Hearts of our People (Native Women Artists)

Hearts of our People (Native Women Artists) is well-meaning and very extensive exhibit at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.  Moving at a reasonable pace, the show requires about 50 minutes to see -- it would be possible to linger much longer if the viewer were so inclined.  The exhibition is politically correct in all respects and, indeed, checks all of the ideological boxes now in vogue -- there is even some beadwork done by an intersex or transgender native person.  Ash-tray like receptacles have been built into the corners of some of the rooms so that viewers (if Native American) can leave small offerings to honor the art presented.  (I don't know if White people are authorized to leave tokens of their admiration in those corner-pocket receptacles; I suspect this would be viewed with disfavor as some kind of cultural appropriation and bad karma to boot.  Based on my observations, most of the offerings seemed to be ticket stubs, quarters, and bus passes.)  The show is free to Native Americans -- exactly how one would prove this status is unclear to me.  I assume that enrolled members of tribes would pass muster.  The labels are presented both in English and Native languages, mostly Dine as far as I could see, although there are labels in Lakota and Pueblo languages as well.

The art on display consists of a variety of modern work, mostly uninteresting identity politics installations and some fascinating traditional artifacts.  Handsome ceramics made during the last century or produced for the Southwestern tourist trade are on exhibit as well as very intricate ceremonial garments, cradle-boards, and beadwork pouches and purses.  I've never had much interest in fashion or clothing and so the beauty of these garments is probably wasted on me.  I can see, however, that many of the garments and other textile artifacts display fantastic levels of craft and are never less that extraordinarily handsome.  Wall placards inscribed with poems, including work by Louise Erdreich appear at intervals and speakers broadcast recitation of some of this verse to the gallery-goers.  The modern stuff is largely forgettable.  However, there are a couple of notable exceptions.  Some elegant and simple fabric shrouds, cut to resemble abstract hoods, represent native dancers -- as you pass by these delicate objects, your body displaces air and causes them to nod and beckon to you.  A number of molds of phallic-looking antlers are suspended from a ceiling -- a strange, organic installation that looks a bit like the minimalist work of Eva Hesse and has a curiously haunting aspect.  There is a rabble-rousing but brilliantly executed meditation on canvas about the imbroglio that occurred when the Walker Art Center commissioned an artist to build a scaffold that turned-out to be based -- at least in part -- on the hanging platform on which 38 Dakota warriors died in December 1862.  The painting shows the scaffold as a small skeletal structure surveyed by a white girl who is also extending her tongue to lick the iconic Claes Oldenberg cherry on the spoon in the  WAC sculpture garden.  Next to the white girl sprawled across the canvas, there is a sinister-looking but elegant coyote, darting to the side of the painting with what looks like a bird crushed in the beast's jaws.  The image is supposed to be a political allegory about the insensitivity of the WAC to Native American concerns but, like many allegories, the image has a surrealist charge and is exquisitely rendered.  The artifacts made with natural pigments have a refined and graceful quality that the modern stuff, the product of a more agitated age, doesn't possess.  Do we really need to see an enclosure shaped like a wigwam with a target (actually it looks like the view through a rifle sight) next to a machine gun with bullets installed, after the manner of Damien Hirst, in a sort of sparkling aquarium?  The installation merely states the obvious and, although the machine gun has a malicious sort of glamor, there's not much that a work of this sort can tell us.  Similarly obvious is a knee-high heap of broken china, made apparently with buffalo bone, displayed behind a barricade, with video images of bison snorting and stamping -- the china is pretty enough and, even, fractured has a kind of Victorian charisma: the point about the death of the bison to make the china seems confused to me and hectoring. 

The exhibition is pricy -- it costs 20 bucks to enter.  I won't say that the show is over-priced:  it is, after all, very large occupying, I think, four big, dimly lit galleries.  The show wasn't to my taste, even though I enjoyed viewing some of the objects.  I think the gallery-goer is better advised to skip the show and tour the adjacent gallery (free)containing many beautiful Native American masks and other objects including some tremendously beautiful Cheyenne ledger drawings, simply rendered in lead pencil and a few crayon colors and extraordinarily expressive.  The horses and mounted warriors are precisely drawn, stylized and portrayed as moving with an exquisite balletic choreography -- it looks like an early Picasso.