By: Gorman Museum of Native American Art
A new exhibit featuring Indigenous photography is set to open at the Gorman Museum of Native American Art.
Reflecting Lenses: Twenty Years of Photography at the Gorman Museum runs March 6 through September 1.
This exhibition presents highlights from the Gorman Museums collection by more than two dozen Indigenous artists from North America, Aotearoa, and Australia.
For decades, the Gorman Museum of Native American Art has hosted artists who advance Indigenous visual sovereignty – understood as the assertion of Indigenous autonomy through visual media. Photographs are now central to the museum’s collection of contemporary art. Themes that are prevalent in the collection relate to social and environmental justice, connection to homeland, and Indigenous empowerment in the contemporary world.
Throughout its nearly two-hundred-year history, photography has been a tool for colonial projects across the globe. Non-Native photographers deployed images that dehumanized and stereotyped Indigenous people. The non-Native gaze produced narratives of vanishing cultures, primitive minds, and victims of progress. The work of early Indigenous photographers is seen as the emergence of a Native point of view. These images not only restore dignity to the subject, they reflect the priorities and realities of Indigenous experiences. Taking up the camera was an act of visual sovereignty.
Contemporary artists approach photography from a diversity of backgrounds including photojournalism, performance art, digital production, and film making. They produce visions of collective memory and counter narratives, in addition to portraits and landscapes. The subject of these images is Native presence. Many Indigenous artists have examined issues of self-representation through their artistic practice. In response, the museum uses the artists’ own words to present their ideas and artistic strategies.
Related events:
SUNDAY MARCH 10: Curator Walk-through by Polly Nordstrand, 2pm.
FRIDAY, APRIL 12: Artist Talk & Reception, 2-4pm. (Artist TBD, this is the day before UCD Powwow, and during NACD week).
MAY TBD: Artist Talk by Natalie Robertson.
Image: Kimowan Metchewais, Cold Lake Venus, 2005.
