Hundreds celebrated the raising of the first 12 of 30 totem poles along the Juneau waterfront that make up Kootéeyaa Deiyí, Totem Pole Trail, during a dedication ceremony held Saturday in downtown Juneau.

[Totem poles raised along waterfront ahead of trail dedication ceremony]

Hundreds of people flocked to Heritage Square in downtown Juneau for a ceremony celebrating the raising of 12 totem poles along Juneau’s waterfront. (Mark Sabbatini / Juneau Empire)

Over the last week, the poles carved by Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian artists were raised along the waterfront, each depicting the crests of their respective clans and tribes. Most of the artists spent more than six months creating the poles after being commissioned by Sealaska Heritage Institute, which launched the Kootéeyaa Deiyí initiative in 2021 through a $2.9 million grant from the Mellon Foundation. The 12 now dedicated poles can be seen along the waterfront, and soon will be joined by an additional 18 more.

A totem pole by Tsimshian carver Gyibaawm Laxha David Robert Boxley stands tall during a light drizzle Saturday afternoon after the dedication ceremony of the Kootéeyaa Deiyí, Totem Pole Trail, was held Saturday in downtown Juneau at Heritage Plaza. (Clarise Larson / Juneau Empire)

During the multi-hour event, SHI’s Heritage Plaza downtown was overflowing as dozens of students from the Tlingit Culture, Language and Literacy program at Harborview Elementary led the procession of the event that featured speeches from dozens of renowned Alaska Native artists and leaders from across Southeast Alaska about the historic trail.

U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola, a Democrat and the first Alaska Native person to represent Alaska in Congress, laughs while sitting in the crowd at the dedication ceremony of the Kootéeyaa Deiyí, Totem Pole Trail, held Saturday in downtown Juneau at Heritage Plaza. (Clarise Larson / Juneau Empire)

The ceremony also celebrated the unveiling of “Faces of Alaska,” a new installation of five, 4-foot bronze masks that represent the diversity of the Alaska Native cultures including the Inupiat, Yup’ik, Alutiiq and Athabascan peoples, and a combined mask for the Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian peoples, according to the SHI.

A singer beats to a song during the procession of the dedication ceremony of the Kootéeyaa Deiyí, Totem Pole Trail, held Saturday in downtown Juneau at Heritage Plaza. (Clarise Larson / Juneau Empire)

SHI President Rosita Worl said the poles will further the continuous goal of SHI and the City and Borough of Juneau of making Juneau the Northwest Coast art capital of the world.

“Gunalchéesh to clans and tribes whose crests and masks are represented here, and to the master artists who created these iconic works that will stand among the greatest art collections of the world,” she said.

From left to right, City and Borough of Juneau Deputy Mayor Maria Gladziszewski, City Manager Rorie Watt and SHI President Rosita Worl laugh together during a speech at the dedication ceremony of the Kootéeyaa Deiyí, Totem Pole Trail, held Saturday in downtown Juneau at Heritage Plaza. (Clarise Larson / Juneau Empire)

Fran Houston, cultural Leader of the A’akw Kwáan, said the poles will serve to bring unity and positivity to Juneau and the Alaska Native community.

“We need to come together, and that’s what we’re doing. We see these beautiful, beautiful totem poles out here, I’ve taken the walk through the walkway to the channel — it’s beautiful,” she said. “All of this will bring us together, support each other, love one another,” she said.

Kaax̱ḵaatuklag̱é Ken Grant sings a song as Ben Coronell performs a thanking and feeding the spirits of the trees ceremony during the dedication ceremony of the Kootéeyaa Deiyí, Totem Pole Trail, held Saturday in downtown Juneau at Heritage Plaza. (Clarise Larson / Juneau Empire)

Renowned Haida master artist Robert Davidson congratulated the artists for taking on the challenge of creating a totem pole and thanked them for what the poles will mean for the future of Alaska Native art in Juneau and Southeast Alaska.

“These totem poles mark this time in our history, the strength we are gaining in reclaiming our rightful place in the world,” he said, continuing. “Art is our official language throughout our history, to help keep our spirit alive, now arts helps us reconnect with our history and ceremonies.”

U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola, a Democrat and the first Alaska Native person to represent Alaska in Congress, also spoke to the crowd, beginning her speech as she wiped away tears following a standing ovation.

U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola, a Democrat and the first Alaska Native person to represent Alaska in Congress, speaks to the crowd at the dedication ceremony of the Kootéeyaa Deiyí, Totem Pole Trail, held Saturday in downtown Juneau at Heritage Plaza. (Clarise Larson / Juneau Empire)

“Usually these tears swell up when the introduction song comes, Walter Soboleff Jr. always laughs at me, but when the dancers come in, it makes me bawl like a baby,” she said. “Because of all those decades where we were not supposed to be proud, we were not supposed to be here, we were not supposed to know our language and our names and our cultures and our clans. All that information was underground for a while, but now it is here, and it is loud and it’s proud.”

