“Preoccupied” is not only a clever play on words for the title of an exhibition on Native and Indigenous artwork at the Baltimore Museum of Art. It is a meta takeover of the museum, with Indigenous community members leaving their mark on the museum’s permanent collection in addition to the special Native and Indigenous works curated and created specifically for the exhibition.
Dare Turner (Yurok Tribe of California), Curator of Indigenous Art at the Brooklyn Museum, and Leila Grothe, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art for the Baltimore Museum of Art, worked together to create “Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum” to uplift Indigenous perspectives, center Native art, and help Native and Indigenous artists “claim space” and be heard.
More broadly, they sought to literally Indigenize the museum. Turner and Grothe began the project by talking to Native communities in Baltimore and Indigenous artists across North America. Their top priority was not to burden Native community members with “fixing” the problematic aspects of how Native art has been either excluded or warped in its presentation in museums. They simply asked them to talk about their experiences in museums, and how they felt when they walked through them. Unsurprisingly, Native and Indigenous folks felt predominantly invisible.
In addition to heavily prioritizing Indigenous perspectives and gazes, Turner and Grothe brought in professionals to offer training to every member of the BMA’s staff at every echelon to be aware of how to rectify past harm and prevent it in the future to avoid the museum’s perpetuating it. The training was led by Deana Dartt (Coastal Chumash and Mestiza) of Live Oak Consulting, which focuses on educating professionals about issues and experiences crucial to a respectful treatment of Native culture and history.
These efforts aim to help this learning and reduction of harm become part of the museum’s ecosystem, even as the temporary exhibits come and go.
One of the ways in which Indigenous perspectives touch the permanent exhibits is that Turner and Grothe invited Indigenous community members to visit and respond to any artwork in the BMA’s collection that makes them think about their lived experience in their Indigenous community.
These pieces are marked with the logo of the “Preoccupied” exhibit, with a QR code on the other side of the placard. The QR code takes visitors to an audio guide wherein the community member talks about how that piece of art impacts them.
“When we talk about this project, ‘Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum,’ this is one of the aspects that helps us surface the projects wherein we center Indigenous voices throughout the museum into many places,” Turner said. There are a total of 14 such pieces with associated markers and recordings throughout the BMA that are now permanent parts of those exhibits.
As for the “Preoccupied” exhibits, there are nine planned exhibitions, six of which are open now, with the other three opening July through August 2024.
Dyani White Hawk (Sičangu Lakota) is a sculptor and painter with an installation called the “Carry” series, for which she created two new pieces for the Preoccupied exhibition. Each piece begins with a copper bucket and ladle which she adorns with glass beads, porcupine quills, and dramatically long fringe which appear to act as a pedestal and base for the bucket and ladle.
There are also arboreal references to the shapes of the Carry series, where the strong and straight thickness of the fringe from the bucket to the floor suggest a tree and when the fringe hits the floor it spreads out into shapes that form a base that call a root system to mind.
White Hawk is doing several things with her art, not the least of which is connecting the functionality of nature and basic needs to the beauty, skill, and majesty of art. She is also refuting the tendency of institutions like museums to relegate Indigenous art to only their use value and labeling them as “craft.”
“At the fore of her thinking is this notion of encyclopedic institutions like the BMA have had this history where they take Indigenous artworks that have a use value and have sort of labeled them as craft or other than fine arts,” Grothe said. “In a way, they’ve sort of been devalued in this hierarchy of museological practice. And so, Dyani very emphatically is stating with her work that that is a problem.”
Another aspect of Indigenizing the museum comes through in the invitation to Native artists to view the many pieces in the BMA’s vault, some of which have never been displayed, and others of which have not been displayed for decades. This is happening across the museum.
White Hawk chose two tobacco bags and a pair of men’s moccasins that made an impression on her. “She said they feel a little bit like modern Vans, and that was something that she loved and really spoke to her,” Turner said. “So, we worked with her to come up with the interpretation of these. She gave wonderful insights from her own perspective, and we mashed it up with our knowledge of these historic artworks.”
