and Lorenzo Clayton, who has fashioned a wild amalgam of multi-handed clocks, digital readouts, and printouts of equations that feel like the output of a computer that runs on numerology.

Ultimately, though, Smith’s show isn’t about the achievements of individual creators. Instead, she has called this convention to confront a haunting question. How might groups of indigenous peoples represent themselves in a society that tried to erase them?

There are two main heavies in the exhibition. The first is the United States government. The other is the motion picture industry. Both popularized reductive versions of Native American life — and Native Americans — for a non-Native audience. While images of indigenous Americans saturated American consciousness, actual indigenous Americans had limited latitude to tell their own stories. This, as “Indigenous Identities” demonstrates, has created a distortion: Young artists encounter Native life through pictures and films created by those looking to oppress, exploit or sensationalize them. Disentangling the actual Native American experience from the popular image of the American Indian is a task that could take an artist a lifetime.

Idealized representations are almost as thorny as negative ones. Judith Lowry’s “Medicine Man” — a monumental, semi-satirical acrylic painting — seats a muscular, shirtless, handsome Native American on a throne in the clouds. He is perfectly proportioned, his countenance is beatific, and his head is haloed with blue luminescence. This is an ascended consciousness: a paragon who has died for the sins of the nation whose flag falls roughly across his legs. A blonde, blue-eyed woman kneels at his feet and reaches to touch his face. This sexualized image of supplication carries an apology with it. It is glorious, but it is deliberately two-dimensional. It doesn’t help us get any closer to understanding indigenous consciousness to indulge in acts of overcompensation. It exiles the Native to the realm of fantasy.

Luanne Redeye’s “I See You.”

Realistic depictions of ordinary indigenous Americans are more helpful, but they’ve got ironic undertones, too. Luanne Redeye’s lovingly rendered “I See You,” an oil painting, couldn’t be more different from “Medicine Man” — yet it is just as clearly an intervention in our understanding of Native American experience. Instead of a demigod on a celestial pedestal, we are shown a woman in late middle age, exhausted, overweight, eyes shut in an easy chair and cane close at hand. A desk light illuminates a can of Pringles. This is a small, quiet life with limited horizons, beautiful in its way, but clearly beleaguered. The ache in the character’s back is palpable, as is the tightness of her quarters. She may seem insignificant. Yet traces of a deep and continuous identity are apparent in the picture: the Native American pattern on the quilt that hangs on the wall, and the face of her granddaughter in a little frame, there to carry on the lineage.

No two artists are likely to agree on what that heritage is. That is, in part, because they come from different traditions: The exhibition includes work from representatives of 74 distinct indigenous tribes and communities, and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith makes sure to list every one of them. Yet there are common resonances throughout this sweeping 103-piece exhibition, and indications that there is a latticework of signification that undergirds the Native experience.

One thread is the artists’ fierce identification with the land and its travails. “Indigenous Identities” devotes an entire gallery to depictions of America as it might be seen by a viewer with a full grasp of its near-oceanic turbulence, including Michael Namingha’s “Altered Landscape 12,” a fractured image of a mountain sandstorm, and Emmi Whitehorse’s gorgeous “Rushing Water,” a painting of Sonora-red whorls and smears that simultaneously evokes ancient cave designs and modern artists like Cy Twombly. In many of these works, there is an implicit suggestion that the Native American has been severed from his stewardship of the land, and everybody has suffered the consequences. George Alexander’s painting “Urban #2” strands a dejected buffalo amid telephone poles, electrical relay transistors, and a parking lot. It would be heavy-handed if it didn’t feel right on the money.

Tomahawk Greyeyes’ “Eyes Like Arrows.”

A not-unrelated theme is that life for the indigenous person is one of uncommon intensity — intensity that modern Americans, desensitized as we are, could neither access nor withstand. In “Eyes Like Arrows,” Tomahawk Greyeyes superimposes a print derived from an old photograph of a Navajo man atop a landscape decorated with Native American patterns. Square-jawed and confident, he leans toward the viewer. He hasn’t just got a story to tell; he is the story. Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie’s mixed-media piece “Anticipation” (see above) introduces us to a woman whose quick-to-see gaze reaches out to encompass an entire landscape.

Tony Abeyta’s profound “Dispersion” plants hundreds of circular seeds of bright color, drawn from a vibrant depiction of a native mask, in two sandy-colored “fields” on either side of the piece. The hope is that these will, in time, come roaring back to life and replenish a culturally fallow Earth with primal energy. Even Tom Jones’ newborn, swaddled in a Native blanket and surrounded by bead designs stitched into the photograph, seems to be coming into the world in a burst of force.