• Contact reporter Clarise Larson at clarise.larson@juneauempire.com or (651)-528-1807.

The mural will be painted on the side of the 10th Street YMCA.

“If we put on a different set of glasses with a different set of lenses and tilt your head a little to the right or left, I think they’d see it clear as day, and I hope we can do our part to inspire that chance across the country,” Trevisani said.

The club’s quest for public funding for its own facility failed by a 2-to-1 margin in a state-wide ballot measure last November, but that has not deterred Trevisani.

“The fact is that there was a vote, we heard ‘no’ on a publicly-funded stadium, and that was the night I slept the best of the whole election season,” Trevisani said. “The next day we got up and got on a call and put our heads together and said, ‘What’s next? Let’s pivot. How are we going to fund this privately?’ It might look different.

“It might be in a different location, but the reality is we’re going to keep fighting for our home and this is a 100-year vision,” Trevisani continued. “And having a facility that we know that we can curate and count on is a big part of how we guarantee that plan.”

Like art, rivalries are created

New Mexico United’s upcoming Third Round matchup against USL Championship league mates Phoenix Rising brings back old memories and old conversations.

“When you have games that count [and] when there’s passion, rivalries are born,” Trevisani said. “When you’re playing Phoenix Rising in the Open Cup, sort of the prima donna team with the highest payroll and most high-profile players. With [Didier] Drogba [who played with there in 2017-18 , Phoenix had an attitude and we went out and beat them.”

This year, New Mexico United host Phoenix Rising at The Lab on Wednesday, April 26. Kickoff is set for 9 pm ET.

“The U.S. Open Cup really captures that intensity because New Mexico has a history that we’re not good enough,” Trevisani said. “That we rank last on the good list and first on the bad list, and there are so many people in this state that reject that narrative and want to focus on the good things, and we have so, so many of them.”

“New Mexico is a place where we punch above our weight,” he added. “And in the first year of the Open Cup we actually manifested that and it revealed itself on the pitch when we got to the final eight.

“It just showed that the underdog grit, heart and soul of a team can still go a long way in the Cup, just like they go a long way in America still,” Trevisani said. “The Open Cup really heated up our rivalries and really heated up our club in our state because it was really the first time in a long time that we had a sports team that was representing us at the highest level possible.”

Dennis Pope writes about local sports for the SoCal Newspaper Group and serves in a communications role for both NISA Nation and the Southwest Premier League. Follow him at @DennisPope on Twitter.

No one place more completely embodies the American experience than St. Louis, smack dab in the middle of the country on the banks of the nation’s most important historic transportation route, the Mississippi River.

It has been at turns frontier, Western outpost and urban center. It is where the South, the Midwest and the West meet.

Centuries before any of those, the area was the site of a cosmopolitan Indigenous community, a hub of continental trade and culture. But America’s westward expansion also started here. Louis and Clark went up the Missouri River at the confluence with the Mississippi, an adventure that would ultimately result in the attempted genocide of Native people and wholesale theft of Native land.

The Gateway Arch, the country’s tallest and second most recognizable monument after the Statue of Liberty, memorializes the city’s role in western expansion, and, simultaneously, the madness and cruelty of Manifest Destiny.

In 1857, the Dred Scott case, in which the United States Supreme Court ultimately upheld the legality of slavery, began here. Missouri was a slave state that never seceded from the Union. Find a better example of America’s split personality than that contradiction.

Little remembered today, an effort in the late 1800s sought to move the nation’s capital from Washington D.C. to St. Louis at a time when it was the fourth largest city in the country and a major cultural, transportation and economic hub.

St. Louis is renowned for beer–Budweiser’s hometown–and baseball–America’s pastime–and Black Lives Matter–the movement took over St. Louis and centered the nation’s gaze on the suburb of Ferguson where social upheaval followed the shooting death of Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager, by police in 2014.

St. Louis represents America and America is represented in St. Louis more thoroughly than anywhere else.

St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.A.

Counterpublic 2023, a public triennial of contemporary art locally rooted while international in ambition, runs with the St. Louis as America metaphor, concentrating these vast histories along a six-mile section of Jefferson Avenue, so named for America’s third president, author of the Declaration of Independence, enlightened, slave holder, rapist, contractor of Lewis and Clark to head west.

“Jefferson Avenue runs north and south through the city; like many Rust Belt cities, St. Louis has been redlined and segregated in various ways along a north south axis, (and) Jefferson runs the full length of the city,” Counterpublic Executive Director and Artistic Director James McAnally told Forbes.com. “So if you start at the outset of the exhibition and move through these 30 projects, in a sense, you traverse the entire length of St. Louis.”

And America in many ways.

