New Mexico: Moving Beyond The Expected - Representation And Presence In A Contemporary Native Arts Museum

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Published on Monday, 23 July 2012 16:24

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This essay is a critical ethnography of Native art and representation in a contemporary museum, the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA) in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I explore how one museum promotes and encourages the recognition of Indigenous ways of knowing, Indigenous models of representation, Indigenous aesthetics, and the delivery of knowledge pertaining to Native arts and culture. Intrinsic to this discussion is naming dominant cultural perceptions that are outdated, and intervening with decolonizing methodologies and Tribal Critical Race Theory (TribalCrit). Additionally, I elaborate on the ongoing discussion of Indigenous aesthetics by briefly surveying the 2009 traveling MoCNA exhibition curated by Ryan Rice titled Scout's Honour, featuring the work of Frank Shebageget and Michael Belmore, both Ojibwe from Thunderbay, Ontario.

Native art, or what some still refer to as "Indian art," is commonly associated with silver and turquoise, dream catchers, objects adorned with beads and feathers, or pottery and textiles, particularly Navajo rugs and other "crafts." In commercialized settings, these objects are commoditized, fetishized, and romanticized abstractions of Native arts and culture, serving the consumers who buy them. When Native art and culture is displayed and represented in public institutions, such as museums, it is often packaged, presented, and consumed through the lens of the dominant culture, creating an imagined past where Native peoples are static, immutable parts of colonial history and conquest. Museums that display Native art using anthropological, ethnographic, and Western art historical models as interpretative lenses work to sublimate Native peoples and cultures into an imagined or romanticized past, creating an absence of authentic Native representations in the present. The museum, as a public institution and a producer and transmitter of culture and knowledge, is often one such site of sublimation and tokenization.

Source: http://indigenouspeoplesissues.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=15752:new-mexico-moving-beyond-the-expected-representation-and-presence-in-a-contemporary-native-arts-museum&catid=22:north-america-indigenous-peoples&Itemid=55

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