‘Native Prospects,' a contemporary view of the American landscape through an Indigenous lens
Kay WalkingStick's 'Thom, Where Are the Pocumtucks (The Oxbow),' 2020. It's her take on Thomas Cole's famous work "View From Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, After a Thunderstorm – the Oxbow,' from 1836.
Image courtesy of Kay WalkingStick/JSP Art Photography/Hales, London and New York
It's hard to even write those words, true though they may be. American art history offers a broader reading of American history writ large, if you read between the lines; and in the realm of landscape painting, what's left from the frame is often as significant as what's not. 'Native Prospects,' curated by Scott Manning Stevens, who is Akwesasne Mohawk and the director of Native American and Indigenous studies at Syracuse University, is an exercise in history much in need of revision. Importantly, and uniquely, the exhibition is not a simple point/counterpoint in the depiction of the American landscape — though there is that, and we're getting there — but a consideration of entirely different points of view: One colonial, one Indigenous, and the gulf, pictorially and historically, that exists between them.
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The counterpoint is bluntly provided by the Cherokee painter Kay WalkingStick, who can be relied on for such things; her lifetime project has been one of revision at its most provocative. Earlier this year at
Thomas Cole's 'Landscape Scene from 'The Last of the Mohicans,' 1827.
Thomas Cole/Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, NY, Gift of Stephen C. Clark/Richard Walker
Over decades, WalkingStick, now in her late 80s, has painted American vistas much as Cole and his peers did: as grand visions of an untamed wild. Often, she coopts their exact framing, a blunt reclamation of lost land from their gaze. But WalkingStick overlays her paintings with the specific patterning of the Indigenous people who live there, invoking a kind of seance for the land's rightful stewards, most often excised from the frame.
In 'Native Prospects,' her one painting is a compositional replica of one of Cole's most famous works, 'View From Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, After a Thunderstorm — the Oxbow,' from 1836. In her version, she softens the contours of land and sky and abandons the hand-of-God maelstrom of unearthly mist looming in the heavens, wraithlike and coal-gray. The title of the 2020 piece says much: 'Thom, Where Are the Pocumtucks,' the tribe native to the region, conspicuously absent in his frame. WalkingStick calls them forth with a bright floral pattern tracking the bottom of the frame, an ancestral motif that stamps their presence on the land. Absence, meet presence. Enough said.
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Kay WalkingStick's 'Thom, Where Are the Pocumtucks (The Oxbow),' 2020.
Image courtesy of Kay WalkingStick/JSP Art Photography/Hales, London and New York
But 'Native Prospects' is less about confrontation than it is assertion of difference, persistence, and a line drawn from past to present. That part matters: Indigenous artists here are contemporary, a declaration of a thriving culture that survived colonial deprivations of the land to flourish. Colonial artists in this exhibition are anchored in the past, often an ugly one, and tied to those deprivations: Cole's 'Solitary Lake in New Hampshire,' of a lone Indigenous man minimized against a glorious alpine scene, was painted in 1830, the same year as the federal Indian Removal Act went into effect, requiring all tribes east of the Mississippi to uproot and move west. His 'Landscape Scene from The Last of the Mohicans,' 1827, is the visual embodiment of James Fenimore Cooper's 'vanishing race' epic (the two were neighbors, and fellow aesthetic travelers).
'Native Prospects' connects Indigenous art on a continuum, from a faraway past to the here and now. How far? One image is a photo recreation of a Powhatan's Mantle, four deerhides sewn together and studded with shell and sinew to depict a human figure flanked by animals. Given to English colonists by Wahunsenacawh, the chief of the Powhatan Confederacy 400 years ago in modern-day Virginia, it's believed to be a kind of map — a depiction of land, and an expression of sovereignty.
Jeremy Frey's 'First Light,' 2023.
Jeremy Frey / Photography by Jared Lank
Nearby, the immediate present: Teresa Baker's 2019 'Forest‚' an abstraction of green and gray — yarn and, poetically, astroturf — mimics the deerhide's scale. With strands of willow dangling from its surface, 'Forest' rebukes abstraction's central tenet of being unmoored in the physcial world; instead Baker, who is Mandan and Hidatsa, anchors her piece in the northern plains, where she grew up.
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Just to the left of Powhatan's Mantle is
Alan Michelson (Mohawk member of the Six Nations of the Grand River), "Third Bank of the River (Panorama)," detail, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
Alan Michelson
And Alan Michelson, who Boston audiences might know best from 'The Knowledge Keepers,'
Next to it, Michelson's 'Third Bank of the River (Panorama),' from 2024, adopts the colored bands of the wampum belt in a broad photo collage, infusing its linear color scheme with the landscape of the riverbank of the Mohawk reservation strung along its crest. From the distant past to the here and now, land has meant sovereignty, and survival. In the eerie vista of Michelson's panorama, you can start to imagine the future.
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NATIVE PROSPECTS: INDIGENEITY AND LANDSCAPE
Through July 6
. Farnsworth Art Museum
, 16 Museum St., Rockland, Maine
. 207-596-6457, www.farnsworthmuseum.org
Murray Whyte can be reached at
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