The event uses three significant anchor points around which to center the presentation.

“The southern terminus is at a place called Sugarloaf Mound,” McAnally explains. “St. Louis is known as mound city historically, and (Sugarloaf Mound) is the last intact Native mound in the city. It has been preserved almost by accident.”

While construction has occurred on the mound, it has survived where all other mounds here have not.

The exhibition continues through the Mill Creek Valley neighborhood west of downtown and the Arch. The once-vibrant neighborhood was home to over 20,000 residents, 800 businesses, and 40 houses of worship before city officials declared that the 450 acres would be demolished in the name of “urban renewal.” The intentional destruction of thriving Black communities across America in to run interstate highways through them occurred in nearly every major city in the country during the 1950s and 60s.

“Finally, the northern terminus of Jefferson hits a place called St. Louis Avenue where there are a number of Black cultural institutions, notably the Griot Museum of Black History and the Vashon Museum,” McAnally said. “Those sites tell a story of St. Louis’s long history. (St. Louis) has been a central focal point in what is now America and Jefferson just happened to be touching upon those multiple histories.”

To best experience Counterpublic, begin at one of these three hubs. Each location is free and open to the public, offering exhibition guides and materials with free parking and bathroom facilities along with on-site event staff to discuss the projects and inform your visit.

The Griot Museum

2505 St Louis Ave, St. Louis 63106

Open Wednesday-Saturday 10AM-5PM

Citypark Pavilion

2100 Market St, St. Louis 63103

Open Monday-Friday: 10AM-6PM

Saturday 11AM-6PM, + Sunday 11AM-5PM

The Luminary

2701 Cherokee St, St. Louis 63118

Open Wednesday-Saturday 11AM-6PM

You are on Native Land

St. Louis, same as every other square inch of America, was built on Native land. Mostly stolen Native land.

“You can’t understand the history of St. Louis without understanding the history of Cahokia, that it’s the confluence and has been important gathering site for millennia,” McAnally said.

Cahokia, centered just east of St. Louis across the Mississippi River in Illinois, was one of the greatest cities of the world, larger than London in 1250. A vast network of trade connecting most of the continent moved through here, not to mention some 50,000 people in and around the development. Remember Cahokia when hearing lies about how what became America was unpeopled and unsophisticated before European colonizers arrived.

Critically, before presuming to share this story, Counterpublic asked.

“It started with a proposal to the Osage Nation, the ancestors of the mound builders, the Mississippians; we went through the formal protocol–approaching them–of what it would look like to work at Sugarloaf Mound, which is one of their most sacred sites,” McAnally explained.

When the Osage Nation purchased part of Sugarloaf Mound in 2007, the site was reabsorbed into the Nation, extending Osage territory from the site of their displacement in Oklahoma back to their ancestral homeland.

“It is not a space that is publicly programmed and it required tribal approval, so they had to invite us in and say, we trust that we can work together with respect,” McAnally added.

From there, Counterpublic curators invited Native artists to reflect upon the space. Featured at Sugarloaf Mound and throughout the triennial are an all-star roster of contemporary Native artists: Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara/Lakota), Nokosee “Yatika” Fields (Osage/Cherokee/Muscogee) and his mother Anita Fields (Osage/Muscogee), Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Enrolled Salish member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation), Raven Chacon (Diné).

Luger’s Future Ancestral Technologies: Roaming has viewers at Sugarloaf Mound watching buffalo roam through virtual space via mobile phones. Buffalo once existed on the prairies surrounding St. Louis in great numbers before their slaughter by the white man, a slaughter designed to deprive the Great Plains’ indigenous residents of their most important resource for survival. These people weren’t referred to as the “Buffalo Tribes” for no reason.

In the augmented reality platform, visitors interact with seven Midéegaadi (buffalo in the Hidatsa language) positioned along St. Louis’s horizon line. The continuously looping performance invites the buffalo to return to St. Louis.

The Fields’ WayBack encourages visitors to gather in physical relation to each other, to Sugarloaf Mound, and to Osage ancestors, history, and legacy. Atop this site, forty platforms modeled after those found at Osage events in Oklahoma are installed. Each platform is embellished with ribbons referencing Osage cosmologies of balance between sky, water and earth.

After the exhibition, the platforms will travel to Tulsa where they will be distributed to Osage community members, completing the link between the current home of the Osage Nation and its ancestral homelands.

Global Ambition, Local Focus

Counterpublic opened April 15 and lasts through July 15, 2023. Each of the 30 artworks were commissioned specifically for this event and were imagined and produced specific to their sites. It is the largest public art exhibition of its kind in the country.

Headlining the event is architect David Adjaye’s first permanent public artwork. Adjaye designed the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. He’s created a monumental earthwork using materials adjacent to the notorious Pruitt-Igoe housing development, mere blocks away, as a means of engaging with communal memory and the community museum.

