On February 12, the Ucross Art Gallery announced the opening of “Celebrating Complexities,” on view from February 12 through May 17.

The exhibition features art by the 2022 and 2023 recipients of the Ucross Fellowship for Native American Visual Artists, including Gerald Clarke (Cahuilla Band of Indians) of Anza, California; Savannah LeCornu (Tsimshian, Haida, and Nez Perce) of Bellingham, Washington; Mikayla Patton (Oglala Lakota Nation) of State College, Pennsylvania; and Cara Romero (Chemehuevi Indian Tribe) of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Cara Romero (Chemehuevi Indian Tribe) Mikayla Patton (Oglala Lakota Nation)

“Celebrating Complexities” showcases the work of the four talented artists who work across many different mediums, including photography, sculpture, painting, drawing, printmaking, beading, quillwork and basketmaking. Hailing from diverse backgrounds, geographies and tribal affiliations, they are at different stages in their careers. Each artist explores and celebrates complex ideas in their work, looking at the specific to elucidate the universal. They emphasize their connections to their families, their ancestors and their communities, presenting an Indigenous worldview that encompasses the past, the present and the future. They are reclaiming materials and techniques, narratives and identities, and their work tells rich contemporary stories about people and cultures that are vital and thriving.

Gerald Clarke (Cahuilla Band) Savannah LeCornu (Tsimshian, Haida, and Nez Perce)

The exhibition is guest curated by Brenda Mallory (Cherokee Nation) of Portland, Oregon, a recipient of the Ucross Fellowship for Native American Visual Artists in 2018, the first year of the program.

“I’m honored to come back now to curate this exhibition of works by these recipients of the Ucross Fellowship for Native American Visual Artists,” Mallory said. “Having the opportunity to study their work closely, to listen to their public talks, to delve deeper into their thinking and motivations has been enriching and gratifying. It makes me appreciate anew what Ucross can provide to Native artists.”

Launched in 2018, the Ucross Fellowship for Native American Visual Artists was designed to support the work of contemporary Native American visual artists at all stages in their professional careers. Each year, two artists are selected and presented with a four-week Ucross residency, which includes uninterrupted time, a private studio, living accommodations, meals prepared by a professional chef, staff support and the unparalleled experience of the majestic High Plains. The fellowship also includes the opportunity to be featured in an exhibition at the Ucross Art Gallery and a $2,000 award.

“I am grateful to Ucross not only for creating the Fellowship for Native American Visual Artists and for the opportunity it affords these artists to advance their themes and careers, but also the opportunity for us, the viewers who see the work, to broaden our own thinking and worldview through their considerations and creations,” Mallory said.

“Celebrating Complexities” is on view at the Ucross Art Gallery, located at 30 Big Red Lane in Clearmont, Wyoming, through May 17. Admission is free. The exhibition is supported in part by a grant from the Wyoming Cultural Trust Fund, a program of the Department of State Parks and Cultural Resources. Additional exhibition support is provided by the Arete Design Group and the Wyoming Arts Council, with support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Wyoming Legislature.

The gallery is open Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. The onsite Ucross Café, which offers coffee, tea and freshly baked pastries by the Ucross artist residency chef, is open Wednesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.

On May 3, Ucross will present an artist talk at Sheridan College’s Kinnison Hall at 11 a.m., as well as an exhibition reception at the Ucross Art Gallery at 6 p.m. Both events will be free and open to the public.

After the exhibition departs the Ucross Art Gallery, “Celebrating Complexities” will travel to the Yellowstone Art Museum in Billings, Montana, where it will be on view from June 21 to October 6, 2024.

For more information, to view the exhibition’s brochure and to register for the May 3 events, visit ucross.org.

Photos courtesy of Ucross.

Ucross Art Gallery has announced the opening of “Celebrating Complexities,” on view from February 12 through May 17.

