In an Exhibition of Native Artists, Clichés Give Way to Charged Memories

New York Times

01-05-2025

In the Hudson River Museum, landscape is usually a celebration: grand, idealized and comfortably distant. The river bends picturesquely; the skies flush with sunset pinks; the forests remain untamed. It's an aesthetic shorthand that still shapes how we mostly see the land: as backdrop, as bounty, as beauty.
Along with this view is another, where the terrain is splintered and rust-streaked, its scars reworked into irony. Not Thomas Cole's wilderness or the Hudson River School's frontier, it reflects a messier America, where landscape is both home and battleground. An America where Sacagawea graces coins as a unity symbol — while settlers keep the deeds.
'Smoke in Our Hair: Native Memory and Unsettled Time,' on view through August, boldly corrects the romanticism usually lining these museum galleries. The exhibition was curated by Sháńdíín Brown, a graduate student at Yale, and features 22 Native artists who rewrite the land as contested, communal and charged with memory. Brown is part of a new wave of curators including Amber-Dawn Bear Robe, Darienne Turner and Kalyn Fay Barnoski, who reframe Native art not as artifact but as argument.
The title, from a poem by the Tohono O'odham linguist Ofelia Zepeda, clings like juniper on skin. Smoke, she writes, travels deep into memory, lingering in hair and clothing — a scent you carry with you.
In the American fable, Indigenous people are cast as side characters to innocent explorers fulfilling Manifest Destiny. In museums, art by Indigenous people has been seen as artifact, not intervention or complex storytelling — reduced to dream catchers, headdresses and pottery, repackaged for nostalgia and sale. Meanwhile, the land that once held the homes of Indigenous people is rendered scenic, lush and anonymous. The Native scholar Vine Deloria Jr. in his seminal book 'Custer Died for Your Sins' put it this way: 'To be an Indian in modern American society is in a very real sense to be unreal and ahistorical.'
On a frigid February night, I found myself in the presence of something undeniably real. At the Hudson River Museum, a group gathered to pay homage to an exhibition articulated through the Native curatorial gaze: 22 place-based artists working from landscapes both geographic and conceptual.
James Luna's 'High Tech Peace Pipe' (1992), a ceremonial pipe fused with a push-button phone base — two bygone communication devices — makes for a surreal, hat-on-a-hat gag. 'You have to laugh, or else you'll cry,' Brown, the curator, joked at the opening, verbally tossing the 'Western gaze' out with the Indian blanket.
'White Flag' (2022) by Nicholas Galanin also recasts a recognizable trope. His pole-dancing polar bear — a legless white beast posed like a defeated stripper — disarms the familiar. In 'America Spirit' (2021), the clever mocking of the commodification of Arctic identity continues. The artist Matthew Kirk shows us a slouching log, winking at settler corporate romanticization and using a tobacco brand as proxy.
Where Galanin's satire stings, Luna's 'The History of the Luiseño People" (1993) slips into banality: an armchair draped in Pendleton fabric — produced by a non-Native-owned company, with references to Native patternmaking — a half-lit tree, a staged holiday scene that in its inertia, produces a sense of anhedonia, a stark contrast to the many percussive works in the exhibition.
If Luna's work speaks to stagnation, Marie Watt's 'Companion Species (Resemblance)' from 2021 counters it with movement and multiplicity. Where colonial quilt traditions can veer into nostalgia or myth, colonial quilting becomes kinship here, stitched with words like 'missing and murdered,' 'future generations' and 'pollinators.' The work has the same barbed narration as much of the show but also evokes the Lakota phrase 'mitákuye oyásiŋ' — we are all related.
'Vestige' (2022) by Tania Willard is both tree and monument. 'This is a monument,' etched into the central panel, is flanked by pristine rings, making time's imprint visible. Her tree rings become record and relic — proof that land was always the first archive. Andrea Carlson uses similar language in her 'Never-Ending Monument' (2021). Its 27 driftwood-like columns topped with spheres and sea gulls critique monumentality but lack Willard's gravitas. It left me asking, What is a monument? Carlson's answer — the land itself — felt overly literal. Art today, Native included, sometimes clubs us with its clarity.
But her earlier work, like 'Portage' (2008), brims with conceptual rigor. Carlson, an Ojibwe artist, depicts a Rocky Mountain cliffside enrobed in a backstrap chevron weave — a V-shaped pattern symbolizing the passage of time. Past, present and future coexist, with the Native presence recentralized in human-land relationships.
An untitled oil painting by George Morrison from 1965 charts two-dimensional topographies dissected by grid lines. It's a nod to the 1887 Dawes Act's carving of tribal lands, and the blank title echoes the era's bureaucratic erasure. Sonya Kelliher-Combs's 'Natural Idiot Strings' (2022), made of bowed wire and floating wooden moccasin inserts, plays with expectations of authenticity. Her surreal forms conjure a line by the writer Tommy Orange: 'You can't trust the authenticity of a thing by the way it looks.' Here, Indigeneity — a.k.a. a deeply rooted connection to ancestral lands, distinct cultures, self-determined sovereignty, and historical continuity as original peoples resisting colonization — is not static but provisional, where identity slips between performance, perception and the demand to prove one's Native-ness.
In the exhibition as a whole, Native artists focus not on nostalgia but on nerve; not cliché, but confrontation. We can only hope these works become widely recognized as metaphors for Native America, replacing glowing-wolf posters and Edward Curtis's staged black-and-white photos. If sentimentality remains, it's for the land itself: a site of survival and possibility, not just scenery.