Additionally, the BMA is prioritizing Indigenous voices in the placard descriptions of artwork both by Native artists and by non-Native artists depicting Native people and scenes.
“When there are non-Native artists depicting Native subjects, we want to privilege the Native subjects over the non-Native artists,” Turner said. “So, some of that, ends up flipping around our perspectives and inviting visitors to think about Indigenous works in a totally new way.”
They relied heavily on the community advisory panel and on anti-colonial staff workshops for guidance in these aspects of Preoccupied and reworking other areas of the BMA. Rather than abdicate their responsibility as curators, they are leaning into learning and understanding how they can be better. Turner described the approach as “fulsome” and “cross-institutional” in that it reached every wing of the museum and every level of the staff.
Multiple Piscataway people contributed belongings to the exhibition (Baltimore rests on Piscataway land) and there is a large Lumbee presence in the guidance of Indigenizing the museum. Grothe said the Lumbee are the largest Indigenous community in Baltimore, and the largest home for Lumbee people outside their ancestral homelands, which are in North Carolina.
There is an exhibition entitled “Enduring Buffalo” reflecting the essential role the animal played in Indigenous life on the Plains since time immemorial. European and American attempts to eradicate the species was a brutal means of subjugation employed by colonists desperate to impose imagined superiority on Native people. Some of the art in this section of the exhibit are magnificent examples of how Indigenous people used and adorned themselves in the buffalo with whom they had such a symbiotic relationship.
One photo, however, is so disturbing it is covered with a black curtain designed by Stormi Turner (Yurok Tribe). The photo depicts a man standing atop an enormous pile of buffalo skulls in Roucheville, Michigan, while another man stands at the bottom. The pile must be 30 feet high at its apex, and it is impossible to discern the width of the pile, as it exceeds the photo’s edges on both sides.
“We’re really mindful of the fact that the imagery associated with this really devastating history can be painful for non-Natives and Natives to see,” Turner said. “So, we didn’t want to force this particular image on people, but this gives you this sense of devastation.… We didn’t want this to be the first thing people see but we wanted it to be an educational opt-in opportunity. So, we had a native textile person and make this this curtain here. My mom did. It was just important for us to offer this context but not force it onto people and we wanted to be really careful about that.”
An open rejection of the non-Native gaze takes place in the “Illustrating Agency” installation. Under non-Native pressure and “education,” Native artists were encouraged to depict themselves in flat, stereotypical images under the auspices of creating “authentic” art for consumption by non-Native buyers. Allan Houser (Chiricahua Apache) was educated in this style and grew to portray himself and Native people in actually authentic, multi-layered ways.
Houser bristled at the techniques taught at the Santa Fe Indian School’s Painting School, where teachers instructing Native students to paint in a way that would please the predominantly white market. In 1962, he joined the faculty of the newly created Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he was the head of the Sculpture Department.
The self-portrait below was created by T.C. Cannon (Kiowa/Caddo), a student of Houser’s at IAIA. His self-portrait is arresting and absorbing in both style and the pose he takes. It is a complete rejection of everything early 20th century non-Native educators demanded of their Native students.
The myriad of other exhibits include — but are not remotely limited to — a mind- and consciousness-bending installation by Caroline Monnet (Anishinaabe/French) transforming a room with seemingly simple design and material, but meticulous skill and subtle defiance of literal and cultural space; a 40-minute film program curated by Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation and a descendant of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño people) uncovering and exploring generational memory; and Marie Watt’s (Seneca Nation and German-Scot ancestry) soaring and overwhelming sculpture made of folded blankets that seem to defy gravity and logic.
(On the left) Caroline Monnet’s (Anishinaabe/French) installation, “River Flows Through Bent Trees.” (On the right) Marie Watt’s (Seneca Nation of Indians and German-Scot ancestry) “Blanket Stories: Beacon, Marker, Ohi-yo.” Photos by Aliza Worthington.
“The Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum” exhibition is available for viewing until Feb. 16, 2025. The Baltimore Museum of Art is located at 10 Art Museum Drive, Baltimore, MD.
