Princeton University Art Museum Premieres Native America: In Translation

Princeton University Art Museum Premieres Native America: In Translation
Exhibition exploring the relationship between photography and Native representation opens February 5

Princeton, NJ‚—A new exhibition debuting February 5 at the Princeton University Art Museum gathers work by Indigenous artists who consider the complex histories of colonialism, identity, and heritage. The exhibition spans a diverse array of intergenerational practitioners, offering new perspectives by artists who re-imagine what it means to be a citizen in North America today. Native America: In Translation features works by Rebecca Belmore, Jacqueline Cleveland, Martine Gutierrez, Duane Linklater, Guadalupe Maravilla, Kimowan Metchewais, Alan Michelson, Koyoltzintli, and Marianne Nicolson. It will be on view at the Princeton University Art Museum's Art on Hulfish gallery, located in downtown Princeton, from February 5 through April 24, 2022.

Native America: In Translation is curated by Wendy Red Star, a Portland, Oregon—based artist raised on the Apsáalooke (Crow) reservation. The exhibition is organized by Aperture Foundation, New York, and extends Red Star's work as guest editor of the Fall 2020 issue of Aperture magazine [https://aperture.org/events/inside-the-native-america-issue/].

"The Museum's new photo-focused gallery space, Art on Hulfish, is an ideal venue in which to examine how this cohort of both leading and emerging artists traces the complexities of the past and embraces their future," said James Steward, Nancy A. Nasher—David J. Haemisegger, Class of 1976, Director.

In the exhibition, artists from throughout what is now called North America‚—representing various Native nations and affiliations‚—offer diverse visions that build on histories of image-making. This includes Kimowan Metchewais's meditative assemblages and Polariod collages, which pursue a "self-made Native Imagery;" evocative installation works by Alan Michelson that investigate colonial histories; Koyoltzintli's speculative mythologies, which document imperiled Indigenous oral traditions; and Guadalupe Maravilla's fictional and autobiographical narratives. Martine Gutierrez's high-fashion self-portraits present a revolving roster of interchangeable, often Indigenous, identities that ask what makes a "Native-born woman," while Rebecca Belmore's photographs comment on labor and the environment and confront the pain of state violence against Indigenous people. Jacqueline Cleveland recounts foraging as a form of knowledge transmitted through family rituals tied to the seasons of her coastal Alaskan village. Marianne Nicolson's photographs use forms of light to tell stories about community, the impacts of capitalism, and the ongoing tension felt by Indigenous peoples in relation to settler colonialism.

Some of the artists are propelled by what the historian Philip J. Deloria describes as "Indigenous indignation"‚—a demand to reckon with eviction from ancestral lands‚—while others translate varied inflections of gender and language, as well as the impacts of climate change, into inventive performance-based imagery or investigations into personal and public archives.

"The ultimate form of decolonization is through how Native languages form a view of the world," Red Star notes. "These artists provide sharp perceptions, rooted in their own cultures."