Rosalie Favell Faces the Camera

     
 
Rosalie Favell is having a moment! On September 16th she was in New York for the opening of HIDE, Part 2, which features her series, Facing the Camera (2008-present) a growing collection of portraits of Indigenous artists and curators. The following week she was in Washington, DC at NMAI for the opening of Vantage Point: The Contemporary Native Art Collection, organized by Rebecca Trautmann, which features one of Favell's potent self-portraits titled “If only you could love me…” (2003): two very different approaches to portraiture by the Métis artist from Winnipeg.

“If only you could love me…” (above) is from the series, Plain(s) Warrior Artist (1999-2003) which draws heavily from pop culture, placing her likeness within scenes from movies and television shows such as Zena: Warrior Princess and Star Trek, as well as seamlessly blending historic and family photos. Each work is a personal comment on some aspect of her identity or biography. Those of you familiar with Western art might recognize that this work is a re-interpretation of Frida Kahlo’s haunting, Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair (1940) painted after her stormy divorce from Diego Rivera. Like Kahlo’s painting, Favell’s portrait is one of anguish and despondency; both show themselves surrounded by their shorn hair, dressed in men’s suit, and looking unwaveringly at the viewer. But while they both reflect on a lover’s rejection, Favell’s also explicitly references her own struggles with gender identity.

Installation: complete!

 
 Installers worked on creating a faux concrete surface while it was pouring rain outside last week.

The installation of HIDE, part 2, with Michael Belmore began last week during a torrential rain storm in New York. The new work, Dark Water, needed some final touches, including very through waxing and polishing. Michael’s partner, Mary Anne Barkhouse, the exhibition designer, Barbara Suhr, and I were happy to pitch in and give our arms a workout while the platforms for the work were completed by our preparators, including creating a faux concrete floor for Flux.  Dark Water was assembled on Friday and is even more dramatic than I expected. This week we placed and hung the photographic work, installed the labels, cleaned the galleries and worked with the lighting designer to get everything just right. We're looking forward to Michael's public program on September 16th at 6pm. Mark your calendars!

Michael Belmore and Mary Anne Barkhouse work on the finishing touches of Dark Water.

Having Faith: Site-Specific work

   
 Michael Belmore completing work on Dark Water, Minden, Ontario. Photos by Mary Anne Barkhouse, 2010.

If you purchased the catalogue for HIDE: Skin as Material and Metaphor, you may have seen detailed images of the work, Dark Water, by artist, Michael Belmore whose solo installation will open in September in part two of the exhibition. The complete work, composed of 11 sheets of hammered copper balanced on steel stands, was actually only recently finished in its entirety in time for shipping to New York. It has taken Belmore over 18 months of work to complete, including time spent researching and acquiring maps of the New York waterways, design, and the arduous process of shaping the copper with a blowtorch and endless hours hammering.  

  
 

An early design drawing (left) and the finished work, Promise (2007) by Jeffrey Gibson. Photo by  Jeffrey Gibson.

One of the exciting, and some would say, most nerve-wracking aspects of planning exhibitions with living artists is giving them the opportunity to create new work. Design drawings, lists of materials and measurements can only tell you so much; you often don’t really know how the final product will come together until it arrives or is installed on site.  For Off the Map, which I organized at the GGHC in 2007, we worked tirelessly with the artists Jeffrey Gibson and Erica Lord, to help them plan their site-specific works, respectively, Promise and Binary Selves. The results were beyond our expectations. The only drawback to this approach is that work not completed until the installation cannot photographed in time to be included in the exhibition publication. It is definitely a trade-off, but the new work we’ve seen so far has underscored, for me, the importance of encouraging new work in our galleries from these young, smart and talented artists.  We await the arrival and installation of the complete work, Dark Water, with much anticipation!  

   
    Concept drawing and detail of final installation, Binary Selves (2007), by Erica Lord.

New York Scar Stories

When the exhibition, HIDE, opened just over a week ago, we offered an unusual opportunity for the public to take part in artist Nadia Myre’s ongoing artwork known as The Scar Project. As I discussed in my 2-22-10 blog entry, Myre has be adding to this project since 2005, holding workshops for individuals to write about a scar, be it physical or emotional, and then depict that scar story on a canvas with materials she provides. The response to this workshop at NMAI was overwhelming.  The gallery and every chair was filled, so we brought in more chairs and spread the tables out so more people could participate.  After an initial flurry of activity as Nadia introduced the project, passed out blank canvases and the participants settled in, the room became almost eerily quiet as everyone began diligently working.  It seems as if most people had already planned their scar canvas, and a few people worked for the entire 3 hours without a break.  More people arrived and filled in seats as they emptied. By 4:30 Nadia had 30 new stories and canvases to add to the installation. 

