Native America: In Translation

Martine Gutierrez, Indigenous Woman, 2018

Overview

Press

Overview

Native America: In Translation, curated by Wendy Red Star, considers the wide-ranging work of photographers and lens-based artists who pose challenging questions about land rights, identity and heritage, and histories of colonialism. The exhibition extends Red Star’s work as guest editor of Native America, Fall 2020 issue of Aperture magazine.

In the Apsáalooke (Crow) language, the word Áakiwilaxpaake (People of the Earth) describes Indigenous people living in North America, pointing to a time before colonial borders were established. In this exhibition, artists from throughout what is now called North America—representing various Native nations and affiliations—offer diverse visions, building on histories of image-making. Some of the artists presented in Native America: In Translation 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 and 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.”

Works by: Rebecca Belmore, Nalikutaar Jacqueline Cleveland, Martine Gutierrez, Duane Linklater, Guadalupe Maravilla, Kimowan Metchewais, Alan Michelson, Koyoltzintli, and Marianne Nicolson.

Native America: In Translation is made possible, in part, with generous support from the National Endowment for the Arts

Image credits: Martine Gutierrez, Queer Rage, Dear Diary, No Signal During VH1’s Fiercest Divas, from the series Indigenous Woman, 2018. Courtesy the artist and RYAN LEE Gallery, New York; Rebecca Belmore, matriarch, 2018, from the series nindinawemaganidog (all of my relations). Photograph by Henri Robideau; Kimowan Metchewais, Indian Handsign, undated. Courtesy the Kimowan Metchewais [McLain] Collection, National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution; Duane Linklater, ghostinthemachine, 2021. Courtesy the artist and Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver; Nalikutaar Jacqueline Cleveland, Spider Woman Embrace, Abiquiu, New Mexico, 2019.

Installation views Princeton University Art Museum and Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, Haverford College.