The exhibition features art by the 2022 and 2023 recipients of the Ucross Fellowship for Native American Visual Artists, including Gerald Clarke (Cahuilla Band of Indians) of Anza, California; Savannah LeCornu (Tsimshian, Haida, and Nez Perce) of Bellingham, Washington; Mikayla Patton (Oglala Lakota Nation) of State College, Pennsylvania; and Cara Romero (Chemehuevi Indian Tribe) of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

“Celebrating Complexities” showcases the work of four talented artists who work across many different mediums, including photography, sculpture, painting, drawing, printmaking, beading, quillwork and basketmaking. Hailing from diverse backgrounds, geographies and tribal affiliations, they are at different stages in their careers. Each artist explores and celebrates complex ideas in their work, looking at the specific to elucidate the universal. They emphasize their connections to their families, their ancestors and their communities, presenting an Indigenous worldview that encompasses the past, the present and the future. They are reclaiming materials and techniques, narratives and identities, and their work tells rich contemporary stories about people and cultures that are vital and thriving.

The exhibition is guest curated by Brenda Mallory (Cherokee Nation) of Portland, Oregon, a recipient of the Ucross Fellowship for Native American Visual Artists in 2018, the first year of the program. 

“I’m honored to come back now to curate this exhibition of works by these recipients of the Ucross Fellowship for Native American Visual Artists,” Mallory said. “Having the opportunity to study their work closely, to listen to their public talks, to delve deeper into their thinking and motivations has been enriching and gratifying. It makes me appreciate anew what Ucross can provide to Native artists.”

Launched in 2018, the Ucross Fellowship for Native American Visual Artists was designed to support the work of contemporary Native American visual artists at all stages in their professional careers. Each year, two artists are selected and presented with a four-week Ucross residency, which includes uninterrupted time, a private studio, living accommodations, meals prepared by a professional chef, staff support and the unparalleled experience of the majestic High Plains. The fellowship also includes the opportunity to be featured in an exhibition at the Ucross Art Gallery and a $2,000 award.

“I am grateful to Ucross not only for creating the Fellowship for Native American Visual Artists and for the opportunity it affords these artists to advance their themes and careers, but also the opportunity for us, the viewers who see the work, to broaden our own thinking and worldview through their considerations and creations,” Mallory said.

“Celebrating Complexities” is on view at the Ucross Art Gallery, located at 30 Big Red Lane in Clearmont, Wyoming, through May 17. Admission is free. The exhibition is supported in part by a grant from the Wyoming Cultural Trust Fund, a program of the Department of State Parks and Cultural Resources. Additional exhibition support is provided by the Arete Design Group and the Wyoming Arts Council, with support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Wyoming Legislature.

The gallery is open Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. The onsite Ucross Café, which offers coffee, tea and freshly baked pastries by the Ucross artist residency chef, is open Wednesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. 

On May 3, Ucross will present an artist talk at Sheridan College‘s Kinnison Hall at 11 a.m., as well as an exhibition reception at the Ucross Art Gallery at 6 p.m. Both events will be free and open to the public.

After the exhibition departs the Ucross Art Gallery, “Celebrating Complexities” will travel to the Yellowstone Art Museum in Billings, Montana, where it will be on view from June 21 to October 6, 2024.

For more information, to view the exhibition’s brochure and to register for the May 3 events, visit ucross.org.

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Several years ago, painter and ledger artist Chris Pappan created a groundbreaking exhibition in the outdated, problematic Native North America Hall at the Field Museum.

Pappan replicated his work on decals, which he placed directly on the glass of the old exhibit cases of mannequins wearing headdresses and moccasins.

Visitors were forced to confront contemporary Native artwork before they could engage the items of the past. Still, not everyone received the message.

“I heard a woman say to a child, ‘Everyone in these cases is dead,’ right in front of me,” said Pappan, 52, of Albany Park, who is of Kanza, Osage and Lakota heritage. “I’m not the only one who’s had that experience here. There are other Native artists that have been told to their faces, ‘I thought all Natives were extinct.’ ”

Today, Pappan is still working to provide that visibility in Chicago, which boasts a population of more than 215,000 Native Americans representing over 140 tribal nations, according to the American Indian Center. In September, he and his wife, Debra Yepa-Pappan, along with other Native artists Monica Rickert-Bolter and Andrea Carlson, opened the Center for Native Futures, located at 56 W. Adams St. in the Marquette Building in the Loop.

