Exhibition Dates:
|
December 3, 2018–May 13, 2019 |
| Exhibition Location: |
The Met Fifth Avenue, Henry R. Luce
Center for the Study of American Art, Mezzanine,
Gallery 773 |
Opening December 3 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Artistic Encounters with Indigenous America explores how European and American artists represented Indigenous North Americans in drawings, prints, watercolors, photographs, and popular ephemera (including advertising posters and trading cards) from the 17th to the early 20th century. Through 45 examples—all from The Met collection—the exhibition will examine the evolution of this complex imagery over time, highlighting the ways in which it contributed to the creation and dissemination of myths and misconceptions about Native peoples, often justifying their dispossession, cultural destruction, and genocide. From formulaic depictions of so-called savage warriors and Indian princesses to romanticized representations of a “vanishing race,” these works reveal the pervasive influence of Indigenous America on the Euro-American imagination.
Organized chronologically, the exhibition opens with The Discovery of America, an engraving from around 1600 by the Flemish-born, Florence-based artist Jan van der Straet. Although Van der Straet never traveled to the “New World,” his iconic depiction of America—a nearly nude female figure wearing a feathered cap and reclining in a landscape—had a lasting impact on Euro-American representations of Indigenous peoples. Widely adopted by European artists in the Age of Discovery, such visual conventions were later embraced by both American- and foreign-born artists working in the United States in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Also featured will be portraits—including watercolors of Osage warriors by Charles Balthazar Julien Févret de Saint-Mémin and Pavel Petrovich Svinin—as well as narrative scenes and landscapes by Emanuel Leutze, Thomas Cole, and Henry Kirke Brown, among others.
With the advent of photography in 1839, studio portraits of tribal leaders and official Native American delegations became popular. Several such works will be featured, including one of the earliest photographs of a Native American—an 1845 salted paper print of Reverend Peter Jones (Anishinaabe/Ojibwe) by Scottish photographers David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson. Photographs by Charles Milton Bell, including a studio portrait of Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt (Nimiipuu/Nez Perce), widely known as Chief Joseph, will be displayed along with the collectibles his portraits inspired, such as cabinet cards and trading cards promoting the sale of tobacco and cigarettes. Offering an important counter-narrative to the Euro-American representations of the period, a selection of ledger drawings produced by Plains Indian artists in the late 19th century will also be on view.
The final section of the exhibition is devoted to early 20th-century works on paper by artists working in the Southwest, notably Gene Kloss, John Marin, and John Sloan, who depicted Pueblo peoples in the experimental new styles of American modernism.
The exhibition is organized by Shannon Vittoria, Research Associate in The American Wing. To provide additional insight and context, contemporary artist Wendy Red Star (Apsáalooke/Crow) will contribute interpretive labels for several of the works on display.
The exhibition will be featured on The Met website, as well as on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
The exhibition complements Art of Native America: The Charles and Valerie Diker Collection on view in the American Wing’s Erving and Joyce Wolf Gallery, Gallery 746 (October 4, 2018–October 6, 2019).
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November 27, 2018
Image: Charles Balthazar Julien Févret de Saint-Mémin, 1770–1852. Osage Warrior, 1805–7. Watercolor and graphite on off-white wove paper. The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1954 (54.82)
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