Collection Tweed Museum of Art, art by Rabbett Before Horses Strickland
A new show at the University of Minnesota’s Katherine E. Nash Gallery titled “Dreaming Our Futures: Ojibwe and Očhéthi Šakówiŋ Artists and Knowledge Keepers” showcases an impressive range of perspectives and aesthetic approaches across the work of 29 Indigenous painters and multimedia artists. The truly momentous exhibition marks the opening of the George Morrison Center for Indigenous arts and will travel across Minnesota throughout 2024. The show is on view at the Katherine E. Nash Gallery through March 16.
Collection Tweed Museum of Art, art by Dyani White Hawk
The show’s title, “Dreaming Our Futures,” calls to mind critical positions like Indigenous Futurism and, more specifically, Diné photographer Will Wilson’s practice of “remembering the future.” If colonial linear time’s telos is the erasure of Indigenous people and the complete extraction of resources (to fatally toxic and radioactive ends), then the process of “remembering the future” seeks to disrupt this narrative formation by introducing alternative, non-linear temporalities—to dream futures wherein Indigenous life has persisted and culture and sovereignty have been recovered in the face of total destruction.
Collection of Plains Art Museum, art by Andrea Carlson
In “Dreaming Our Futures,” artists tell these stories, and the exhibition is a must-see. Included among the impressive roster of artists is Dyani White Hawk (Sičaŋǧu Lakota), recently awarded the MacArthur Fellowship “Genius Grant.” Much of White Hawk’s work combines reference to Lakota textile patterns with “Western” modes of abstraction, drawing attention to the ways the development of contemporary abstract art is inextricable from (often unrecognized) Indigenous abstract aesthetic practices. Her monumental painting “Untitled (Quiet Strength III)” evokes the subtle coloring and precise gridwork of abstract painter Agnes Martin. Upon closer inspection, White Hawk has performed a subtle inversion; the grids have been spliced, tilted, and offset to create a more geometrically dynamic pattern, and the multi-tonal stripes that the grid comprises in fact resemble traditional porcupine quillwork. The painting can thus be said to be abstract and representational, its referent being the entangled histories of easel-painting and Indigenous textile-making.
Courtesy of Rabbett Before Horses Strickland
My favorite artworks in the exhibition are a collection of paintings by Rabbet Before Horses Strickland (Red Cliff Band of Anishinaabe). I think it appropriate to call his paintings powerhouses of narrative form, art-historical reference, and composition. Perhaps it was my recent, rather disappointing encounter with Botticelli’s “Primavera” bubbling over, but encountering Strickland’s “Searching for Nokomis” for the first time felt like a punch in the gut. The painter’s study of the techniques and forms of Renaissance and Baroque masters is certainly evident but does in no way overwhelm Strickland’s singular vision. Utilizing and revitalizing familiar “Western” forms and formats to communicate traditional scenes from Ojibwe mythology and storytelling, Strickland creates an immensely evocative, dream-like world, subverting the traditional (Christian or classical Greco-Roman mythological) subject matter endemic to the genre.
