Native American artist Jeffrey Gibson’s work is part of a brand new exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum which examines misconceptions around Native art and biases by non-Native artists.
The Brooklyn Museum asked Gibson, who is of Choctaw and Cherokee descent, to explore its collection of Native American objects, which he did along with including his own art, and commentary by historian Dr. Christian Ayne Crouch, to offer new narratives on Indigenous people and their history and stories.
The exhibition is called “Jeffrey Gibson: When Fire Is Applied to a Stone It Cracks,” and the title comes from an Irish proverb, which Gibson describes in the show as being factual and metaphorically poetic.
“I read ‘fire’ in this quote to describe the innovative making, use of materials, transformative techniques, and the survivalist ethic of Indigenous people,” according to Gibson. “Our use of new and different materials to make things that support ourselves and our communities is the ‘fire’ that continues to break open the static and antiquated ideas regarding who we are and what we are capable of.”
“When Fire Is Applied to a Stone It Cracks,” Jeffrey Gibson, 2019.
When entering the exhibition, visitors immediately face a sculpture called “Dying Indian,” from around 1904 and by Charles Cary Rumsey, a piece that Gibson says is one of many Western bronzes made around that time, by non-Native people, to portray the decline and end of Native American civilizations.
Gibson notes that such images “have always saddened and perplexed me because I have never understood why some people celebrate these sculptures while I have found them offensive since I was a child.” Gibson also says about such images, “These sculptures present images of Native people that are idealized in the mind of the maker either for the objectification of their beauty or their demise.”
The “Dying Indian” sculpture has been modified with a custom pair of moccasins added to the figure, which were made by artist John Murie and include the words, “I’m Gonna Run with Every Minute I Can Borrow.” The phrase is from lyrics in the Roberta Flack song “See You Then.”
Another gallery includes works by Native artists from the museum’s collection, complemented by Gibson’s own works in similar techniques and materials. These include headdresses by Tsimshian and Sioux or Cheyenne artists, which Gibson notes have becomes used for romanticized or stereotyped notions of Native American people, and clothing by Seminole artists.
There are also many objects using beadwork, which dates back to the 16th century when Europeans introduced glass beads in trading, and Gibson notes the conflict between Indigenous people using such materials for their own crafts and the Western demand for what is traditionally thought by many as Native art that includes beadwork.
Man’s Shirt, c. 1940, and Dress, 20th century, by Seminole artists.Garments made by Jeffrey Gibson in 2018.“WHOSE WORLD IS THIS? IT’S YOURS IT’S MINE,” 2019, stained glass, by Jeffrey Gibson.
Another gallery examines the work of Stewart Culin, the first curator starting in 1903 of the Department of Ethnology at what would become the Brooklyn Museum, and who the exhibition says held racist views that contributed to bias in his curating practices. Gibson and Crouch address this and seek to change the narrative.
“The material in this room rejects the romanticized idea of the West – a false, vanishing frontier—or the reductive theatricality of the Wild West show,” Gibson and Crouch write. “We aimed to mute Culin’s voice in order to return the focus to Native people represented in the Archives and reports, who went about their daily lives and projected distinct representations of themselves.”
The exhibition will run until Jan. 10, 2021, and more information is at brooklynmuseum.org.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
