In his 1946 speech The Primacy of Perception and its Philosophical Consequences, philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argues that subjective perception is “paradoxical”: the object of perception unequivocally exists, he explains, but “only insofar as someone can perceive it. I cannot even for an instant imagine an object in itself.” When artist Lorenzo Clayton first encountered this phrase, he interpreted it through a Cartesian lens and took umbrage at its underlying assumption that objects cannot possess their own consciousnesses. In Indigenous Identities, now on view at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, he interrogates this quote through a time-based sculpture, Consciously Conscious Numbers (2024), a collaboration Clayton initiated with engineering professor George Sidebotham and production designer Timothy Corbett.
The installation, backdropped by a hanging scroll emblazoned with a seemingly infinite string of numbers, features a flickering elliptical blue screen and a manipulated clock. Multiple sets of numbers peek through thin layers of paint and multiple sets of hands run forwards and backwards at varying speeds, calling attention to the viewer’s transience. While Clayton’s perspective draws from his Diné heritage, at the Zimmerli Art Museum, Consciously Conscious Numbers is juxtaposed with artworks by ninety-six other artists representing over seventy tribal nations across North America, emphasizing the diversity of voices and cosmologies in contemporary Indigenous art. Clayton’s work, stretching time and tradition into infinity, also encapsulates the subtitle of the exhibition as a whole: Here, Now & Always.
Indigenous Identities: Here, Now & Always is the swan song of late contemporary artist-curator Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, herself of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nations. Most recently, Smith was the subject of a roughly fifty-year retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art and helmed the National Gallery’s first ever artist-curated exhibition. Though the number of works gathered in Indigenous Identities (over one hundred) appears overwhelming on paper, the curatorial team of Smith, her son Neil Ambrose-Smith, and assistant curator Raven Manygoats successfully avoid the pitfalls of large group exhibitions by providing the curatorial precision needed for a comprehensive and multifaceted, yet still accessible mosaic of contemporary Native American art.
Smith divides Indigenous Identities into four segments: “Political,” “Social,” “Land,” and “Tribal.” The exhibition’s structure lets each work flow logically into the next, forming smaller-scale recurring themes within, and sometimes between, the overarching segments. For instance, while Ambrose-Smith’s neon sculpture of a teepee emblazoned with its title, Abstract in Your Home (2009), is featured in the Political section, it addresses tensions between commodification and humanity that are similar to those Ryan Singer explores in The Vendor (2014), which Smith placed in the Social section. These cross-thematic curatorial choices anchor the individual works within the currents of what could have been an overly nebulous theme.
A recurrent thread in the Political section is the persistence of injustices against Indigenous people. For instance, Jeffrey Gibson’s She Never Dances Alone (2021), a continuation of his 2019 Times Square multi-channel video installation of the same name, celebrates the importance of Native American women while calling attention to the ongoing crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) of North America. Marie Watt simultaneously references both the Seneca practice of commemorating milestones with blankets and the eighteenth-century British imperialist tactic of giving blankets contaminated with smallpox to vulnerable Indigenous populations in Skywalker/Skyscraper (Twins) (2020). The sculpture, two identical stacks of blankets adorned by steel beams, fuses the complex imagery of blankets with the contour of the Twin Towers, buildings that—like many skyscrapers—were produced by the often-overlooked labor of Mohawk ironworkers, also known as “skywalkers.”
Smith bookends the Land section with the assertion that “Natives of the Americas live in a holistic world without a horizon line.” We can see one way this is articulated in Rushing Water (2001), where artist Emmi Whitehorse transmogrifies an answered prayer for water, a joyous affirmation of life, into bloody thickets of wide brushstrokes and tiny scribbles. Whitehorse’s forms wash over crimson sands and a convergence of wounds both healed and opened—we see disjointed geometric shapes, hooves, and human silhouettes celebrating, or perhaps drowning. Jordan Ann Craig similarly flattens a tumultuous thunderstorm into a high-contrast symmetrical geometric pattern in the onomatopoeic Colliding Clouds (2020), hybridizing Northern Cheyenne and De Stijl motifs. Athena LaTocha’s abstract mixed-media Murderers Creek (2018–19) combines both media and subject, assuming the form of a landscape dense with vortices of smog and shadow bisected by a “road gator” (a ragged exploded car tire) that LaTocha used to apply pigment to paper.
Works featured in the Tribal section depict cultural and collective resilience, a refusal to adhere to the myth of the “vanishing Indian.” Linda King’s Beauty Set (2020), for instance, juxtaposes individualized beadwork, emblematic of centuries-old handcrafting, with mass-produced contemporary everyday objects, dispelling the notion that “traditional” practices are confined to the past. The section’s most powerful work is Sonya Kelliher-Combs’s Remnant (Walrus Bone IV) (2019), which features a walrus bone placed in a white wooden box webbed with cracks and caked in dirt, covered in waxy resin salted with pockmarks, surface scratches, and warping. Kelliher-Combs’s presentation of the walrus bone foregrounds the object’s age (or poor preservation), recalling antiquated methods of archiving and exhibiting Indigenous artifacts, presenting Indigeneity as a bygone history instead of an enduring present. Kelliher-Combs pairs the object with three dictionary definitions of the word “remnant,” with the most poignant reading “what is left of a community after it undergoes a catastrophe.” Here the artist invokes both historical tragedy and the catastrophic looming presence of climate change while calling our role as viewers into question. Are we observing this object in the present, past, or future?
The adjoining exhibition Hope With Humor also features a handful of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s works that are held by the Zimmerli Art Museum, making apparent the parallels between works by the curator and her peers. One of Smith’s works, Survival Suite: Wisdom/Knowledge (1996), incorporates an illustration by George Catlin that documents his exploitative touring exhibitions of Indigenous people. Similarly, in Dickens (2022), artist Sarah Sense constructs a Chitimacha and Choctaw basket-weaving motif from eighteenth-century records of violent British settler-colonialism, including maps, manuscripts, and photography, effectively reclaiming and “re-Indigenizing” the history these archival materials encompass.
Smith’s passing a week before the exhibition’s opening imbues its meditation on the cyclical connection between artistic production and curatorship with a distinctly bittersweet flavor. Indigenous Identities: Here, Now & Always is the rare group exhibition that is both even-handed and intentional. Each artist makes a distinct contribution, and, since many of the exhibition’s contributors were either taught or mentored by Smith and Ambrose-Smith, the show serves as an embodiment of her family’s commitment to fostering the careers of Indigenous contemporary artists within the fine arts channels that they have historically been excluded from.
—Joanna Seifter