“Native America: In Translation’ is the new exhibition at Princeton University Art Museum’s satellite exhibition space, Art on Hulfish, located in a former clothing shop at 11 Hulfish Street in downtown Princeton.
A quick step in and turn to the right gets one facing the introductory panel of the nine-artist exhibition curated by Wendy Red Star.
Star, 41, is the Apsaaloke Reservation (Montana) raised artist whose work, we learn, “is informed both by her Native American cultural heritage and by her engagement with many forms of creative expression, including photography, sculpture, video, fiber arts, and performance.”
The panel continues to explain that the participating artists are “from throughout what is now called North America — representing various Native nations and affiliations — (and) offer diverse visions, building on histories of image-making.”
Additionally, some of the artists presented are propelled by a sense of “Indigenous indignation” or “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 exhibition was organized by the Aperture Foundation, New York. The nonprofit organization was founded in 1952 to connect the photo community and its audiences with “the most inspiring work, the sharpest ideas, and with each other — in print, in person, and online.”
The Princeton exhibition also has its roots in the foundation’s Fall 2020 Aperture magazine’s “Native America,” a special issue about photography and Indigenous lives, guest edited by Star. The issue was part of an ongoing series exploring perceptions of various populations, including Latinos and African Americans.
One way to enter the exhibition is to simply to move left of the introductory panel where there are a series of enlarged Polaroid images of water and hands by the late Cree artist Kimowan Metchewais (1963 – 2011).
The accompanying panel refers to him as a sculptor of flat, rectangular objects and credits him with creating works of “paper walls” of “spliced photographs, with conspicuous scratches, creases, and Scotch Tape fastenings, [that] have a soft, dream-like quality that distinguishes them from digital photography and the ethnographic, conventions imposed by others to parse a ‘self-made Native imagery’ that challenges the authority of fixed representation.”
One of the most prominent of his images are a set of hand signals that — even while still — capture the eye and pause the mind to engage.
Then, quickly to the left, Omaskeko Ininwak artist Duane Linklater, born 1976, and living Northern Ontario, takes over the remaining wall to display an expansion of a work he originally created for two issues of Aperture. The idea driven piece uses drawn lines on the scanned pages of mainly black and white images and text found in those issues as part of a “continuation of the long tradition of Indigenous artist mapping out beadwork and quillwork, allowing him to delimit the scale and pace of his own practice and to inscribe himself into an artistic lineage.”
On the opposite side of the panel is a standing wall featuring three works by Guadalupe Maravilla.
Here, the Salvadorian painter, sculptor, and choreographer, born in 1976, uses retablos, small framed Mexican and Central American devotional works, to create personal and mythological visual narratives. Our ancestors were about creating mythologies, and I connected with that,” he says in a text.
The three displayed mixed media works all created in 2021 — “Motorpsycho Retablo,” “I Crossed the Border Retablo,” and “The Performance at the Center of the World Retablo” — use cartoon-like imagery and explanatory text painted on tin that is affixed to wood and framed with a mixture of glue and cotton.
Pulling in the eye with color and exaggeration, the text for the work with the performance references conjures the artist’s in-your-face attitude by connecting the image with an actual 2021 Times Square performance featuring “choreography with 15 break dancers, a golden lowrider car with hydraulics and sound” and the artist performing as a ghetto blaster.
The walls in this first station area easily guide visitors to the next section that features the work of photographer Koyolzinth, the taken name of Ecuador-born artist Karen Miranda-Rivadeneira.
The series of large black-and-white images depict the myth of a “two-million-year-old woman — known today by various names, including Sky Woman” and “narrates the woman’s fall from the heavens into the Earth’s ocean.”
The artist, descended from the Manta peoples on the Ecuadorian coast, uses myths to document imperiled Indigenous oral traditions, connecting origin stories to Zaparo, a language of Ecuador today spoken by only a handful of people. “Here the gray toned documentary-like images suggest a mediation of how the human female body and the clayey earth terrain both juxtapose and connect.
Alan Michelson’s “Hanodaga:yas” and “Pehin Hanska ktepi” are dramatically displayed in the next room — a darkened area formed by panels and the rear wall of the building.
The former work, translated as Town Destroyer, consists of six brightened photos images of French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon’s bust of George Washington colored by projections that include maps and texts.
A Mohawk member of the Six Nations of the Grand River, Michelson says via text that he wants to “defeat American amnesia and denial” by using an “archive against itself, to challenge the colonial narratives it usually serves.”
Additionally, he notes, “In 2018, the approaching 240th anniversary of Washington’s 1779 destruction of the Iroquoia — our extensive homelands in which is now New York State — prompted me to get a life-size replica bust and project archival imagery onto it to tell the story of invasion and forced eviction. The imagery includes historical maps and New York State historical markers that seem to celebrate genocide.”
The other work, translated as “they killed long hair,” is a continuous film loop projected across the darkened room onto a trading blanket screen. The film features the actual Native American victors of Custer’s Last Stand participating in the 1926 parade commemorating the 50th anniversary of the conflict.
Moving back towards the front of the building and past Koyolzinth’s earth images, the viewer meets several images by photographer and performance artist Rebecca Belmore, a member of the Lac Seul First Nation Anishinaabe.
According to the signage, the artist born in 1960 “has probed the politics of First Nations representations in Canada to parse the pain of state violence against Indigenous people.”
Here, however, she creates large seemingly conventional photo images depicting what the curator says are “scenes of forceful grace” that “expand the fields of conceptual photography in images that feature organic materials, such as clay or cloth, or place subjects in strange contortions of the body.”
The opposite side of the panel presents the conventionally edgy photo works by 33-year-old Martine Gutierrez.
Described as “a trans artist of Mayan heritage,” Star says the artist “mobilizes the concept of Indigeneity to question the birth origins of gender: what makes a ‘Native-born’ woman? Here, Indigeneity becomes a medium to contemplate gender, heritage, and narrative.”
The large, bright, and finely executed images depict the photographer in various personas wearing Indigenous textiles, some of which, we learn, came from her grandmother.
The tone changes abruptly with the adjacent panel of the work of Jacqueline Cleveland.
Born in 1979, Cleveland is an Alaskan Native of Yup’ik descent, a photographer and documentary filmmaker, and a resident of the coastal village of Quinhagak.
While there are only four of her photos, community members at home or with the landscape, Cleveland says her work reflects the season rituals of the people and transference of traditional knowledge, especially plant use. “My audience is the people of the villages I shoot and students of ethno-botany. I identify myself as a subsistence hunter-fisher-gatherer. (That includes foraging, first and foremost),” she says in a statement.
Arriving at the final station, visitors find the work of Marianne Nicholson, 1969, a member of the Dzawada’enuxw of the Kwakwaka’wakw peoples of the First Nation community of Kingcome Inlet in British Columbia. Canada,
Using an enlarged pre-digital photography film contact sheet, Nicholson presents “images to tell stories about community, the images of capitalism, and the ongoing tension felt by Indigenous people worldwide in relation to settler colonialism.” That includes images suggesting modern changes that have affected fishing and fish migrations.
While one could ask for more elaboration on that final topic — as well as a deeper exploration of each artist’s work and culture — the quick read magazine-sense of the exhibition is the one that resonates. But, in this case, the reading is done by walking through a front door on Hulfish Street — and a gallery that is welcome addition to the cultural life of the region.
Native America: In Translation, Art on Hulfish, 11 Hulfish Street, Princeton. Through April 24. Monday through Wednesday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Thursday and Friday, 10 a.m. to 8:30 p.m.; Saturday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; and Sunday noon to 5 p.m. Free. artmuseum.princeton.edu/arthulfish.