Citing limited opportunities for artists and problematic treatment of Native art and items at Chicago museums, the founders have created one of the only Native-owned contemporary art galleries in Chicago. The space embraces the concept of Indigenous futurism, which they say paints a more complete picture of Native Americans by not only considering their past, but placing them in the present and future.

As they gradually build a hub for both local and national Native artists, Chicago area institutions such as the Field Museum, Mitchell Museum of the American Indian and others are attempting to take corrective actions — returning sacred Native items and showcasing contemporary Native works in partnership with Native communities.

“Having the Center for Native Futures is basically proof of our existence,” Pappan said.

Chicago museums are rethinking their collections

In recent years, Chicago museums have been taking steps to re-evaluate their collections of Native art and items.

Following Pappan’s “Drawing on Tradition” exhibition, the Field Museum de-installed the Native North America Hall and replaced it with “Native Truths: Our Voices, Our Stories,” a permanent exhibition of contemporary Native art created with input from Native people representing over 100 tribes.

However, the museum has long faced criticism for its Ancient Americas hall, which features tools, pottery and other sacred Native American items. In January, the museum, along with others across the country, covered a bulk of its display cases of items from the present-day United States following updates to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). Passed in 1990, the law “addresses the repatriation and disposition of Native American human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony,” according to the National Park Service.

The act now requires that museums obtain consent from tribes, descendants or other Native groups before exhibiting human remains or cultural items.

The Field Museum will consult with Native communities to re-curate the exhibition, according to Jaap Hoogstraten, head of exhibitions. Although not required to do so under NAGPRA, the Field Museum said it will also evaluate items from present-day Canada in its Northwest Coast Collections.

“We are committed, based on our work with ‘Native Truths,’ to not talk on behalf of people that are not in the room, whether it’s the display of items, but also the stories that the items tell,” Hoogstraten said. “The most important thing is that there is an attitudinal shift in how we think about this in terms of priority. And that will have an impact long-term.”

Debra Yepa-Pappan, former Field Museum community engagement coordinator who worked on “Native Truths,” said she thinks the institution should shut down both its Ancient Americas hall and Northwest Coast Collections area altogether.

“I’m glad they finally made this move,” said Yepa-Pappan, 52, who is of Jemez Pueblo and Korean heritage, “but at the same time, I’m disappointed that it had to take a change in the law to help move them in this direction, because they had so many opportunities to remove items or cover up cases, or really just close down those halls.”

Yepa-Pappan directly references ancestral pottery in the Field Museum in her artwork for “Native Futures,” the inaugural exhibition at the Center for Native Futures.

Titled “Ancestors Speak,” the piece depicts the pottery through digital images on antique ledger paper, copper leaf and birch panels.

“This piece is my attempt to rescue them, to rescue my ancestors, to free their spirits, and to share their visual language so we may hear them speak once again,” Yepa-Pappan says in her artist statement.

Native artists in Chicago feel overlooked

Like the Field Museum, the Mitchell Museum of the American Indian in Evanston has taken steps to remove and return cultural items and focus on contemporary Native art and stories, including its current exhibition, “No Rest: The Epidemic of Stolen Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirits.”

Named for a non-Native couple who donated their personal collection, the museum is undergoing a rebranding.

“The most important thing for me and our staff and our board is that whoever visits gets to know Native people who are here today,” said Kim Vigue, the museum’s first permanent Native executive director, who is of Menominee and Oneida heritage.

Chicago art museums have also faced criticism from artists who want to see more local contemporary Native art on their walls and relationships with Native communities that go beyond land acknowledgments on their websites. 

“We’re tired of waiting around,” Yepa-Pappan said. “They’re completely overlooking the folks that are right in their front yard.”

Over the past five years, the Art Institute of Chicago has featured more than two dozen works by contemporary Native artists in its galleries and permanent collection, and hosted talks with Native artists, according to Andrew Hamilton, associate curator of “Arts of the Americas.”

