The Speed Art Museum has re-engaged with its Native American art collection and reinstalled the Native American art galleries. Some of the work has never been on view before.

Dr. fari nzinga, curator of the Native American and the African Art collections, and Sirene Martin, curatorial intern, have worked together to ensure compliance with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) of 1990, which was revised in 2024. Expanding their scope beyond legal compliance, nzinga and Martin have been cultivating relationships with Native American culture-bearers (Tribal members who carry forward arts and traditions) as well as Tribal leaders and liaisons.

The recently reinstalled galleries of Native American art present not only a recalibrated perspective of the Speed’s existent collection, but also new acquisitions and loans from the unequivocal Tia Collection.

The Legality And Ethics Of Displaying Art And Artifacts

NAGPRA provides for the ownership or the control of Native American cultural artifacts and ancestral remains, whether they are excavated or discovered on Tribal or Federal land. NAGPRA grants ownership of human remains and funerary objects to the lineal descendants of Native Americans, and if descendants cannot be confirmed, the Congressional act grants ownership to the Tribal or Native Hawaiian organization on whose land the objects are found. If cultural artifacts or ancestral remains are found on Federal land, NAGPRA grants ownership to the tribe recognized as aborginally dwelling the area (unless a different Tribe makes a stronger claim to ownership and provides stronger evidence). This legislation was enacted into law on November 16, 1990.

NAGPRA was revised on January 12, 2024. The revision replaces definitions and procedures for lineal descendants, Indian Tribes, Native Hawaiian organizations, museums, and Federal agencies. These revisions were made in an effort to both clarify and improve the processes involved in the disposition or repatriation of Native American human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony.

Even before these changes became effective, the Speed Art Museum had already decided not to have items on view that could be interpreted as sensitive, especially in regards to categories of objects that are protected by NAGPRA. In a prior installation, there had been a case displaying pipe bowls and stems. “Because there was information about where these items came from and who they had been collected from,” nzinga says, “and I’m air quoting ‘collected’ because when you’re a prisoner of the military, do you really have full consent to be able to say ‘sure, you can have this item that’s used in sacred ceremonies?’ We wanted to get started taking those things off display and explaining to our stakeholders here at the museum why [they] might not see some of [their] favorite items any longer.”

Long before before nzinga joined the Speed, there was a member of the curatorial staff who had attempted to begin the process, “but because there was no follow through over those many years … we brought Sirene to help us manage everything that it was going to take to be able to prioritize the repair of those relationships.”

Arthur Amiotte,Oglála Lakȟóta Oyáte (Oglala Lakota Nation), Buffalo Image, 1973, oil on canvas, 18 by 24 inches. Courtesy of Tia Collection, Santa Fe, New Mexico.  
James Hart Photography” class=”uk-display-block uk-position-relative uk-visible-toggle”> click to enlarge

James Hart Photography

Arthur Amiotte,Oglála Lakȟóta Oyáte (Oglala Lakota Nation), Buffalo Image, 1973, oil on canvas, 18 by 24 inches. Courtesy of Tia Collection, Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Curating The Native American Art Collection

The story of how the Native American art collection has changed — especially since the recent revisions to NAGPRA — began in earnest when nzinga joined the museum in June 2022, and was then made curator in December of 2022. There was an expectation among museum leadership that there would be a reinstallation of the collection, followed soon after by the opportunity to change the collection’s location within the museum. “So that was really exciting and that gave us the kind of impetus.”

In her first year as curator, nzinga initiated the Curatorial Advisory Council, comprised of Native American artists and curators and people who can connect the museum to artists, curators, and tribal representatives. “It’s really helping push us forward,” she says, “In terms of our interpretation and in terms of our relationship-building practices as well.”

Martin was hired in June 2023. The preponderance of her work has been to facilitate correspondence between the Speed and Tribal preservation historical officers. “I was initially brought on to help [nzinga] start correspondence … to Tribes all across the nation, letting them know that we do indeed have a Native American collection and that we are starting the process to be in compliance with NAGPRA,” she says. That invitation was sent soon after Martin’s arrival, in early July 2023, and has been well received. “We focused our response to Tribes that we have identified to have connections with the belongings in our collection.”

“We’ve been working with the Southern Cheyenne Tribe for six to eight months,” Martin says. “We’re really excited for the work to be in compliance with the law and to be in the right relationship with the people and cultures that are that have birthed our wonderful collections.”

The Speed is proud that nothing in the Native American art gallery is entangled in any questionable politics. At the same time, the Speed wants to modernize and update the work presented in the Native American galleries because there has been such strong emphasis on historical material like beadwork, clothing, and hide paintings from The Reservation Era (1850–1887). Items with their provenance from that time of divestment and removal of Native Americans from their homelands is questionable because of issues of consent. “We want to have an ethical stance and we want to be proactive in helping the tribes that want any of these items returned to them,” nzinga says, “We want to use this as an opportunity for us to learn further about the art and the culture of the people, because that’s what’s in our collection.”