Community impact, place making and permanence motivated Counterpublic throughout.

“Nobody needed another triennial that was an exportable model where people fly in, they fly out, they leave unchanged and, ultimately, when the exhibition leaves, the place is unchanged,” McAnally said. “We were committed to showing up in a much longer duration and deeper way.”

Counterpublic enlisted the work of local artists and has formed lasting community partnerships. Many of the commissions will remain permanently. Half of the budget will be staying in St. Louis.

“The art world paid enormous attention to Counterpublic in 2019,” event co-founder Lee Broughton told Forbes.com of the debut version; this second edition being delayed a year by COVID. “What we really wanted to do (for 2023) is bring it to St. Louis as well as the art world.”

Broughton and McAnally hope that by taking care of Counterpublic’s neighbors locally, organizers of similar events around the world will take notice.

“(The artists) are bringing their best work and creating something for this place, for the people here; we think that if we get it right for the audiences of St. Louis, then (other biennials and triennials) can learn from that,” McAnally said. “Ultimately, we want it to be one of these events that sets a tone in the art world. We’re not just trying to create this large volume exhibition, but really think deeply about what are the possibilities of this kind of platform.”

Those possibilities, of extraordinary contemporary art in public spaces, are no less than individually and communal transformational.

“Artists hold up important mirrors to our society that open doors for reflection and learning. They weave cords that bind us through storytelling and shared experience, and they help us appreciate our commonalities and help us negotiate our differences which, ultimately, creates bridges for us to cross around understanding and appreciation,” Broughton said. “That doesn’t necessarily always translate in the white walls of a museum because there is so much presupposition held about walking into a museum, whereas if it’s in public space, and it’s hopefully invitational, and it’s free, and it doesn’t ever give a feeling of inferiority, it literally provokes perspective and point of view.”

Out of town visitors to Counterpublic staying at the Angard Arts Hotel receive special rates and exclusive offers from the boutique property in the Grand Center Arts District. The first hotel in the world letting guests book rooms by the color of emotion, the discounted rates–well under $200 per night–are only available when booking through Counterpublic’s room block and using the code: NCCOUNT.

East Texas native Caleb Bell visited his first art museum on a high school field trip.

“There was a lot of contemporary work, which at the time, I didn’t understand, but I thought it was just really interesting,” Bell said. “I remember being inspired.”

The Tyler Museum of Art (TMA) Board of Trustees unanimously selected Bell to serve as the executive director following the retirement of Christopher Leahy on June 30.

Bell will assume the position on July 1.

Leahy said Bell has put on great exhibitions and brought exhibitions people wanted to see to the museum. Both Leahy and Bell have grown a lot working together over the years.

“Caleb has done a magnificent job of getting our name as a museum out into not just our community here in Tyler with great exhibitions but throughout the state,” he said. “It’s been a lot of fun. It’s been a really enjoyable time.”

His activities have been beneficial and will continue as he takes over.

Bell studied public relations and art history at UT Tyler.

“I started going to many museum exhibitions throughout Texas and beyond for as long as I can remember,” he said. “I think art is so powerful and meaningful. It’s something that has resonated with me.”

He was hired as a marketing and public relations coordinator at the Tyler Museum of Art in 2012. He has served various roles with TMA, including marketing and special event coordinating and curator, since July 2016.

He focuses on presenting the beauty and power of art to the public.

“Art plays a huge role in our everyday life, whether we recognize it or not. From creative thinking and problem solving to basic aesthetic choices such as the clothes we wear, the car we drive,” he said. “Those are all art forms… it’s helping people recognize the beauty of the every day.”

In addition to group exhibitions, he has presented solo exhibitions for contemporary artists, including Helen Altman, Daniel Blagg, Abhidnya Ghuge, Letitia Huckaby and Linda Ridgway.

His most recent project, Observations: Works by Melissa W. Miller, will open to the public May 7.

According to a Tyler Museum of Art press release, he has played a vital role in the institution’s educational programming and community outreach efforts. He has assisted with grant writing and fundraising efforts. Bell has also served as a juror for numerous external exhibitions, written for various art publications and given talks throughout the state.

The transition for Bell to take over for Leahy has been in the works for years. It’s largely been ensuring Bell understands the nuances of the financial aspects of the museum.

“We are proud of the many strides we have made together under the direction of Chris, and he will be greatly missed,” said TMA Board President Suzanne Perkins. “Caleb has played a key role within the organization for years, and we are excited for our future under his guidance.”

The TMA is located at 1300 S. Mahon Ave. across from Wagstaff Gymnasium on the Tyler Junior College main campus. Regular hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday; the museum is closed Mondays and most major holidays.

For information, call 903-595-1001, visit www.tylermuseum.org or follow the Museum on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/Tyler.Museum.Of.Art/.