“The Art Institute of Chicago is deeply committed to exhibiting works by Indigenous artists and highlighting more work from these communities,” Hamilton said in an e-mail to the Sun-Times. “We demonstrate this commitment through our redeveloped department structure, by expanding the works in our galleries and in our collection, and by elevating these voices through public programming.”

The museum said it has recently worked to recognize Native artists from the Great Lakes region and aims “to feature more works by artists from communities with ties to the Chicago area, recognizing that historical displacements mean these artists may now reside in places like Nebraska, Kansas, or Oklahoma.”

Chris Pappan and Debra Yepa-Pappan were invited to present their artwork in the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago’s “The Long Dream” exhibition during the pandemic. And last year, the museum featured an exhibition by Native artist Duane Linklater, of Ontario, whose work interrogated museums’ “historical exclusion of Indigenous content.”

MCA did not immediately respond to the Sun-Times’ requests for further information about the museum’s engagement with Native artists. 

Where to find contemporary Native art

Prior to the opening of the Center for Native Futures, there were other spaces in the city dedicated to Native contemporary art. Operating from the 1970s through the 2000s in various locations in Chicago, the Jan Cicero Gallery notably featured Native artists — but it was not Native-owned.

In 2005, Dave Spencer helped open the Trickster Cultural Center in Schaumburg, a Native-owned organization that currently highlights contemporary Native art.

Now the interim executive director of the American Indian Center, Spencer has been operating a gallery featuring contemporary and traditional art in the center’s space since 2018.

But while the Center for Native Futures highlights more experienced visual artists, the AIC Gallery mentors Native artists in the community, encouraging them to showcase their work for the first time.

“The Center for Native Futures is a great balance to what we’re doing here,” said Spencer, 55, of Aurora, who is of Mississippi Chata and Diné heritage.

“They’re giving the huge opportunity of being in downtown Chicago to Native artists across the country. … To have another space dedicated 100% to Native voice, I can only applaud that. We need more.”

Over the next year, there will be opportunities to see contemporary Native art in exhibitions at the Schingoethe Center of Aurora University, Northwestern University’s Block Museum, Newberry Library and the National Public Housing Museum. 

Many of these efforts are being financially supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art, which also donated a total of $325,000 in seed funding and other grants to the Center for Native Futures.

The new gallery serves as a powerful counter-narrative even in its own location in the Marquette Building, which features a Louis Comfort Tiffany mural in the lobby that incorrectly depicts the Native Americans encountered by European explorer Jacques Marquette. The building is owned by the MacArthur Foundation, which has been supportive of the Center for Native Futures and is even developing an “intervention” exhibition in response to the mural with Yepa-Pappan, Pappan and others.

People who are used to seeing such depictions of Native Americans are surprised when they enter the Center for Native Futures, said co-founder Monica Rickert-Bolter.

“The artistic world doesn’t see what a lot of contemporary Native art can be,” said Monica Rickert-Bolter, 37, of Chicago’s Little India neighborhood, who is of Potawatomi and Black heritage.

“The way people are using old techniques and then creating these new works is just blowing my mind. … And we want to make sure that they have a place here.”

“African art.”

American audiences for generations have been conditioned to connect that phrase with items like wood carvings, masks, and shields. The “African art” galleries at most museums are full of those objects.

While creatively inventive and remarkable, restricting representations of African art to the customary subconsciously creates an inaccurate perception of all African art as “primitive.” Of the past. Unevolved. Not connected to Modernism or progressive trends and thinking.

By extension, audiences are left assuming–inaccurately–the people who created those items similarly belong to the past.

The same trick has been played with Native American art where moccasins, buffalo robes or baskets made 200 years ago remain more commonplace in museums than paintings, sculptures, or photography from the last 20 years by Indigenous artists.

It’s almost as if American museums and the directors, boards and curators who dictate what’s on display inside of them want American museum audiences thinking of African and Indigenous people as equally unevolved and locked in the past as their ancestral artwork on view. They did.