Frank Big Bear, Gaa-waabaabiganikaag Anishinaabeg (The White Earth Band of the Minnesota Chippewa-Ojibwe Tribe), Ghost Dance of the Great Mystery, 2022, color pencil on black illustration board, 80 by 96 inches. Courtesy of Tia Collection, Santa Fe, New Mexico.  
Courtesy of the artist and Bockley Gallery” class=”uk-display-block uk-position-relative uk-visible-toggle”> click to enlarge

Courtesy of the artist and Bockley Gallery

Frank Big Bear, Gaa-waabaabiganikaag Anishinaabeg (The White Earth Band of the Minnesota Chippewa-Ojibwe Tribe), Ghost Dance of the Great Mystery, 2022, color pencil on black illustration board, 80 by 96 inches. Courtesy of Tia Collection, Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Connecting With The Tia Collection

Some of the work in the Native American galleries at the Speed is on loan for one year from the Tia Collection, a lending collection based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. “We borrowed some really cool things,” nzinga says. “We’re so excited to present some of those artists to our visitors because we wanted to give people a sense of the dynamism of Native American art.”

One of these works is a painting by Arthur Amiotte, a scholar, art historian, and artist from the Oglala Lakota Nation. “We reached out to him because he is in his 80s and lives in Pine Ridge, South Dakota,” nzinga says. “We just wanted to let him know that we’re here at the museum and we’re borrowing [your work] and we’re so honored to share that with our museum audiences. And he wrote us back a letter, and it was just so sweet.” The painting is “Buffalo Image,” an oil painting on canvas, completed in 1973.

A more contemporaneous piece on loan from the Tia Collection is “Ghost Dance of the Great Mystery” (2022) by Frank Big Bear of the White Earth Band of the Minnesota Chippewa-Ojibwe Tribe, which nzinga describes as “masterful.” It is a six-panel work rendered in color pencil on black illustration board. “The level of detail is freaking amazing, and the maximalism of the composition is frenetic,” she says. “You feel the energetic vibration of the ethereality emanating off these panels. We really encourage people to come in and experience it.”

Other works on loan include “Maiden with Basket, From Pottery Mound” (1983), an acrylic painting on canvas by Linda Lomahaftewa of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and the Hopi people; and “Diné Vegetal Dye Chart” (c. 1970) by the Navajo artist Vera Myers, which is crafted with vegetal dyes, vegetal matter, and handwoven yarns.

Some gallery spaces only present their collections from behind glass, suggesting to viewers that the objects are suspended in time, but nzinga wants visitors to the Speed to know that Native American people are still making art. She wants to situate the work within a cultural context that suggests the present moment, which is a rupture from — yet also in continuity with — the past. She also wants to amplify the voices of Native people whenever possible, including quotations from artists on the placards in the gallery, so viewers can read the artists’ own words to help understand the work.

“I think we’ve tried our best to prioritize Native voices in our gallery, as two Non-native people,” Martin says.

Linda Lomahaftewa, Chahta Okla (Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma), Hopituh Shi-nu-mu (Hopi), Maiden with Basket, From Pottery Mound, 1983, acrylic on canvas, 18 by 18 inches. Courtesy of Tia Collection, Santa Fe, New Mexico.  
James Hart Photography” class=”uk-display-block uk-position-relative uk-visible-toggle”> click to enlarge

James Hart Photography

Linda Lomahaftewa, Chahta Okla (Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma), Hopituh Shi-nu-mu (Hopi), Maiden with Basket, From Pottery Mound, 1983, acrylic on canvas, 18 by 18 inches. Courtesy of Tia Collection, Santa Fe, New Mexico.

The Collective Excitement Around The Collection

In addition to Martin’s work in relationship building, nzinga also invited her to support her in the curation process of the gallery, specifically in collections research and helping refine the acquisition strategy. During their shared efforts, they found some hidden gems in the museum’s collection that have never been on display before now.

Rather than hermetically sealed specimens detached from the contemporary world, the Native American collection at the Speed Art Museum is a living process. “We’re not just acquiring new things and borrowing things from the outside,” nzinga says. Her passion for her work is palpable. “We’re going down and coming back up from storage like, ‘yo, did you know this was here? Let’s put it on view!'”

A radiant example of this curatorial experience can be seen in the section of the gallery dedicated to southwestern artists. In it is the work of Maria Martinez, a historical Puebloan figure who innovated black-on-black pottery with geometric designs. “So what’s crazy is we have had Maria Martinez in our collection for decades, and it never had been shown,” nzinga says.