 
 
The stories were as diverse as the imagery, speaking about lost and found identities, cancer, death, abuse, 9/11, family, broken relationships, home, divorce and healing.  The new canvases are now hanging in the gallery on a separate wall and you can read the stories in a separate binder on the reading table. It was thrilling to witness the response and enthusiasm of our visitors and now the Scar Project contains a small piece of the hearts and minds of New York City.

Compare this with the first photo: the empty wall was filled with the new work.

HIDE - A Thick-Skinned Beast

American Indians are often masters of metaphor. Alternative meanings that reflect our spirituality and the histories and narratives of our communities charge much of the world around us. This also extends to the artwork we create. There is no great mystery inherent to any of this, of course, nor are Native people unique in this way. It is a symptom of the human condition to crave and create meaning, to examine and interpret what we’ve been presented with, and to make choices about what we reveal or hide or see.

It’s also no surprise that skin—our most intimate cover for what’s literally on the inside of each of us—offers rich material in terms of metaphor. The English language presents a number of examples related to skin that we use without thought, almost daily. Some are cautionary words about illusion and reality, as in beauty is only skin deep. Other phrases—it’s like a second skin or it got under my skin—suggest comfort, or the lack of it. And descriptors like thick skinned or thin skinned speak of the emotional distance we maintain between ourselves and others. The same multilayered nature of the artworks in HIDE: Skin as Material and Metaphor is central not only to the exhibition but to this book’s essays. The exhibition—the name of which offers its own multiple meanings—assembles the work of several contemporary artists as they examine issues of identity and consider what it means to be Indian within the context of what we choose to reveal, to hide, and to see.

As individuals, our skin is not only a protection but also a document of our wounds and healing, a witness to our personal histories in the form of scars, stretch marks, and wrinkles. Maori, Hawaiian, and other traditional indigenous tattoo designs literally inscribe an individual’s story and life force on the skin, and many people today find it appropriate to express themselves by ornamenting their bodies with tattoos, makeup and other forms of paint, and piercings. These alterations aside (and despite American culture’s apparent obsession with preventing or treating signs of aging), we generally expect an individual’s skin to accurately represent their life experiences. After all, to be truly unimpeded by the confines of our histories, as documented in the form of our skin, is to belong to the indigenous realm of shapeshifters, those who possess supernatural abilities to change their physical form. At the end of the day, our skin keeps us honest. Try as we might, we cannot separate ourselves from it. And we should not want to.

Our “hides” are important to this dialogue as well. Entire communities may become defined, by themselves and others, based on what they collectively decide to reveal or keep hidden. Another significant conversation about identity and self determination is currently underway at the National Museum of the American Indian, in partnership with the National Museum of African American History and Culture, in the form of the exhibition IndiVisible and its related scholarship. Like HIDE, IndiVisible considers surface appearances, and what they reveal and hide, within the specific context of our African-Native American communities.

Our “red” skin has meant a great many things to us and to others over the last several centuries. It has been venerated and nearly idolized, and it has made us vulnerable to hate and violence. It has been a source of pride and shame and confusion within our communities, especially as related to its various shades, which themselves bear witness to the various histories of our ancestors. And for as long as Native people have been recorded in images, we have been misrepresented, whether in the beautifully staged romantic photographs by Edward S. Curtis, the perverse exaggerations of sports mascots and Hollywood stereotypes, or the unintentional distortions by otherwise well-meaning individuals. The deconstruction of this imagery is central to HIDE. Here we ponder the artists’ representations of a few of the many ways of being a “real” twenty-first-century Indian: celebrating our beautiful skin, acknowledging the scars we bear as individuals and as tribal nations, and recognizing the scars we inflict on our Mother Earth. HIDE is also a manifestation of a larger and long-term initiative at the National Museum of the American Indian, namely its Modern and Contemporary Native Arts Program, which will continue to present thoughtful and innovative works by today’s leading Indian artists.

I am reminded of the words of American poet Walt Whitman—himself a master of metaphor—who once said, “The public is a thick-skinned beast, and you have to keep whacking away at its hide to let it know you’re there.” I’m grateful to the artists who continue to whack away, and in the process have enlightened us about who they—and who we all—are.

Kevin Gover (Pawnee)
Director