The moment you enter the exhibition Indigenous Identities: Here, Now & Always at the Zimmerli Art Museum, a feeling of immense beauty and grandeur will likely overtake you.
An canvas by Jeffrey Gibson taking up the entire entry wall is filled with rich color, pattern, and intricate beadwork. Behind it, or peering through it, is a visage with long-lashed seductive eyes and slightly parted coral-colored lips. The words “She Never Dances Alone” are beaded into the border.
“She Never Dances Alone” was made in conjunction with a video broadcast in Times Square focusing on the jingle dress dance — a powwow dance that originated with the Ojibewe tribe and is traditionally performed by women to call upon ancestors for strength, healing, and protection.
Jeffrey Gibson (Member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee Descent), SHE NEVER DANCES ALONE, 2021. Acrylic on canvas, archival pigment on cotton, archival pigment on rice paper, inset in custom wood frame, glass beads, artificial sinew. Courtesy Gochman Family Collection. Photo courtesy of Max Yawney.
The “ancestral call for strength and healing for all Indigenous people, and a recognition of the power of Indigenous women” that the artist describes is also a central theme of Indigenous Identities, on view through December 21.
Curated by acclaimed artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (1940-2025), it is the largest curatorial endeavor in her 60-year career and is also the largest exhibition of contemporary Native American art at a museum to date. With more than 100 works in media from beadwork and weaving to video and painting, the exhibition includes 97 artists who represent more than 74 distinct Indigenous nations and communities across the United States.
“For years, the media has portrayed us as a vanishing race and museums historically have ignored us,” said Smith, who died in January, in a prepared statement. “It’s an interesting moment that we find ourselves in, having captured the attention of the art world… This exhibition is a celebration of life.”
Born in 1940 at St. Ignatius Jesuit Mission on the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Reservation in Montana, Smith was an enrolled member of the Flathead Nation. Descended from French, Cree and Shoshone ancestors, Jaune’s mother left her and her sister with another Indian family when she was 2. Her father, a horse trainer and trader, would draw pictures of horses in the sand and on receipts.
Smith’s earliest memories of creating is with mud and sticks – moss and rocks were her toys. “We didn’t have a home and we never had enough to eat, so I was always making things,” she said.
Jaune had to work on a farm from the age of 8, but books opened up worlds in her head. When she was in second grade, she learned to read from books from the bookmobile and hid in a tree or barn to read instead of chopping wood or cleaning the corral.
Smith’s work was the subject of a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2023.
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation), Celebrate 40,000 Years of American Art, 1995. Collagraph. Collection Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University Jersey City Museum Collection, gift of Jersey City Museum, gift of anonymous donor. Photo Peter Jacobs.
By the time of her death, she was known for her “prolific arts practice that merged piercing humor and profound socio-political commentary with poetic depictions of Native American life,” according to Hyperallergic. “Her five-decade oeuvre, which spans painting, collage, drawing, print, and sculpture, is an intimate visual lexicon that bridges personal memories and joyful resilience, exemplifying her lifelong refusal to be defined by any singular narrative.”
Although she lived in New Mexico, she had a presence in New Jersey through numerous exhibitions and at the Brodsky Center for Innovative Editions, where she made prints, some in the Zimmerli’s collection and on view here.
Zimmerli Director Maura Reilly first met Smith in New York City in 2015, as part of that year’s Performa biennial. “I was asked to participate in a panel discussion with Emory Douglas and Vernon Ah Kee, convened at Richard Bell’s Aboriginal Tent Embassy, the artist’s multipurpose space for activism and dialogue supporting Indigenous rights globally,” says Reilly. “After the talk, Jaune approached me regarding Bell’s first museum retrospective, which I organized in 2010 and which traveled nationally. Our conversation naturally turned to contemporary Native American art — its brilliance, its neglect, and, ultimately, the dearth of large-scale exhibitions. Together that day, we vowed to organize an exhibition to showcase the diverse and exceptional art of the nation’s many Native communities. ‘Indigenous Identities’ began with that first conversation, and now, over a decade later, I am so pleased to see it realized at the Zimmerli.”
Working with Smith on this project “was the honor of a lifetime,” says Reilly.
Back to that beauty – alongside Gibson’s work is a red neon outline of a teepee with the words “Abstract in Your Home.” The artist, Neal Ambrose-Smith, says he was influenced by a 1970 work by Pier Paolo Calzolari, also titled “Abstract in Your Home.”
Neal Ambrose-Smith (Descendant of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation of Montana), Abstract in Your Home, 2009. Neon, mixed media. Tia Collection. Photo Peter Jacobs.
“But the triangle wasn’t meant to be read as a tipi. It may be abstract to have a tipi inside a building or dwelling, which is like a home within a home…The tipi or triangle will always take me home,” says Smith.
And yes, Ambrose-Smith is the son of Quick-to-See Smith, and also a frequent collaborator. In an opening reception, he read aloud an original poem in which he suggests there are no delineations between art that is on the floor or worn on the back; between ceramics that may be functional versus those on a pedestal. He reminded the audience that the United States banned Native American dances and ceremonies until the mid-20th century. “Now I dance every day,” he said.
