Hartman, whose parents were collectors of Native American art, had shepherded the acquisition of about 350 major contemporary works by Indigenous artists when he was at the museum, recognizing an opportunity to create a diverse collection when the institution was conceived in 2003 on the campus of Johnson County Community College. It was a visit to the collection a few years ago by Scott Nussbaum, Phillips deputy chairman, Americas, that sparked the idea of bringing this art, many by artists unknown to the wider market, to Phillips. 

The exhibition, “New Terrains”—which runs through Jan. 23—offers a wide-ranging creative response by Indigenous artists to the modernism, post-war, and pop artistic movements of their eras as seen through their own social and political experience. Hartman brought on two more curators, the Dine artist Tony Abeyta and James Trotta-Bono, a gallerist in Los Angeles whose parents were longtime Native American art dealers, to assist.

“We all started contacting sources, and I have to say it’s kind of miraculous that we were able to pull together such extraordinary pieces for this show with the majority of them being available,” Hartman says. 

The aim of the exhibition was to include tribes from across the U.S. and into Canada, and to be as inclusive as possible. “We looked at gender, we looked at tribal affiliations, we looked at modes of expression,” he says. 

The artists range from well-known practitioners who have been the subject of museum shows, such as Jaune Quick-to-See Smith—a citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation—and Fritz Scholder of the Luiseño, in addition to lesser-known artists.

Calvin Toney, is a Navajo artist born in 1987 in Fort Defiance, Ariz., who was trained in weaving by his mother and grandmother on the Navajo reservation, but whose works reflect artistic influences from the Italian Renaissance to Jean-Michel Basquiat. Two “extraordinary textiles” by Toney are included in the exhibition, Hartman says.

“We wanted to say, if weaving is a primary means of artistic expression for the Navajo, then we must include weaving. We must include silversmithing. You’ll see some gorgeous pieces of jewelry; it’ll be a treat for people coming through that are so used to the kind of the usual contemporary expressions to suddenly walk into a space and, ‘oh, my God here are these extraordinary bracelets!’ he says. 

Scholder, who died in 2005, long ago broke the boundaries of what was perceived as Native American art with a series of paintings created from 1970-80 that he referred to as “Monster Indians,” Hartman says. 

These huge, extraordinary paintings revealed a more honest, painful picture of the Indigenous experience than the “movie stereotypes and romanticized versions” prevalent in the middle of the 20th century. “He was fearless,” Hartman says. “A lot of the depictions are verging on the grotesque.” 

The exhibition includes the artist’s 7-foot-tall, soulful, Sitting Indian, 1972, from this period. 

Also included is a color-field abstraction, Summer Spectrum II, 1958, by the late George Morrison, an Ojibwe who was a contemporary and friend of Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Jackson Pollock, among other artists, whose work was shown regularly at the time but was largely ignored after he returned to Minneapolis, Minn., to work, Hartman says. 

One reason for beginning the exhibition with works from 1950 was “because we wanted to show that there were these early practitioners … groundbreaking Native American artists who were working within these genres and these styles that we only know of Anglo artists working within,” Hartman says. 

Smith is an artist whose works—which regularly appear at auction—directly respond to Western contemporary art movements and individual artists, such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. They reflect her stated belief that her “life’s work involves examining contemporary life in America and interpreting it through Native ideology,” according to the Whitney Museum of American Art, which held a retrospective of Smith’s work from April 19 to Aug. 13 last year. 

Smith’s My Heart Belongs to Daddy, 1968, is included in the show. 

Another significant work is Death of Adonis, 2010, by Kent Monkman, a Canadian Cree—a monumental painting that shows his gender-fluid alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, cradling a white cowboy who is dying amid what appears to be a battle in a dramatic Western landscape. The 6 by 10 foot painting evokes Albert Bierstadt’s The Last of the Buffalo in a painting of the same size that “sexualizes, decolonizes, and Indigenizes Bierstadt’s iconic depiction,” Phillips said in a news release. 

Museums and private foundations across the country have already expressed interest in acquiring many of the works, which range in price from about US$8,000 to close to US$1 million, Nussbaum says. 

“It’s apparent that some of these great works are going to end up on public view and that’s truly exciting,” Hartman says. “And it extends across the United States—it’s not as if it’s just a localized type of interest. … Tony, James, and I take a lot of pride in the fact that we were able to bring extraordinary pieces out of the woodwork, so to speak, and look at what the response is already.”