The “Painting History” tour, led by Jami Powell and Michael Hartman, explores the theme of art’s role in the construction of history.

by Celine Choi
| 4/21/23 2:10am

On April 19 at the Hood Museum of Art, Jami Powell, Curator of Indigenous Art, and Michael Hartman, Jonathan Little Cohen Associate Curator of American Art, led a special tour titled “Painting History.” The tour touches upon the Hood’s theme for this year pertaining to art’s role in the construction of history through the exhibitions “Historical Imaginary” and “Kent Monkman: The Great Mystery.” 

Hartman elaborated on the connection between art and history.

“Artworks here are really questioning how art has shaped and continues to shape our perception of the past,” Hartman said. “Our goal with that is the hope that by being more transparent with the past and the roles that artworks have played that maybe we can build towards a more equitable future.”

The tour began with the “Historical Imaginary” exhibition, located in the entrance gallery to the museum. This exhibit consists of works including Emanuel Leutze’s 1851 “Incomplete Study of Washington Crossing the Delaware” alongside “George Washington (On A Stick),” created by Valerie Hegarty, and a sketch of Washington by José Clemente Orozco. All addressing Washington as a subject, these three artworks were produced at different times and use varying  approaches — embodying the unique interpretations that can be produced about the same historical subject. For example, “George Washington (On A Stick)” has a melted black material obscuring Washington’s face, while Orozco’s sketch is a straightforward rendering. 

This exhibition additionally pairs these depictions of George Washington with other pieces from the Hood Museum’s collection, including a Wampum belt recently gifted to the College by the Mohegan nation when Samson Occom’s papers were repatriated. This belt is made of purple and white beads, symbolizing unity after conflict through its portrayal of figures hand-in-hand. Hartman explained the value of the Wampum belt, as it creates a more comprehensive understanding of local history.

“The belt within the context of this exhibition is really representing how reckoning and telling a more complete history locally allows us to build a better future together,” Hartman said. 

Directly above the “Historical Imaginary” exhibition on the second floor of the museum, Powell guides the tour to Cree artist Kent Monkman’s painting “The Great Mystery.” This painting draws inspiration from Mark Rothko’s notoriously bold, color-blocked paintings and Cyrus Dallin’s 1908 statue of a Native American man with his arms spread wide on horseback, called  “Appeal to the Great Spirit.” Influenced by these two iconic artworks, Monkman created “The Great Mystery,” commissioned for the Hood’s permanent collection. In the painting, Monkman depicts his alter ego — Miss Chief Eagle Testikle — on horseback wearing a Native American headdress and dream catchers on a backdrop of Rothko’s painting “Lilac and Orange Over Ivory.” Monkman utilizes Miss Chief Eagle Testikle as a character that challenges the gender binary; the figure is male-presenting but wears more “feminine” clothing. Through “The Great Mystery,” Monkman hopes to convey to audiences that uncertainty is welcome; he embraces ambiguities rather than binaries. 

Powell discussed how the inclusion of Indigenous perspectives connects back to the Hood’s theme for this year. 

“When we use this theme of art in the construction of history, we can think about whose voices are included, whose voices are not, who’s allowed to tell their own history,” Powell said. “This Cree artist reimagines a depiction of Indigenous peoples from the Cyrus Dallin sculpture over 100 years later in a different context.”

In addition to Kent Monkman’s “The Great Mystery,” this exhibition includes works from other artists such as Rothko and Indigenous artist T.C. Cannon, bringing modern painters into the conversation of American art history. Powell also emphasized the need for representation and diversity in artistic spaces in order to foster important dialogue.

“Enabling Native students and also queer or trans students to see this really powerful representation … is something that is really impactful for me and drives my work,” Powell said. “But [it is] also something that I hope we can build on in the future, as we make the collection here at the Hood Museum reflect the diversity and multiplicity of our growing student population.”

The Hood Museum’s special tour “Painting History” drew audience members from Dartmouth’s student population, visiting alumni and members of the local community. One attendee, Sebastian Fernandez ’24 reflected on the experience, appreciating the role of the curators.

“It’s always really refreshing to be able to hear directly from the curators,” Fernandez said. “It’s one thing to be in the museum and read the labels and come up with your own interpretations from the didactics, but it’s really cool to hear the thought process and intellectual connections made by the curators between the artwork within their own exhibits and also between each other’s [exhibits].”

Having curators themselves speak on their work provides an opportunity for people to learn more about the processes behind constructing exhibitions and connect more with the Hood’s mission, which hopes to “center art and people in teaching and learning through inclusive and robust academic, cultural and civic engagements with art and its histories.” 