Marble walls are no safeguard against racism and colonialism.

Truth is, African and Native American artists have a deeper engagement with what the West considers “Modern” art than most museum goers–and many museum officials–have any idea of. “African Modernism in America, 1947-67,” the first major traveling exhibition to examine the connections between modern African artists and American patrons, artists, and cultural organizations, reveals the transcontinental networks that challenged academic assumptions about African art in the United States and there by encouraged American engagement with African artists as contemporaries.

What were those “academic assumptions?”

They were exemplified by the Museum of Primitive Art co-founded in 1954 by the director of the Museum of Modern Art, Renée d’Harnoncourt. It opened to the public in New York in 1957.

“That institution, whose collection forms the foundation of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s African art collection, promoted the understanding of African art as ‘primitive’ and denied the value and contributions of contemporary artists from Africa who studied for advanced degrees in fine arts at universities in Europe, the United States, and across Africa in the mid-20th century,” Perrin Lathrop, Assistant Curator of African Art at the Princeton Art Museum and “African Modernism in America” co-curator, told Forbes.com. “This exhibition reinforces the importance and widespread impact of the paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, and ceramics by these artists.”

Modern art as advanced and forward thinking as anything coming out of Paris or New York at the time.

The Museum of Primitive Art closed in 1974, but its impact and that of all the textbooks and museum collections which adhere to its biased perspective linger.

“There is a growing international awareness of the work of modern and contemporary artists from Africa, but many U.S. audiences still carry assumptions about African art,” Lathrop said. “They expect to see the traditions-based artworks, including carved masks and figures, that entered European collections in the late 19th and early 20th centuries through colonial networks and exploitation. I think the work on view in ‘African Modernism in America’ has been revelatory to visitors unfamiliar with the breadth of African art history in the 20th century.”

The Harmon Foundation

Ranging from paintings and sculptures to works on paper, artworks exhibited in “African Modernism in America, 1947-67,” exemplify the experimentation and diverse artistic practices that emerged in Africa from the 1940s through the 1960s. The presentation draws primarily from Fisk University’s remarkable collection of gifts from the Harmon Foundation, an American organization devoted to the cross-continental support and promotion of African and African American artists.

Ohio real estate baron William Elmer Harmon established his charitable foundation in 1922. While serving a broad range of philanthropic endeavors, the Harmon Foundation became best known for its support of African American creatives, particularly artists of the Harlem Renaissance.

A wealthy white businessman financially investing in Black artists was radical to the point of stupefying in the 1920s, 30s and 40s. Harmon’s support extended to African artists, a vision that would take many American arts institutions another half century to catch up with; some still haven’t.

“The exhibition dates of 1947 to 1967 relate to the Harmon Foundation’s decades of support for the visibility of African artists in the United States in the post-World War II era,” Lathrop explained. “In 1947, the Nigerian artist Akinola Lasekan became the first African artist to contact the Harmon Foundation, spurring a two-decade period during which the Foundation researched contemporary artistic networks in Africa and exhibited the work of African artists.”

The zenith came in 1961 with the Harmon Foundation organizing its landmark exhibition “Art from Africa of Our Time.” That same year, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, exhibited its first acquisition of contemporary African art, Men Taking Banana Beer to Bride by Night (1956) by Sam Joseph Ntiro (Tanzania). Extraordinarily, that painting can be seen in “African Modernism in America, 1947-67.”

These efforts began introducing American audiences to modern African artists, defying preconceived Western narratives that diminished African art as “primitive.”

“The simultaneity of the Harmon Foundation show and the MoMA purchase was crucially important, drawing attention to African artists’ modernity in the U.S.,” Lathrop said. “Owing to the leading role of the Harmon Foundation, (Historically Black Colleges and Universities), and other cultural organizations in supporting these artists in the U.S., the postwar period is one of the first times there is a concentrated opportunity for them to share the same physical space and collaborate together and alongside Black American artists.”

Connections

Africans and African Americans had a great deal in common during this era. African nations were attempting to break the chains of European colonialism while African Americans were seeking to do the same with Jim Crow segregation.