The Speed wants to build their Native American collection and fortify it. “Our acquisition strategy is anchoring our contemporary materials within our historical strengths,” Martin says. “We’re really trying to create a sense of continuity with our collection, especially as we work with our Learning, Engagement, and Belonging Department and with the artist talks” scheduled for autumn 2024.

“We’re thinking about contemporary in the longer term, not just the hyper ‘right now,’ but we’re taking the opportunity in this presentation of Native American art to introduce people to some of the important names,” nzinga says. Her hope is that if visitors know more about an artist, they will come back and see something new in another piece, or be able to contextualize Native American art in a different way. “That’s what we love.”

Considering the amount of Native American art in the Speed’s permanent collection that has never been on view before and the acquisition of contemporary Native American art, an ongoing dialogue with the people who created — and continue to create — the work is essential. “We can at least begin to build relationships that are beautiful and fruitful … just acknowledging artists and their impact on the culture,” nzinga says.

The Speed Art Museum is collectively excited to see what the Native American art collection will become. As nzgina and Martin share their feelings of being honored to do the work of displaying this art and being able to talk about it with visitors.

The reinstalled Native American galleries opened on April 5 (then briefly closed on April 10 in response to an HVAC issue in the building), and will remain open. Items on loan from the Tia Collection will be on view through March 2025.

When I visited Wendy Red Star at her studio in south-east Portland, she described her work as that of a “visionary” rather than an artist. “I don’t think I’m an artist, at least not in the western sense,” she said. “I’ve never tailored my stuff to fit in the art world.”

The products of her vision were scattered all around us, illuminated by the late-morning sun: sculpture, mixed-media installations and many, many photographs of Native Americans. Some of these were archival images of long-dead ancestors that she had annotated and embellished with red pen, others surrealist self-portraits that seem to cast the artist as the star of Technicolor melodramas satirising white views of Native American life in the 19th and 20th centuries. In “Fall”, for example, from her 2006 self-portrait series Four Seasons, Red Star sits alongside an inflatable deer in front of a painted backdrop, dressed in the ornate regalia of the Crow people, a Native tribe indigenous to America’s northern plains. All around her are plastic flowers and leaves that evoke the artificiality of indigenous life as dramatised by natural history museum dioramas.

Red Star, who is 43, told me that early works like Four Seasons were partly about grappling with the misconceptions surrounding Native identity. She grew up on the Crow reservation in rural Montana, where her father worked as a rancher and her mother as a nurse. Having both Apsáalooke (Crow) and Irish blood, she told me, made her a bit of an outsider and an introvert on the reservation. But she took inspiration from a creative family, which included her uncle, the painter Kevin Red Star. She went to art school at Montana State University, then earned a Master of Fine Arts in sculpture at UCLA, where she remained an outsider because of her indigenous identity and her aversion to an art education that, she felt, focused “on the kinds of exhibitions and residencies necessary for building a career in the art world”.

After getting her MFA in 2006, Red Star moved to Portland and eschewed this kind of careerism and networking to immerse herself deeper in study, first by sitting in on Native Studies courses at a local university, then by exploring the collection of Native American art at the Portland Art Museum. It was there, she told me, that one curator’s description of indigenous regalia, pottery and beadwork as “art objects”, rather than tools and clothing, made her reconsider the relationship between what she had studied in university and the sewing and beadwork that her grandmother had learnt to do as an ordinary member of Crow society.

“The community would never think of her as an artist in the art world context in which the museum was trying to place these objects,” Red Star said. “But I was like: Oh, I guess my grandma’s an artist.”

Despite her resistance to chasing mainstream success, Red Star’s work has found its way to some of the art world’s most prestigious institutions. These include New York’s Museum of Modern Art, where she has exhibited work, and which, along with the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and London’s British Museum, has her works in its permanent collection. And Red Star’s work is currently on view at the South London Gallery as part of Acts of Resistance: Photography, Feminisms and the Art of Protest, which explores the role of photography as a means of fighting injustice around the world. 

Dressed in black jeans, black boots and a black cardigan, with her long, dark hair pulled back in a ponytail, Red Star led me to a large worktable in the centre of her sprawling steel and cement studio. On the table were several paintings which are part of an ongoing series, now numbering in the hundreds, showing faithful renderings of parfleche, a kind of satchel made from animal hide and decorative pigments. These were produced by the indigenous tribes of the American plains region to store and transport clothing, dried food and other sundries. “They’re basically rawhide suitcases that plains women, for the most part, made,” Red Star said, walking over to a large row of cabinets to retrieve a parfleche that she had bought from an auction house: an envelope-like slab of cream-coloured rawhide roughly the same length and width as her own torso, and about half as thick as a bible, decorated with a repeating diamond pattern of blue, red, green and yellow.

