Putting native artists on the map

Volume 20 Issue 9 | July 13 - 19, 2007

Off the Map: Landscape in the Native Imagination
National Museum of the American Indian
One Bowling Green
Through Monday, September 3
(212-514-3700; AmericanIndian.si.edu)

Courtesy the National Museum of the American Indian

James Lavadour, “Blanket” (2005)

By Laura Silver

Maps are all about compromises and omissions. Draw them to scale and you are likely to forfeit the intricacies that define a place. Emphasize the major thoroughfares and you risk eclipsing a neighborhood’s nuances. Focus on city blocks and topography is likely to be overlooked.

Off the Map: Landscape in the Native Imagination sets these struggles aside, choosing instead to hone in on individual takes on identity and experience. The exhibit, designed to showcase to contemporary Native American artists, gives their work the play it deserves in a modern setting. The brightly painted walls of the National Museum of the American Indian’s newest gallery are reminiscent of exhibitions at MoMA or the Guggenheim (minus the entry fee) and, as a bonus, remind visitors that all things native, while perhaps linked to the past and the land, are not constrained by either.

There’s no formal key to explain the meaning of the inverted letter “A” in Emmi Whitehorse’s “Flowing Water (2006).” Nor is there a geographic map to help the visitor locate the hometowns of the five artists in the exhibition — but it’s just as well. That would likely detract from the documented journeys at hand: Forays into color and texture splayed on canvas, wood, board, video and foam crammed into a gallery alcove.

Whitehorse, a Navajo from the eponymous New Mexico town, explores the confluence of land, sky and sea in her detailed yet abstract representations of the ocean depths, riverbeds, and the earth. The stuff of life is portrayed as if through a high-powered microscope: Vowels, twigs, leaves, stones and seed pods float in organic slices of color and shape, which, according to one young visitor, “looks like crayon” and according to Whitehorse, reference weaving tools and her grandmother’s gathering of plants.

James Lavadour’s riveting, slick oil-on-board compositions are reminiscent of stylized Spin Art minus the Rorschachesque blobs. “Blanket” (2005), a large-scale work of 15 boards, reads as a collection of postcards from the road: Each of the high-sheen tableaux captures a moment and invites a narrative. One invokes a red shelter tentatively perched on an overlook, another, a mountains in the haze. Brush and knife strokes define cliffs, brushfires and forests. The work, impressionist and representational at once, uses smudges and scraped away paint to convey the expanse of the Northwest departing from the Walla Walla artists’ home on the Umatilla Indian Reservation outside Pendelton, Oregon.

Inuit/Athabascan artist Erica Lord transports us to Nenana, Alaska and shares the story of her return to and repeated departure from the ice-gripped town where she grew up grappling with her father’s alcoholism. Her journey, reflected on two video monitors at the end of a short hallway striped with floor-to-ceiling strips of mirror, includes moments of reflection and glee, showing Lord speeding down a highway singing, hanging out with a friend on a small iceberg, and flashing back to faded color photos of her girlhood.

Carlos Jacanamijoy is influenced by his upbringing in Putamayo, Columbia and the environment of his studio in Brooklyn’s DUMBO. His five-foot canvases explode in vibrant colors, using oils to convey graffiti-like portraits of rainforest trees and ocean life, drawn from “a succession of memories of the jungle in Putamayo.”

Jeffrey Gibson takes consumer culture to task with mixed media works dappled in pearls, rubies and sapphires, which, upon, closer inspection, turn out to be beads of colored silicone painstakingly strung across outlines of jungle flora and fauna. The Colorado Springs-born Mississippi Band Choctaw/Cherokee artist examines the tension between the manicured and the untamed and asks how to resurrect and represent that which has been blotted out and glossed over.

Individually and collectively, the works in Off the Map invite us to take a closer look at the landscapes and people that form the backbone of the Americas’ native heritage.