Mia Celebrates Native Women Artists With "Hearts of Our People" Exhibit

For centuries, Native American women’s art has been misappropriated, misinterpreted, and, generally, missing in action. A blockbuster, once-in-a-generation exhibit at the Minneapolis Institute of Art promises to rewrite that history.

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How to convey the magnitude of Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists, the show opening this June at the Minneapolis Institute of Art? How about this: Simply imagine a grand colonial role reversal.

Starting around, say, 1492, Native American women storm into Florence, Italy. They love what they see and grab it all. They pluck Raphaels and Botticellis from private homes, while musing to one another: This must be the type of things Italians make all the time. They toss it all into their ships’ holds, in case Native American scientists back in North America want to mine the paintings for data about these quaint Europeans and their mysterious lives.

Plundering along, these Native American women happen upon Michelangelo’s Pietà. Looking at the death of Christ rendered in folds of marble, they declare, I bet this here rock could reveal the secrets of local geology! So what if distinct cultural forces—a powerful and unique history—had come together to educate and elevate these particular pieces and these specific Italian men? So what?

They keep going, these Native American conquerors. They waltz into France and seize the Renaissance tapestries, blitz into Germany to snatch the Durer engravings—you get the idea. These Native ladies then disperse the booty and get on with their lives.

Five hundred years pass. A few fortunes are made selling these Raphaels and Durers. Over the centuries, some Native American women make even more money buying additional works from the descendants of Raphael and Durer. These latter-day artists have been relocated and incarcerated, after the Native American women marched them out of Florence and Nuremberg and appropriated their homes.

The descendants, too, rarely get celebrated as individuals. Sure, some are Caravaggio and Klimt, but no one looks into the details. After all, they’re just making the routine handiwork that Italians and Germans do to pass the time between harvests, as any primitive people might.

In this role reversal, it’s suddenly the year 2019. Whenever you visit a museum, anywhere in North America, you walk through room after room of important cradleboards and Southwestern clay pots. Curators have painstakingly catalogued these cradleboards and pots by century, artist, and material.

Then, when you get bored of all the cradleboards and pots, you sometimes wander into the tribal and indigenous arts rooms—the ones kids visit on field trips. There, you see funny dioramas, standing near the various Raphaels and Durers. Although now they’re labeled only “Italian” and “German.” Perhaps these dioramas teach you something educational about how Italians or Germans once caught fish and ground flour.

Then, in the summer of 2019, suddenly, you learn that a great number of European men have been talking among themselves and working to present the one thing that has never existed in a museum, ever: a showing of work by European men!

•••••

Let’s call an end to this counterfactual thought experiment. I offer it because it’s difficult to get your head around the way that Western museums have collected, displayed, and interpreted Native American art. Since museums began, the work has been scattered around places such as collections of science, history, and anthropology, effectively severing the art from the artists and communities that created it.

This new show at Mia takes a radically different approach. It scoops a few thousand years of Native American art out of the obscurities bin of art miscategorization. And it attributes the work, for the first time, to the right gender.

“I was stunned to realize that most of the material was made by women, and yet never acknowledged as such.”

- Jill Ahlberg Yohe

Mia’s curator of Native American art, Jill Ahlberg Yohe, recounts the aha moment that sparked this new show. “When I was just starting as a Native arts curator, I was stunned to realize that most of the material was made by women, and yet never acknowledged as such,” she says. Ahlberg Yohe talked through the implications of that realization with the Kiowa beadwork artist Teri Greeves, who became her close friend and the co-curator of a show almost 10 years in the making.

The two realized that to assemble a Native American women’s art exhibit would be a staggering undertaking. They also took as a first principle that their show would need to wholly rethink the typical art-market view: that is, of individual geniuses making high-priced commodities. That perspective, in fact, was part of the system that led to Native American women’s art disappearing in plain sight. To really appreciate Native art would require thinking about objects as living, relational beings: sacred creations, connected to living people and communities.

The scope of the task would be daunting: to accurately, and respectfully, present the work of the United States and Canada, from Texas to Nova Scotia, and everywhere in between. To show the work over time, from ancient days to the living present. And then to show work from scores of communities: Osage, Haudenosaunee, Lakota. This could not be the undertaking of one curator in an office, playing god, making the usual evaluations based on hierarchies and money. (Big-money collectors have long focused on ancient Southwest pottery and Pacific Northwest totem poles and masks—for no coherent reason.)

Adding yet another complication: The work of Native American women couldn’t be found in the ordinary places. If you want to show Rembrandts, you start emailing the curators in charge of the major art museums and the owners of major collections. If you want to show the work of Native American women, you’d better be ready to burrow into the largely undigitized archives of many rural historical societies, archaeology and anthropology collections, and museums of nature and science.

•••••

Here’s how Mia ended up putting the show together. First, the museum assembled a board of 21 scholars and Native American women artists and set them the task of nominating artists and artworks. Next, Ahlberg Yohe and Greeves began the years-long process of delving into diverse collections where the work of Native American women lay hidden. When they found something, they’d photograph it, upload it to Dropbox folders, and get the reaction of their board.

When the board expressed interest in a likely piece, not explicitly made for commercial sale, Ahlberg Yohe and Greeves  (and the board) started to seek permission to show it: from the artist; or, in the case of deceased or unknown artists, the community it came from. Does this make Hearts of Our People the first art show at an encyclopedic museum—such as the Louvre, the Met, or Mia—to present pre-contemporary Native work in a manner that’s fully consensual?  “I wouldn’t say consent,” Ahlberg Yohe answered me. “It’s about consultation, consensus, and discussion.  In a show of this scale, and obviously there have been hundreds of shows of Native art, but this idea of consensus is something we are contributing uniquely in the field. And the show is better for it. Yes, it’s harder. Yes, it takes longer. Yes, it takes tenacity, grit, and determination, but it’s a necessary shift, and it’s what makes this show special.”