Red Star calls her parfleche paintings “studies”. “I’m actually trying to learn from them,” she told me. When visiting museums she obsessively photographs parfleche, which she also tracks down by spending hours searching auction house catalogues and eBay. “I’ve taken it upon myself to try and find as many parfleche as I can find,” she said, and she has so far gathered 336 examples into a series of large binders. Occasionally, her research yields insights previously lost on the curators and collectors in possession of these artefacts. “When these were originally made, they were made in pairs,” and hung from saddles, though it’s rare to find them presented that way in collections and museums. “They’ve been separated a lot of the time, so there’s been instances where I found one, like in the Chicago Field Museum, and then the other one is in the Denver Art Museum. And that’s always super exciting, to find the pairs.” In her paintings, she depicts them side by side, united in their sets.

This enthusiasm for research is characteristic of Red Star’s work, which is often as much about discovery and documentation as the realisation of a particular idea. Beyond her interest in the geometric designs on Crow tobacco bags, or the elaborate beadwork seen on utilitarian accessories, Red Star seems most interested in the people who created, used and left behind such artefacts. “In the process of collecting these, nobody really recorded the makers, so it’s really rare to find the maker,” she said. To memorialise this dehumanisation, Red Star sought out census records from 1885 to 1940 so she could give each of her parfleche studies a name, not one based on its actual maker, but on a real plains Indian woman likely to have used or made one herself.

Census records from Red Star’s own community in Montana have informed other works, including “Her Dreams Are True (Julia Bad Boy)”, which shows a black-and-white photograph of her great-great grandmother reproduced on each edge of the print against a colourful backdrop inspired by Crow quilt patterns. Its title refers to the corruption of indigenous naming conventions by census takers: Crow people had just one name, and the notion of given names and surnames was imposed on them when the US government gave them Christian names.

Crow society, like that of my own ancestors from Alaska, the Tlingit, is matrilineal. But the state also imposed the patriarchal custom of identifying women by the Christian surname given to the male heads of their households on Crow families. Red Star’s great-great grandmother, whose Crow name translates as Her Dreams Are True, was given the name Julia and a surname the government had assigned to her father. “So her Christian name is Julia Bad Boy.”

Transforming genealogy into art requires a degree of obsession. Red Star spread copies of handwritten census ledgers across the table and started pointing out Christian names that crudely mimic the descriptive quality of the Crow names they replaced and serve as reminders of forced assimilation, but which nevertheless delight her. Julia Bad Boy was there as well, prompting Red Star to show me another piece which features her great-great grandmother, one which is now on view at South London Gallery. For the installation, called “Amnía (Echo)”, she recreated the photo of Julia Bad Boy twice, once as a self-portrait, and once as a black-and-white portrait of her daughter Beatrice. All three subjects appear side by side, each made up of 10 layered prints that get progressively larger, making it appear that Red Star, her daughter and Julia Bad Boy are radiating outward as echoes of themselves and each other. On the wall behind the photographs is a long list of translated Crow names sourced from the Indian census rolls.

Almost as soon as we sat down on the comfortable furniture at the back of the studio, our conversation turned towards the art market’s attitude towards Native identity, as if this were a subject too irritating to discuss standing up.

“Native artists are hot right now,” Red Star said. “But if I get into that dynamic of what the art world elevates, if I get wrapped up in that stuff, it’s very torturous for me.” There is a push and pull familiar to any Native artist, she said, between the need to prove oneself and the suspicion that one is being asked to play a role. Many indigenous artists of her generation came up through galleries specialising in Native American art, “and most of those curators are anthropologists,” she told me. “They don’t have an art history background.”

She finds that indigenous concepts are often lost in translation, so that white audiences tend to conflate land stewardship for utopianism, and matrilineal traditions with western feminism. “They’re like: Crows are feminist,” Red Star said. “And it’s like: no. Actually, we did have a chief system, and it can be very patriarchal on the reservation.” For this reason, she felt it was important to take a subtle approach when South London Gallery invited her to appear in the Acts of Resistance exhibition. “Conjuring the names of the women and girls that have been lost” and “finding this photo of my great grandmother and then making artwork with my daughter” made it feel as if her female ancestors were “reverberating through time”.

What fascinated me most, I told her, was how these reverberations were made possible by the bureaucracy of settler colonialism. “In one way it’s horrible, and in another way I really like the census record for the mere fact that I can find all my family and I can have a better understanding of why we’re in the situation that we’re in,” Red Star said. “What’s so weird to me is that they tried to eradicate us, but they also thought we were interesting enough to collect all our cultural items and preserve them.” Ultimately, using “the tools” of colonialism to create indigenous art is not much of a choice, she told me, because “it’s all we have left”.

“Acts of Resistance: Photography, Feminisms and the Art of Protest” is at South London Gallery until June 9. A collaborative group exhibition organised with the South London Gallery and the V&A’s Parasol Foundation Women in Photography Project

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