The recent revelations of “white hands on black art” underscore the authenticity myth that persists when it comes to Aboriginal art

Early this month The Australian published Greg Bearup’s investigation into allegations of art malpractice in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands, a vast area of sparsely populated country in the extreme north-west of South Australia. The investigation has since trailed through the newspaper as new allegations, denials and updates have surfaced. The stories cumulatively point towards a potentially widespread practice of white studio advisers associated with the APY Art Centre Collective (APYACC) physically working on the canvasses of celebrated Anangu artists. Asked for comment in a follow-up story by Bearup, the respected Indigenous curator, writer and artist Djon Mundine referred to the practice, if it was indeed true, as “the ultimate bloody sin”.

Should one be tempted to scream “conservative bias”, The Australian provided video evidence. Filmed in a cyclone-fenced open-air studio in the APY community of Amata, it makes for somewhat squeamish viewing. A well-known senior artist, Yaritji Young, stands to one side as a conversation about the compositional merits of a large painting in progress unfolds between two white advisers. One asks the other, “Could it do with another rockhole there, or is that going to be too circular?” Young seems unfazed: at one point she asks in Anangu for soft drink from a compatriot offscreen. Eventually one of the advisers, identified as Rosie Palmer, manager of APYACC member Tjala Arts, says, “Can I juice this one up a little bit?”, before taking up a large brush and firmly emphasising a circular form in red at the centre of Young’s work. If Young is watching, she is doing so from off camera, and says nothing. Palmer would later claim she was simply painting background washes, but the video says otherwise – the red circle constitutes an expressive central form, and an integral part of the overall work.

The APYACC, which is managed by long-term APY worker Skye O’Meara – whose own conduct in the studio is similarly drawn into question by Bearup’s articles – issued a statement on Instagram strenuously denying any wrongdoing. “We believe our professional studios meet [the] highest standards of integrity and professionalism,” it read, before claiming that assistance with “background washes” was “not unusual”.

In terms of the background wash, heavily diluted paint is poured, sprayed or slopped onto the canvas, including with large ‘house-painting’ brushes. Professional assistants may or may not take part in this process to some degree, at the artist’s direction. Multiple layers are then applied only by the artist following the underpainting stage. Yaritji Young’s work is so successful because of the complex layering involved.

The statement is instructive. To look at one of Young’s paintings with it in mind is to immediately understand how they are made. Take, for example, Tjala Tjukurpa – Honey ant story, 2021, in the collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia. The dominant composition is formed by a tangle of thick plum and aqua coloured lines that knot around three large central circles. All this, one assumes, is the “underpainting” (although “scaffold” or “structure” may well be better terms given their importance to the resulting composition), while the more detailed filigree of linework that thinly covers it constitute the “multiple layers” applied “only by the artist following the underpainting stage”. The iconography of the work is instantly recognisable as part of a well-established canon of desert Aboriginal painting, but it’s the differences that are most revealing. Young’s work is painterly in a way that most desert paintings are not. In this, it strongly recalls the work of the late John Olsen, who was similarly known to layer expressively brushed and washed aerial depictions of landscape with more detailed linework.

To be clear, if Young had indeed directed studio assistants (as opposed to being directed by them) in the creation of her paintings there would not necessarily be anything amiss: it has long been unremarkable that contemporary artists use assistants to realise parts, or even all their work. The reasons for this vary. Sometimes it comes down to pure pragmatism – it allows in-demand artists to work more quickly by outsourcing repetitive and time-consuming aspects of their practice – while other times it means they can draw upon different skill sets that in turn shape their work in new ways. In some instances, assistants are credited, as in the work of Melbourne-based painter Helen Johnson, who is not alone in listing the names of her studio assistants on the verso of each painting, but mostly they’re not; it’s just part of the process. So why is the issue treated so differently for Aboriginal artists such as Young? Why did the publication of the video spark a sequence of strident denials and legal threats from the APYACC? And perhaps most interestingly, why did the National Gallery of Australia, where a major exhibition of APYACC artists, Ngura Pulka – Epic Country, is poised to open on June 3, immediately launch an urgent independent review panel into issues of authorship and assistance?

The answers cluster around the colonial underpinnings of Australia’s celebrated Aboriginal art movement, in which long-held notions of authenticity are often shorthand for elaborate mythologies about Aboriginal people and the art they make. The presence of a white hand in the work of an Aboriginal artist risks deflating these myths immediately, but a white presence – overt or not – has long been the norm in the work of artists such as Young. In its current form, the entire industry hinges upon non-Aboriginal intermediaries. (This is in spite of the fact that the NGA’s website proudly states that “All parts of Ngura Pulka are being entirely conceived, created, directed, and determined by Aṉangu people.”)