Sometimes this verges on superheroism. Star Wallowingbull’s “Arapaho Man With Traditional Design” — an intricate, masterful drawing with colored pencil — lets us fly alongside a leaping native with streaking hair and a star on his chest like an alternate-reality Captain America. He’s a bit too stylized for a comic book, but he looks like he could save the day anyway. Modern artist Will Wilson dons the garments of an ancestor for a tintype photograph designed to resemble those we may have encountered in a history book. He has made sure to fix the camera with a fiercely proprietary stare.

Frank Big Bear’s “Ghost Dance of the Great Mystery.”

This all comes to a dizzying head in one of the most remarkable pieces you will see in a museum this year — or any year. Frank Big Bear’s “Ghost Dance of the Great Mystery” is both a historical reminder and a wish fulfillment, a pouring forth of pent-up desire, and a bright, fraught representation of a moment both utopian and desperate. The artist has drawn hundreds of figures in colored pencil on six paper panels. The sky is full of spiderweb stars and swirling galaxies, sound waves, shooting comets; the ground is alive with people singing, dancing, summoning spirits. In the distance, past the line of wigwams and cornfields, great beasts show themselves atop ray-tickled mounds. Some of these characters are rendered in color, and others are as white as skeletons.

It all feels celebratory, dangerous, and full of generative possibilities. Was this what a 19th century Ghost Dance was like? Did the participants really enter into this kind of intense communion with neighbor, soil and star? Or is this a modern projection, filtered through contemporary images in magazines, and our memories of Woodstock and Glastonbury and other mass gatherings freighted with mystical significance?

Meaningfully, Frank Big Bear chooses to draw on a blackboard-like surface in colors that resemble chalk. Brilliant as this party is, it could be erased with a few crude strokes. We know that that is essentially what happened: the Ghost Dance scared the authorities and accelerated the demonization of Native Americans. The Dance was banned on Indian reservations, and those restrictions were enforced at gunpoint. The massacre at Wounded Knee was the sad culmination — well, one of many culminations — of a military campaign prompted, in no small part, by fears of the Ghost Dance. “Indigenous Identities” trembles with outrage over the treatment of Native Americans, and the overt political images in the show, crackling with still-fresh resistance and mourning, are some of the exhibition’s most indelible.

Diego Romero’s “Girl in the Anthropocene.”

In Ryan Feddersen’s “Bison Stack Crane,” a black-and-white print that is nonetheless quite graphic, a construction claw drops a carcass atop a great sloping pyramid of dead animals. Wade Patton makes a similar point with a smaller body count with “Lone”: A single buffalo, head down and braced against ill fortune, runs through a storm of zigzags and sharp triangles. In Diego Romero’s “Girl in the Anthropocene,” a stark, seething lithograph in hazmat black and yellow, a poor Native American mother hangs washing on a clothesline as smoke from a nuclear reactor cooling tower chokes the sky. We don’t know exactly where they are, but we know it is somewhere in America, and we know it is drained, devoid of the illumination of Frank Big Bear’s Ghost Dance and aching for some of Tony Abeyta’s seeds.

Other pieces get specific. Corwin Clairmont isn’t content to wrap his outraged raven in a smallpox blanket and leave it at that. He calls the government’s response to COVID a greater tragedy, and blames the President. “My Ancestors Will Not Let Me Forget This” makes the protest even more elemental. Demian DinéYazhi’s letterbox print is a single repeated phrase in red, white and blue, set in the shape of the stars and stripes: Every American flag is a warning. Given indigenous history, it is not hard to understand his trepidation.

G. Peter Jemison’s “Red Power.”

These pieces hum with defiance. Listen closely and you can hear the hiss of the rattlesnake. Like G. Peter Jemison’s dazzling acrylic “Red Power,” a large painting of a spiky desert bloom, they are all beautiful but barbed. Kick them again and you may wind up with a spine in your toe.

We may not be able to watch a Ghost Dance or see stills from the Sioux War, but we know that resistance was real, and ferocious. We also know it continues. Alan Michelson’s remarkable video “Pehin Hanska Ktpei (They Killed Long Hair)” gets us as close to it as anything ever might. He has found footage of the 50-year reunion of Native Americans who fought Gen. George Custer at his Last Stand, and he has looped it, doubled it, inverted it, and projected it onto an old wool blanket. His silent procession of old warriors on horseback shatters Hollywood cliché through the dignity of lived experience and the weariness of carrying a heavy history. It is grand, remote, elusive, strangely timeless, diaphanous and shadowed, spiritual and unbroken.

“Indigenous Identities: Here, Now & Always” will be at The Zimmerli Art Museum in New Brunswick through Dec. 21. Visit zimmerli.rutgers.edu.

_________________________________________