“Like other members of the BIPOC community, we have to make our own space because we’re not invited, and Jaune did that,” he recounted. He also recalled the pre-internet 1980s when, to curate an exhibition, his mother would fly to the homes of artists from coast to coast, help them write a statement and get the work framed, then bring it back to New Mexico from where she would drive all the gathered works to an exhibition.
Around the wall and in the first gallery is a work by Marie Watt, who creates totemic assemblages from used blankets. “Skywalker/Skyscraper (Twins)” certainly evokes the twin towers of the World Trade Center, with wool blankets from the mid 20th century – plaids and waffle weaves and a few handmade quilts. There’s even a faint smell of the laundry detergent used, as if the spirits linger.
Marie Watt (Enrolled Member of the Seneca Nation of Indians/European Descent), Skywalker/Skyscraper (Twins), 2020. Reclaimed wool blankets, steel I-Beams, two textile towers. Tia Collection. James Hart Photography. © Marie Watt. Courtesy of MARC STRAUS, New York. Courtesy of Marie Watt Studio.
A blanket offers comfort, protection, and security. It’s what we come into this world in, and we often go out wrapped in one. Watt believes that blankets provide access to social connections, historical traditions, and cross-cultural meanings. In Native American communities, blankets are given away to honor people for being witnesses to important life events. Every blanket tells a story.
Bently Spang has created “Modern Warrior Series: War Shirt #3,” a garment, from photographs of native plants and shrubs on a prairie, tied together with twine and ornamented with plastic detritus.
Lest we are too bedazzled by all the beauty and art and craftsmanship, a wall plaque reminds us of the political implications: “Through genocide, boarding schools, disease, hunger, rape, and abuse, [Native Americans] are still here.”
Among the materials used by these artists are deer hide, neon, textiles (quilts, weavings), cochineal-dyed yarn, and beadwork. There are tintypes, pigment, and digital prints, and works in acrylic and other media that suggest more traditional media, often combined such as beadwork and digital photography.
Corwin Clairmont, in “Raven Speaks to His Friends,” a colorful serigraph from 2020, writes, “Raven Speaks to Friends: The D.J. Trump Virus is More Menacing and Deadlier than Smallpox Blankets or the Covid-19 Virus. Your vote is the Cure!”
A human figure with the head of a Buffalo rendered on leger paper by Chris Pappan, titled “Of White Bread and Miracles,” is a response to the Boy Scout tradition of misappropriating Native American practices as hobbies. “The figures are from a manual titled ‘Here Is Your Hobby…Indian Dancing and Costumes’ (Putnam, 1966). The book is an example of cognitive dissonance as it erases any vestiges of contemporary Native people and homogenizes all Native American cultures while making casual remarks such as ‘get a local Indian to teach you singing and dancing.’ By appropriating the figures from the book and re-contextualizing them, I am reclaiming the power of dance for our people; it is a sacred form of prayer and sacrifice that has deep roots and meaning for Native people everywhere,” says the artist.
Chris Pappan (Kanza, Lakota), Of White Bread and Miracles (Buffalo), 2020. Mixed media on embossed Evanston municipal ledger. Tia Collection. Photo Peter Jacobs.
Nine videos examine such topics as political resistance, settler colonial violence, community, and relationships between land and life. “My Soul Remainer” by Laura Ortman features the artist fiddling her heart out against a backdrop of magnificent, unspoiled landscapes. “Ma’s House: Reciprocity Project” shows us a grandson restoring his grandmother’s house in South Hampton, N.Y., to become an artist residence on Shinnecock Nation land.
If, while viewing the exhibition, you hear what sounds like clock hands scraping their way around a clock face, that’s exactly what’s happening in “Consciously Conscious Numbers” by Lorenzo Clayton. As you might imagine, this is no ordinary clock – there are nine hands spinning both clockwise and counterclockwise. “Divine-like attributes are qualities I’ve always attributed to the field of mathematics, so thoughts of numbers possessing consciousness during a Gestalt-like experience I had some years ago seemed to make absolute, instinctive sense,” says Clayton. “I can say that what I experienced was culturally based. People like my ancestors have been acknowledging the consciousness of the natural world and that of the cosmos for millennia.”
According to another wall panel: “Native American artists frequently translate, internalize, and convert seemingly ‘all-American’ narratives into newly adapted Native American stories… Native American artists often make artwork that documents daily happenings and regular activities such as powwos, preparing meals, and shopping at big-box stores.”
As a special coda to the exhibition is Hope with Humor: Works by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith from the Collection. In words left behind by Smith: ““Perhaps the preeminent issue in the Indian world is plain survival. Beyond that it means retaining our own cultures, governments, languages, religions, and ceremonies…I am telling stories about hope with humor. We wouldn’t be here if we didn’t have hope.”
Zimmerli Art Museum is located at 71 Hamilton Street in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
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