There is a historical aspect here. Some of the earliest Aboriginal artists to practice in colonial Australia made work that was sparked by the pressing need to communicate with the colonisers. Well-known 19th century artists such as Tommy McRae and William Barak forged firmly cross-cultural practices that drew in aspects of Aboriginal and settler Australian iconography. Like many others, both artists benefitted from colonial patrons: for McRae, it was the Scottish settler Anne Fraser Bon, while for Barak it was, among others, the artist Teresa Walker. In the Yolngu community of Yirrkala – now the epicentre of the one of the most beguiling chapters in Australian art history – it was mid 20th century interactions with the Methodist Church that led to the current art industry. For Albert Namatjira, the Arrernte watercolourist who for a brief period in the 1950s was Australia’s most famous artist, it was lessons from fellow artist Rex Battarbee that set him on his path. None of this is to deny the agency of each of the artists. If anything, it makes us understand their vision more clearly. At times in which the most pernicious aspects of colonisation were in full swing – invasion and massacre in the time of McRae and Barak, and assimilationist ideologies in the instances of Namatjira and the early Yirrkala artists – both they and their intermediaries found a way to speak across the cultural divide.

Resulting works show us moments of genuine exchange and dialogue; they are concrete evidence that even the most appalling passages of our country’s history are scattered – albeit thinly – with discrete examples of meaningful rapprochement. Such works were never “authentic” in the way the term is used in primitivist circles, where it is intended to designate something wholly untouched by non-Indigenous worlds. They were made with a colonial audience in mind; they were traded and swapped; they became a currency. Because of this they were imprinted by the ideals of both cultures to whom they came to hold value. It’s for this reason I would argue for their importance, and I’d make a similar argument for much of the Aboriginal art that has since followed.

But we would be wrong to trace too straight a line between the art-enabled encounters of colonial history to the deeply wrought authenticity anxieties that have been sparked by Bearup’s reporting. There is a difference, one that comes down to the economics of Aboriginal art. Namatjira made significant money from his paintings, but it wasn’t until the early 1980s that talk of a bona fide Aboriginal art market truly took hold. By then, the famous Papunya Tula art movement had begun to stake its ground in the popular imagination and policies of self-determination were in full swing. The idea that a culturally based art form might create a cottage industry that enabled Aboriginal people to make an income on (or at least near) Country appealed to artists and funding bodies alike.

By the mid to late 1990s many larger communities such as Yuendumu in Central Australia, Balgo in Western Australia and Warmun in the East Kimberley counted government-funded art centres among their core community infrastructure. As this system spread, it reached ever-more remote places; the APY Lands were among the last and have thus only risen to the fore over the last decade or so. Skye O’Meara has been at the centre of the region’s success, first as manager of Tjala Arts from 2007, and then from 2017 as the founding general manager of APYACC. She has helped cultivate influential supporters, including the painter Ben Quilty, who has called APY painting “the greatest art movement on the planet in my lifetime”. Bearup’s articles include testimony from ex-employees and artists – including Wynne Prize winner Tjungkara Ken – that practices similar to those depicted in the video from Amata are not only common in an off-Country APYACC studio in Adelaide that O’Meara oversees, but that they began during her tenure as manager of Tjala Arts. If this is true, then O’Meara has been central to the movement as well. (O’Meara has denied the allegations.)

Back in 2003, the celebrated Brisbane-based artist Richard Bell won the prestigious National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Prize with a text painting that read, “Aboriginal Art. It’s a White Thing”. It was a statement of the kind that had been whispered in the art industry for years and was at one level low-hanging fruit. But Bell picked it with characteristic aplomb. The work, titled Bell’s Theorem, is now widely known, but its blunt message – that Aboriginal art in Australia is produced for largely white audiences, and therefore reflects the tastes and cherished cultural myths of those audiences – has somehow passed most of us by. Bearup’s reporting shows that the same authenticity myth that Bell was critiquing prevails today. It would have us believe that Aboriginal art is an untouched expression of ancient tradition that springs unabetted from Country like some life-affirming fountain. Yet although the revelations in The Australian might be jarring, they’re hardly surprising for anyone with more than a glancing interest in the Aboriginal art world.

The trajectory of the art itself says it all: in step with a burgeoning market, the most commercially successful paintings have gotten bigger and often brasher. In recent decades, popular styles have more and more closely echoed Western precedent, consciously or not. Sometimes this can work brilliantly, but other times it simply layers an increasingly derivative approach with a veneer of cultural difference. Take this difference away, and too often all that remains are overtly stage-managed paintings that appear thin, lifeless and manufactured; works, that is, that would struggle to find footing in all but the most second-rate commercial galleries, let alone our major cultural institutions. The video from Amata, which makes the studio appear like a production line, only underscores this perspective.

