Introduction
An Indigenous Present includes fifteen artists who pursue abstraction as a tool for liberated expression. The works on view show that abstraction can hold and convey a range of forms and material possibilities, as well as signify personal and collective narratives, symbolize specific and imagined places, and embody cultural and aesthetic traditions. Through subject, process, and material, the included artworks complicate and destabilize preconceptions of what art by Indigenous and Native American artists is made with, looks like, and sounds like.
This exhibition emerges from the 2023 publication An Indigenous Present, which surveyed the contemporary arts across a diverse field of Native North American makers. We consider this exhibition a chapter in the project that is An Indigenous Present—hence our repetition of the title—one in which we envision the ways abstraction can dissolve the hierarchies and categories that confine making, seeing, and thinking. Cocurated by an artist and a curator, this exhibition is both an art historical inquiry and subjective exploration of the ongoing legacy of abstraction among a continuum of elders and emerging makers.
—Jeffrey Gibson and Jenelle Porter
Section 1
The subject is the land, the earthscape, but [these are] not pictures of a place.
—Kay WalkingStick
Ground is the term for a surface that has been prepared for painting. Put another way, a ground is a receiving surface, a place for making. A ground is a timekeeper, recording actions that have taken place on its surface. Ground is also land, and we conflate the two in order to complicate conceptions of land as both generative subject and visual motif. The works in this gallery express the ways artists use abstraction to picture sense memories, places, and histories. Abstraction is used as an infinitely flexible tool to obscure, to symbolize and signify, and to depict ephemeral conditions.
Section 2
These are not storytelling paintings, these are abstractions, but they do tell a story in a way, and they tell an emotive story. When you move past them, you are encouraged to look at them and stand back and move.
—Kay WalkingStick
The artworks in this gallery explore abstraction’s capacity to convey expansive concepts through minimal means. Artistic choices tend toward reduction of color and motif, and the repetition of identical or similar elements. Hand-scaled, handmade elements are massed in serial arrangements in order to assert space and to show the ways an idea or object, repeated, accumulates meaning and visual impact. Arranged in rows, individual elements take on the shape of time—the time required of making and of viewing. Shapes become patterns and cohere into networks, like an idea diagrammed on the wall or a story to be read. Parts are inextricable from the whole, an association we interpret as the expression of individuality within community, and of material considerations within structures of cultural knowledge.
Section 3
The musical parameter that is most important to me is counterpoint. . . . I am speaking about the contrary motion of navigating a world that assumes where you are going because of where you came from.
—Raven Chacon
Counterpoint is a composition of two or more musical lines (or voices) that are both harmonically interdependent and distinct in melody and rhythm. Think of counterpoint as both contrast and alignment, similarity and difference. The theory of counterpoint conducts an exchange among the works in this gallery. Sound is made and alluded to. Artworks reference stories, prayers, and song, evoking the sounds these modes of communication require or generate. Other works portray composers, compositions, and sound patterns. Across these galleries, sound is an abstraction that flows through shape, line, and pattern.
Section 4
I want to represent this image as a cultural document laden with specific, but not so obvious, meanings. I call these hidden meanings “live relics.” They are relics because they are like trace elements from memory, history, and culture. They are alive because they continue to transmit influence to this day. It is not easy to see live relics because they seem to exist outside the scope of awareness, especially those live relics that refer to culture.
The world is rich with live relics. I encourage you to seek them out for yourself. You can find them in your own surroundings, your everyday life. Look for ancient mechanisms that persist within your personal environment and society at large. Notice how the past shapes the present and ask to what end. Resist obvious descriptions and repeated reasoning. This is how you find live relics.
—Kimowan Metchewais
The works in this gallery persist as live relics. Using a range of formal techniques and media, artists shape one thing/idea/image into another—a canvas into a hide, yarn into a topographic image, blackberries into ink. Labored surfaces obscure shapes and images, scale equalizes object and space, and a reduced palette is used to compress space and obscure subjectivity. We see live-ness as a mechanism collapsing distinctions among concept and material, figure and ground, narrative and abstraction.
Section 5
Large organic shapes of canvas became my abstract paintings, made with oil paint, charcoal, wax, and smoke. Digging a pit in my backyard for burning cottonwood root, allowing it to smolder, then rolling the canvas to enclose the smoke created a work pattern, a sense of woman’s work. I sought that physical connection from my traditional past to my contemporary present.
—Jaune Quick-to-See Smith
Artists think through, and with, materials. In this gallery, we see artists coaxing materials into concepts and translating concepts into objects using processes that draw from personal and cultural knowledge. We call this “material thinking,” a convergence of idea and medium that courses through abstraction. What do the materials do and what do they signify? Both found and sourced materials arrive preloaded with meaning and association, which artists exploit and bend to their will in various work patterns, to borrow Smith’s expression. If materials are transmitters, then the juxtaposition of materials (for example, organic and inorganic), multiplies the transmission. AstroTurf, synthetic elk teeth, canvas, paint, plaster body casts, rendered bear fat, and IKEA tabletops engender associations that align in an artist’s attentiveness to material thinking as an engine of abstraction.