Connecting with the artists and their communities also led to a far greater understanding of the work, says Ahlberg Yohe. In one of her essays in the exhibit catalog, Ahlberg Yohe recounts a life-changing event. She had gone to visit Cheyenne community members in Oklahoma to seek permission to exhibit an exquisitely wrought porcupine-quill shirt. (The piece resides in the Smithsonian’s collections.) They discussed the shirt at length: its beauty, its origins. And the Cheyenne community said, No. The provenance of the shirt was too uncertain: who it had been taken from, what living people might still be attached to it. None of this could be resolved.

In the process, the Cheyenne community expanded Ahlberg Yohe’s understanding of the artwork as a thing imbued with living connections.

Another way to maintain that linkage: The wall labels for more than half of the 117 Native art works have been translated into the appropriate Native language—more than 60 in all.

“I’m not aware of any other museum that has done this,” says Ahlberg Yohe.

Those translations will be available to follow the works when the show travels to the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, Tennessee; the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.; and the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma. 

The 345-page catalog, in and of itself, is a feat worthy of international attention. It includes essays by the Native curatorial board, scholars, and Native American writers. Inside, you’ll find a primer on scores of art forms, from Kodiak headdresses to Delaware ribbon work to Lakota buffalo robes. Beyond that, the catalog compiles artists’ names and lineages—a rich history usually unavailable to the general viewer.

The result is a sort of Janson’s History of Art textbook for Native American women’s art. With the catalog in libraries around the country, scholars, students, and community members will be able to add to these stories in ways they couldn’t have done before.

Consider the Lakota Mystery Dress. Dakota Hoska is a Native painter who worked at Mia on Hearts of Our People. She has work in the catalog and just took a job as a curator of Native work at the Denver Art Museum. Hoska and Ahlberg Yohe were going through the archives at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science when they came upon the dress, wrapped in plastic in a wooden drawer. It was made of buckskin, with panels of beads showing horses and two girls’ names.

“Some call it the Mystery Dress, the Lakota Name Dress. Jill saw what it was immediately,” Hoska recalls. “Their father had been at the Battle of Little Bighorn. The girls were moved to Standing Rock, they were moved to Pine Ridge, and they died really young. Someone loved them so much, they put their name in this dress. She wanted to honor them every time she danced. As an adoptee, it really spoke to me.”

Freeing the ceremonial dress from that drawer in Denver means a thousand things could happen. Someone who knew that family could see the dress and recognize the name. A curator with a similar dress in a cupboard could see the dress and connect the dots. A PhD candidate could take on the detective work for a thesis.

On what is, literally, a bigger canvas, the show helps us to see how Native American women invented the visual vocabulary for abstract expressionism, that great American art school.

“Donald Judd collected Navajo textiles and drew heavily from them,” Ahlberg Yohe says. So did Georgia O’Keeffe, Frank Stella, and Jasper Johns. Native American sand painting, Jackson Pollock said, helped inspire his famed style.

“Native women were the first abstract expressionists,” Ahlberg Yohe adds. “It wasn’t design; it was abstraction, distilling elements of the universe into abstract forms. There’s been a worldwide reluctance to give attribution to Native women for their vast influence on the art world.”

Consider the brilliantly colored, geometric Arapaho rawhide envelope, from around the year 1900. The artist—now unidentified—who created this satchel has abstracted the natural world into triangles and other polygons. Hearts of Our People puts the work forward to claim its rightful place in art history.

Art shows do change the world. Art history is full of them: The 1874 Paris group show that launched impressionism; the 1913 New York City Armory show that brought modern art forms like cubism into popular discourse; the 1972 King Tut show that wrenched museums out of their highbrow habits and injected them into pop culture.

This Hearts of Our People show has the potential to inspire such dramatic cultural effects like perhaps no other Minnesota museum show in our lifetimes.

•••••

There’s a reason that the show came together here—several reasons, really.

First, Kaywin Feldman, the now-departed director of Mia, accepted the 19-person board—a hard sell for most directors looking at the bottom line.

Second, the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community, of Mystic Lake Casino fame (and wealth), helped finance the exhibit. In fact, for many years, the tribe has steadfastly backed many Native artists and cultural projects.

Third, Minnesota’s four tribal colleges—Red Lake Nation College, White Earth Tribal and Community College, Leech Lake Tribal College, and Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College—support Native American scholars and scholarship.

Fourth, Minneapolis and St. Paul are an intellectual and artistic capital for Native people in North America. Several of Minnesota’s 11 federally recognized tribes maintain their headquarters here.

Fifth, and finally, private local galleries like the Bockley Gallery represent some of the Native art world’s rising stars, like painter and multidisciplinary artist Andrea Carlson and painter and mixed-media artist Dyani White Hawk.

Both have contemporary pieces in the show. I spoke to White Hawk over the phone in late April, as she drove from her home in Shakopee to South Dakota, and she laid out in no faint terms what the show means.

“I spend a lot of time looking at historic work and work in collections,” White Hawk says. “This work is not new to me, because I’ve spent my life seeking it out. But the reality is, for a great many people, this will all be new. How much of the artistic history of this land has been practiced by Native American women? What significant contributions have Native women made to our nation’s art history? It’s tremendous. That this show is overdue, that it’s something that should have been recognized the entire time? Absolutely. I don’t know how to explain that to you.”

White Hawk continues, “Art history has never been taught from an indigenous perspective. It’s taught from a predominantly male European perspective. It takes a lot of work to unravel that.”

That work is this show. 

Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists, June 2–August 18, 2019, Minneapolis Institute of Art; 888-642-2787

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