Indigenous arts of North America are expressions of deep cultural traditions as diverse as the lands with which they are inextricably linked. Here are five key texts that survey the subject.
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Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists
There are many important surveys of Native North American art, often organized geographically, and typically emphasizing historic art and material culture. But Hearts of Our People, the catalog for a resplendent exhibition organized by the Minneapolis Institute of Art in 2019, is a key introduction that emphasizes the contributions of women to Native art across time. It surveys more than 115 artists from the United States and Canada over the span of a millennium, demonstrating women’s creative triumphs across medium, time, and place. Richly illustrated and featuring essays by leading artists and scholars (including Teri Greeves, heather ahtone, and Jolene Rickard), this is the definitive survey that turns the former patriarchal bias of Indigenous art history on its head.
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Where the Power Is: Indigenous Perspectives on Northwest Coast Art
Art from the Northwest Coast has elicited a dense array of literature owing to its extensive study, collection, and categorization by anthropologists, as well as long-held aesthetic interest among the historic Euro-American avant-garde. Rather than leaning on appreciation from the outside, Where the Power Is centers Indigenous voices and knowledge-keepers on such subjects as hereditary art imbued with ancestral narratives, traditional ecological knowledge, and land claims. Edited by curators in collaboration with the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, one of the world’s preeminent collections of Northwest Coast art, this richly illustrated 2022 volume offers deep insights and opens doors to ways of thinking about material culture that go beyond the visual to break down divisions between art and artifact.
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Art for a New Understanding: Native Voices, 1950s to Now
The 20th century of Native American art is defined by its becoming modern—or, rather, by its recognition as such among critics and scholars who, until the end of the century, largely relegated it to the realm of ethnography. This catalog for an impressive 2018 exhibition at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art surveys artists who made use of modernist idioms and postmodernist techniques to translate their cultural heritage within the language of international art. These artists (including George Morrison, T.C. Cannon, and Kay WalkingStick) sought outlets for individual expression beyond stereotype and outsider expectations, from reconfigurations of midcentury abstraction and the ’60s-era founding of the Institute of American Indian Arts to the emergence of the contemporary Indigenous art scene in the ’80s and ’90s.
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Land, Spirit, Power: First Nations at the National Gallery of Canada
In 1992 Indigenous scholars, artists, and activists who sought to counter the colonial narrative of Christopher Columbus’s purported discovery of America challenged celebrations of the 500th anniversary of his 1492 arrival there. The show that prompted this catalog overlapped with the closely related exhibition “Indigena” (put on by the Canadian Museum of Civilization, now the Canadian Museum of History) and marked a definitive shift in which Indigenous artists not only shook their prior relegation to the past but definitively claimed a place in the halls of the art museum. The show’s survey of the strident politics of land claims, the blurring of boundaries between modern and traditional forms, and the assertion of counternarratives to dominant colonial histories set the stage for the next 30 years of contemporary Indigenous art.
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An Indigenous Present
Choctaw/Cherokee artist Jeffrey Gibson will be the first Indigenous artist to represent the United States with an exhibition at the next Venice Biennale. His new contribution to the literature brings together an expansive selection of contemporary artists linked not by medium or style but by the insistent centrality of indigeneity to their work. Beautifully designed by Sébastien Aubin (Opaskwayak Cree) of Montreal-based studio Otami, the book focuses on the US, and overlooks much of an older generation of stillworking artists. Nonetheless, it is the best survey out there of Indigenous art happening today.
