Met’s homegrown acquisition asks who should write art history

This week, perhaps for the first time, an eagle is fluttering its wings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The ornate feathers belonging to the traditional garb worn by the Acosia red elk (Umatilla, Cayuse and Nez Perce) stand with arms spread wide in front of Thomas Sully’s commemorative portrait of Queen Victoria (1819-1901) on display in the museum’s American Wing. If anyone remembers, Queen Victoria and the British Empire played a crucial role in the colonization of what is today Canada, including establishing a residential school system that separated Aboriginal children from their culture. Red Elk attended a boarding school, although conditions at the school had improved in her time, she said. Critics say Victoria’s colonial legacy persists, manifested in government inaction on the Aboriginal clean drinking water crisis and disproportionate violence against Aboriginal people.

But at that moment, the frame of Queen Victoria’s portrait was overlaid with an augmented reality artwork by Indigenous futurist Josué Riva. The artwork appears after museum visitors scan a QR code with their phone and point their phone camera at the portrait (although any device or tablet will do). On the phone, the moving black and white red elk took Victoria’s place and conveyed this message to the audience: “Be a good ancestor.”

“[Rivas] Let me write a message to the future,” Red Elk told art news. “I always come back to the idea of ​​7 Generation and how everything we do has a ripple effect.”

She added: “This message is intended to outlast us and extend into the future”

Riva’s artwork is titled stand strong (2021), he was one of 17 Native North American artists who came together for “Encoded,” an unsanctioned AR exhibition hidden among the Met’s renowned art and sculptures in the American Wing. The exhibition is co-curated by Tracy Rector and brought online by Amplifier, a nonprofit media lab that works with artists on political conscience projects. “Encoded” launches on Monday, October 13 – the day the United States officially recognizes as Indigenous Peoples’ Day and Christopher Columbus Day. It will end on December 13th.

This was “unsanctioned” because Amplifier did not seek permission from the Met to intervene. (The Met did not respond to ARTnews’ request for comment.) If anything, gallery staff were confused, even a little annoyed, by the noise that accompanied many of the artworks. For example, a ringtone sounds when the user activates Modga Adi Author: Cannupe Hanska Luger (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara and Lakota). Modga Adi The painting features several dancing figures, decorated with bells and beads and wearing masks that recall the huge curved horns of the bison that once inhabited the northern plains. The figures stomp and sway across seven landscape paintings, roughly dating to the mid-to-late 1800s, when settlers of European descent, backed by U.S. troops, slaughtered an estimated five million bison over two decades: a cultural and economic disaster for the native tribes. Modga AdiDancers fly over landscapes by Thomas Cole, Asher Brown Durand and their contemporaries, calling out to fallen bison and shouting to the audience: Do you think these lands were born empty? Do you think Western art history plays a role in canonizing this narrative?

“Wings on America is a room full of stories, stories often told without us,” Nicholas Galanin, another “Code” participant, told us art news. “It was a cathedral built to worship an imagined nation, painted on stolen land, and it mentioned the idea of ​​beauty but not the cost. As I walked there, I felt the weight of how these institutions were shaped by a vision of America that depended on our disappearance.”

Galanin (Tlingit and Unangax) has collaborated with Amplifier on three titles. Tsu Héidei Shugaxtutaan (2006), Meaning “We will once again open this container of wisdom that is in our care”, it is a fusion of video, song and dance, fused with Winslow Homer’s famous work. gulf streamdepicting a ship rocking in a storm. no way forget (2021), James Francis Cropsey places the words “Indian Land” in the style of a Hollywood sign over an 1865 Wyoming landscape. And then there are How are they sailors? (2014), which dealt with the 2010 murder of deaf indigenous woodcarver John T. Williams by Seattle police. Williams, who was armed with a meat cleaver and a totem, failed to hear the officer’s orders before he was shot four times. Garanin works to solve his target of killing my bunky (1899) by Charles Schreyvogel, a painter known for his promotion of westward expansion. my bunky Depicting a violent conflict on the plains, a soldier rescues a housemate from implied Aboriginal attackers. Galanin added a video of a Tlingit man wielding a knife and used police footage of Williams’ killing and aftermath as a soundtrack.

Amplifier executive director Cleo Barnett told us work on “Encoded” began about four years ago art news.

“As we amplify artists and movements, our intention is always to find ways to put artists’ stories into spaces like the Met that would otherwise be off limits,” Barnett said. “Our job is to identify gaps that artists can fill.”

She added that the Amplifier team was lucky to find an anonymous Aboriginal donor who came forward to make this possible. Barnett and Aaron Huey, director of immersive design at Amplifier, tell us art news How they mapped each gallery, studied its lighting, and digitally overlaid the artwork without altering the Met’s space. Each artwork presented a unique challenge, especially those paired with three-dimensional objects, such as the cougar fur/textile piece created by Priscilla Dobler Dzul (Mayans) to cover the nude body of “Mexican Dying Girl,” which is on display in the United States Wing atrium, one of the museum’s busiest spaces every day.

I toured the exhibition with the Red Elk and Amplifier teams, and our first stop was “The Dying Girl of Mexico.” People looked at her Aboriginal costume in amazement. Visitors ask to be photographed as if she were a living work of art, and lean precariously against the railings of the glass mezzanine to get a better view. In the gallery, visitors gravitated to our group to hear Red Elk speak, some even interrupting official tours of the Met. I don’t know what kids are taught in school these days, but in my memory of the American school system, there is not a chapter about the native peoples of the unceded land now known as New York State. It is only in recent years that surveys of contemporary Aboriginal art have begun to enter major museums and centers with greater frequency.

It’s fair to say that the Lenape began leaving their homeland when Europeans arrived about 400 years ago, but New York State remains home to a diverse group of indigenous people, some of whom call New York City home. Her presence might draw attention to herself in an encyclopedic museum like the Met, which is neither a bad thing nor a good thing for the popular imagination, which strives to situate indigenous cultures in contemporary contexts. There is a gap in museum visitors’ knowledge of the land they walk, but one they are clearly eager to fill if cultural institutions only provide the opportunity.

“Art is never neutral,” Galanin said. “It carries the memory of the land and the forces that shaped it. Creation is a ritual, a return to responsibility – not decoration, but direction and responsibility.”