From November 16, 2024, through February 9, 2025, the FloGris Museum hosts two exhibitions that acknowledge the perspective and artistic achievements of the Indigenous community
Thomas Cole, Kaaterskill Falls, 1826, oil on canvas, 25¼ × 35¼ in. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT, Bequest of Daniel Wadsworth, 1848
Old Lyme, CT – October 21, 2024: The FloGris Museum in Old Lyme, CT is thrilled to host Native Prospects: Indigeneity and Landscape from November 16, 2024, through February 9, 2025. The exhibition was curated by Scott Manning Stevens, PhD / Karoniaktatsie (Akwesasne Mohawk) and was organized by the Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill, NY, with loans from public and private collections. Native Prospects juxtaposes an Indigenous approach to the articulation of land in art with the Romantic landscape paintings of Thomas Cole. The exhibition presents 19th-century paintings by Thomas Cole featuring Native figures, in context with Indigenous works of historic and cultural resonance, and artworks by contemporary Indigenous artists: Teresa Baker (Mandan/Hidatsa), Brandon Lazore (Onondaga, Snipe Clan), Truman T. Lowe (Ho-Chunk), Alan Michelson (Mohawk member of the Six Nations of the Grand River) and Kay WalkingStick (Cherokee). This cross-cultural exhibition offers profound interpretations of American art and land, expands conventional definitions of “land” and “landscape,” and highlights Indigenous artistic creation.
The Indigenous approach to land underscores a mutual relationship of nurturing and caretaking. As Dr. Stevens writes, “For many Indigenous peoples, including the Haudenosaunee, it is our relationship with the land that is of paramount importance. That relationship teaches us the ethics on which our societies are built.” He continues, “any abstract portrayal of the land and its features in our visual culture is meant to call to mind those relationships—relationships that we have a sacred duty to remember and maintain.” The approach to nature exemplified by Cole’s one-point perspective landscape paintings is rooted in a European tradition that reflects a perceived right to dominate and rule over nature, as seen for example in an oft-quoted passage from Genesis: “Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”
Much of the critique of 19th-century American landscape painting has focused on the absence of depictions of the original inhabitants of the land. Yet communities of Native peoples had lived throughout these regions for millennia, constructing villages and clearing woods for agricultural fields, as they supported their communities from the resources of the land and its waterways.
Unlike most of his artistic circle, Thomas Cole (1801–1848) included Native figures in many of his landscape paintings, though most often alone. Dr. Stevens interprets these figures as what art historians refer to as “staffage,” or accessories that are not the main subject of the artwork. In Cole’s case, these figures served to provide a sense of scale, geographic location, and arguably time period. Scale was often related to the sublime aspects of certain natural features such as a waterfall or mountain, while identifying a figure as Native American placed the viewer in an American locale, and finally, having a lone Native figure in the landscape, dressed in a stereotypically Indigenous manner, pointed to the country’s past, with the implicit and harmful presumption that Native Americans were no longer present in this region. Cole’s Native figures demonstrate no ethnographic acuity on the artist’s part, beyond romanticized stereotype.
Native Prospects reflects this aspect of the landscape painting tradition while examining representations of land by Native peoples, both in the distant past and today. While Indigenous societies in North America did not have a tradition of representational landscape art, the land was featured abstractly as it related to Native communities in various designs, some decorative and others mnemonic. Contemporary Native visual artists encompass a variety of legacies of representing the land, a fraught subject for many Native artists because of the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from the land and the peril facing the land historically and today.
“Indigenous societies flourish when we recognize that our relationship to the land is as much determined by responsibilities as it is by rights,” said exhibition curator Scott Manning Stevens, PhD. “We maintain our collective right to protect the land and all that’s on it, and we do so with our custodial duties toward the environment in mind. For many Indigenous peoples the European landscape tradition in art presents viewers with a false sense that North America was an uninhabited wilderness waiting to be settled or that the beauty of nature can be depicted with a sense of nostalgia or in an elegiac light, given the inevitability of the presumed advance of ‘civilization’ with its towns, cities, and industries. Contemporary Native artists have inherited this tradition but feel compelled to respond from their own perspectives and be mindful of their traditions. For some that is delivered as a critique and for others it is a prompt to revisit the ancestral views of their people.”
“Our Museum is proud to make space for this unprecedented and much needed reconsideration of nineteenth-century paintings through the lens of Indigenous people,” notes Executive Director of the FloGris Joshua Campbell Torrance. “By pairing these historic depictions of the land with works by contemporary Indigenous artists, this exhibition expands the audience’s concept of landscape and their awareness of Indigenous perspectives.”
The companion exhibition, naqutiwowok/continuance: Connecticut’s Tribal Communities Create, emerged from the FloGris Museum’s interest to elaborate upon Native Prospects with the perspectives and voices of Connecticut’s Indigenous people. The collaboration has been led by people from the state’s five recognized tribes (Schaghticoke, Paucatuck Eastern Pequot, Mashantucket Pequot, Mohegan, and Golden Hill Paugussett), who decided to curate the exhibition from work submitted by members of the tribes. The planners sought contributions to the exhibition that express thoughts about Indigeneity and landscape from the viewpoint of this region’s people. The exhibition takes place during the fall and winter seasons, times of year that carry specific cultural and spiritual resonances. The organizers encouraged participants to consider and reflect concepts such as gathering, resiliency, connecting, relating, walking (land), paddling (water), repairing, continuation, sustaining, warming, and changing. The art, contributed by adults and youth, represents an array of media under the theme of continuity through time.
The exhibitions are accompanied by public programs exploring storytelling, food, language, and the environment, among other topics. Learn more at FloGris.org.
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