Community-based art centres such as those in the APYACC might perform various roles, including nurturing the cross-generation passing of traditional knowledge, but it’s always instructive to keep in mind that, as per Bell’s provocation, one of their core remits remains marketing art to white audiences. This art is made in some of Australia’s most disadvantaged communities. The artists are black, but their work is sold by white gallerists to wealthy white collectors and most often comes to grace the walls of white-owned houses in largely white suburbs, many of which constitute the wealthiest enclaves in the country. The resulting money rarely makes a lasting material difference to the lives of the artists themselves, but if they play their cards right, art dealers, collectors and other white intermediaries can reap significant economic benefit. In step, art institutions enjoy benefits of the non-economic variety, among them the appearance of cultural progressiveness.

There are many good stories of this economy being harnessed for community benefit – several key collectors, for instance, have parlayed an interest in Aboriginal art into other kinds of support and patronage, while a number of key Native Title claims have been quickened by community art initiatives. But there is an undeniable starkness to the majority of exchanges that characterise the Aboriginal art market. That this starkness illustrates the structural prevalence of white privilege as clearly as anything is too often ignored by the art world in favour of more palatable narratives of cultural resilience, endurance and symbolic reconciliation. In this, the current stoush over authorship in the APY Lands can’t help but highlight a bracing pragmatism at the heart of the Aboriginal art movement. Artists such as Young too often accept the implicit or explicit edicts of the far-off market through white intermediaries for a simple reason: although they may have significant cultural power, their economic power is limited. Individual artists might receive significant income from their work, but in economically depressed communities such as Amata and its surrounds it must stretch impossibly far. This is how paintings like those from the APY Lands come to be indirectly shaped by the vagaries of white viewers and quickened by their appealing echoes of Western cultural forms. It’s also why they attract supporters such as Quilty, who, one assumes, can recognise their own ideals about painting (and, specifically to Young’s work, painterliness) reflected back at them. The way all this works might sometimes be invisible, but it’s far from magic. It’s simply the relative poles of white privilege and black disadvantage at play. At its best, the Aboriginal art industry has transcended this blunt fact, but at it its worst it has only underscored it.

On this evidence, we can understand that Aboriginal art is not so much a white thing as a cross-cultural thing. This is the “authentic” reality that the current debate has highlighted, and which Bearup’s reporting in The Australian has so far missed. Culture clash is often stark and unsettling, especially to the eyes of those who live a long way from its bleeding edge. Yes, the video shows a particularly egregious example of creative interference, but Aboriginal art is not made in a vacuum: it is ushered forth by many players. This begins in the studio, where art advisers must tread uncertain ground between facilitation and influence. Even if most never pick up a brush, their impact on the resulting work is difficult to downplay. As the late American anthropologist and cultural critic Eric Michaels once pointed out, such impact might come down to as little as a glance, the choice of colour provided in the studio, or even something as seemingly innocuous as a work’s scale, but it’s nonetheless there. Between 2007–09 I worked as an art adviser on the Tiwi Islands, followed by a year-long stint in the East Kimberley. Although I never did anything like what is depicted in the video, I understood how easy it would be to prime the interest of gallerists and collectors by doing something similar. Did I influence the work in less direct ways? Undoubtedly.

Aboriginal art has long been accepted by our major art institutions, where it has rightly been championed as a truly Australian art form. Now, with the NGA review panel set to decide how and where the processes exposed at Tjala Arts have crossed some unspoken line between so-called authentic and inauthentic Aboriginal practice, it stands to be seen if the more difficult cross-cultural aspects of the movement can be accepted too – the aspects, that is, that don’t align with long-held ideals about what Aboriginal art should or shouldn’t be. What if the practices shown in the Amata video are established as par for the course? What if artists are not as enthused by the process of sharing sacred knowledge as white audiences might like to think? What role does coercion – well intentioned or otherwise – play in the translation of Aboriginal thought worlds into fine art?

We may think this is simply a matter for the art world, but these issues cut to the troubled centre of our national identity, to the mess of relations that define Aboriginal and settler Australian interactions. It’s about colonial power as much as anything; about how, even in the most well-intentioned interactions, this power can still reign supreme. The question is what’s at stake if we admit that some of the key paintings of the Aboriginal art movement – not just the recent works from the APY Lands, but others too – may have been touched by a white hand. Is it simply an outmoded colonial myth at risk of being struck down, or something even deeper, and harder to let go?

Native America Calling: Robots help teach STEM and Native languages

Friday, April 21, 2023

Robots help teach STEM and Native languages

Ojibwe inventor Danielle Boyer is on a quest to make technology more accessible to interested Native students.

Boyer has given away some 8,000 robots through her program Every Kid Gets A Robot. She’s also developed a low-cost, wearable robot that helps teach Indigenous languages. She’s among groups of creative, science-savvy Native young people working to make connections between robots and education.

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Guests on Native America Calling

Danielle Boyer (enrolled citizen of the Sault Ste Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians), robotics inventor

Myra Mendez (Mescalero Apache and Gros Ventre), elementary secretary for Mescalero Apache Schools

Nate Raynor, high school science teacher for Mescalero Apache Schools