“Artists discussed this political context when they came together,” Lathrop said. “Jacob Lawrence, for example, exhibited selections from his ‘War Series’ in Lagos and Ibadan, Nigeria in 1962, which explores Lawrence’s experiences of racial segregation while serving in the U.S. Coast Guard in World War II. Articles in the Nigerian press at the time commented about the ways that this theme resonated with Nigerian audiences who, as colonial subjects, were asked to fight in wars for nations that did not fully acknowledge their humanity or citizenship.”

As evidenced by Lawrence, new technologies, notably jet airplanes, allowed for artists in Africa and America to connect regularly in person in ways unimaginable a generation earlier.

“There was a lot of trans-Atlantic travel at this time,” Lathrop said. “Artists supported by governmental agencies and foundations with diplomatic intentions funded artists from Africa to travel to and study in the United States, including Ibrahim El-Salahi, Skunder Boghossian, and Jean Nakadulu Luvwezo. Artists from the U.S., including John Biggers, Jacob Lawrence, and Elton Fax traveled to the African continent, exhibited their art in new independence era art spaces, and created new bodies of work in response to their experiences and the people they met.”

Introductions made, connections formed, formal and impromptu artistic collaborations blossomed. American David Driskell and South African Peter Clarke developed a years-long friendship resulting in exhibitions of Clarke’s work and an artist residency at Fisk University in Nashville.

Nearly 80 dynamic and vivid works of art created in Africa during the 1950s and ’60s are on view in the show. They are anything, but primitive.

In helping change how Americans looked at African art, they encouraged Americans to change how they looked at African people.

Having previously been on view at Fisk University, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis, and The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. last year, “African Modernism in America” wraps up at the Taft Museum of Art in Cincinnati February 10 through May 19, 2024.

The Harmon Foundation closed in 1967. Fittingly, its collection of artworks by African artists were gifted to a pair of historically Black institutions: Hampton University in Virginia and Fisk University.

Arizona Indian Festival showcases authentic Indigenous art

Steve LaRance shows a piece of jewelry he created in a photo taken on Feb. 3, 2024.

Steve LaRance, right, talks to Arizona Indian Festival visitor Graham Chapman on Feb. 3, 2024. (Photos by Marnie Jordan/Cronkite News)

Left: Steve LaRance shows a piece of jewelry he created in a photo taken on Feb. 3, 2024.
Right: Steve LaRance, right, talks to Arizona Indian Festival visitor Graham Chapman on Feb. 3, 2024. (Photos by Marnie Jordan/Cronkite News)

Rings created by silversmith Steve LaRance on display at the Arizona Indian Festival on Feb. 3, 2024. (Photo by Marnie Jordan/Cronkite News)

Tonya June Rafael shows off jewelry she made at the Arizona Indian Festival in a photograph taken on Feb. 4, 2024. (Photo by Marnie Jordan/Cronkite News)

At the Arizona Indian Festival, Sonja Morgan demonstrates her process of rug weaving to spectators on Feb. 3, 2024. (Photo by Marnie Jordan/Cronkite News)

Rug weaver Sonja Morgan answers questions about her craft on Feb. 3, 2024, at the Arizona Indian Festival. (Photo by Marnie Jordan/Cronkite News)

Navajo silversmith McHale Alcott displays his work at the Arizona Indian Festival on Feb. 4, 2024.

Navajo artist Johnson Yazzie paints at the Arizona Indian Festival on Feb. 3, 2024. (Photos by Marnie Jordan/Cronkite News)

Left: Navajo silversmith McHale Alcott displays his work at the Arizona Indian Festival on Feb. 4, 2024.
Right: Navajo artist Johnson Yazzie paints at the Arizona Indian Festival on Feb. 3, 2024. (Photos by Marnie Jordan/Cronkite News)

Marnie Jordan

News Visual Journalist, Phoenix

Marnie Jordan expects to graduate in December 2024 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism and mass communication and a minor in criminology and criminal justice. Jordan was a public relations intern at Neurodiversity Education Research Center for two semesters.