1. Student-curated exhibition brings Native American art to forefront
The Miscellany News, December 5, 2013
Many scholars believe that
Native American culture
currently findsitself in a
troubling situation: too many
people think of it only in the past
tense. Vassar’s new course
Decolonizing the Exhibition:
Contemporary Inuit Prints and
Drawings from the Edward J.
Guarino Collection seeks to
rectify this.
The course will culminate in an
exhibition preceded by a panel
presentation in Taylor Hall 102
from 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. today. The
reception will be open until 9 p.m.
in the Frances Lehman Loeb Art
Center, and the exhibition will be
on view through Feb. 2, 2014.
“One of the stereotypes is that all Native people are dead—that they no longer exist,” said
Assistant Professor of English and Native American Studies Molly McGlennen, who teaches
the course. Therefore, in an effort to deconstruct this stereotype, the exhibition focuses mainly
on contemporary art.
“When many people think about Indigenous art, they imagine displays of artifacts in cabinets
of antiquated curiosities,” wrote Logan Woodruff ’14, a student of McGlennen’s class, in an
emailed statement. “Far too many museums and institutions present Native Peoples as absent,
conquered and historicized within a dominant narrative. This colonial museology fails to
acknowledge the contemporary existence of Indigenous Peoples and the dynamic and
sophisticated ways in which contemporary Indigenous artists are unsettling this narrative.”
Similarly, Kristina Arike ’14 wrote in an emailed statement, “Few exhibitions celebrate
thriving, contemporary Native art the way that [Decolonizing the Exhibition] does. I hope that
audiences leave this exhibit with a heightened interest [in] and awareness of the work being
done by Native artists, as well as a more critical lens with which to evaluate what they see in
natural history museums that continue to pervade the colonial agenda.” Before viewing the
pieces, the exhibition visitors will be informed by a panel. Decolonizing the Exhibition: Four
Perspectives on Indigenous Visual Culture in the Museum Space will feature
Chitimacha/Choctaw artist Sarah Sense, art collector and donor Guarino, art history major and
Native studies correlate Pilar Jefferson ’15,and McGlennen herself.
Kenojuak Ashevak’s Animals Out of Darkness,
shown above, is one of many Indigenous artworks
that will be on display in the student-curated exhibit
Decolonizing the Exhibition. The show will be on
view through Feb. 2, 2014. Photo courtesy of Vassar
College Admissions.

2. The panel is a discussion of the traditional interpretations of Native American art as well as an
exchange of perspectives. “[Guarino’s] perspective on collecting and donating is quite different
than my perspective as an academic...who studies these pieces to understand more about Native
visualculture,” she said.The student-curated exhibit will display eight Inuit prints and drawings.
“How [the Inuit] started printmaking was from these art cooperatives created by the Canadian
government in the 1950s,” McGlennen said. “So that, in and of itself, is a relationship that can
be vexing.”
“Citing that historical relationship…is something we’re really interested in in the class,” she
continued. “And while we’ll have the wall labels for the pieces in the exhibit itself in the Loeb,
we’re also going to have a website that will show more pieces with extended virtual wall labels.
It’ll give a sort of fuller story to what we can’t necessarily have room for in the Loeb.”
To highlight the fuller story, the course title is a play on words. “We do hope to unsettle the
exhibition, meaning…that non-Native peoples [have] a perception of what Indians should look
like, what their art should be—symbols and signs that quintessentially identify Indianness for
Americans,” said McGlennen. “In that way, there is…this idea of tourism or [exhibitionism] that
Americans perceive that they have access to [and] have complete knowledge about.”
In order to more critically analyze Native art and the way it is understood, the 15 students of
Decolonizing the Exhibition have been researching and creating wall labels for the exhibited
pieces. McGlennen said, “I was giving them constant encouragement to find out more, to say it
better, to think critically about: ‘Is this coming from an outsider’s perspective, or is this coming,
do you think, from an Inuit perspective?’ So we really had to think hard about what…it [means],
then, to say that we’re attempting to create a Native American studies perspective when you
yourself are not Native.”
McGlennen continued, “I think of contemporary art as a continuation of Native storytelling, and
I think that the image—visual culture—is so powerful because it seeps into so many areas of our
life….So just think of that kind of symbol of an Indian again, that someone who thinks they
understand Indianness in these really reduced symbols—the visual culture produced by these
Native people speaks right back to that and right through it. It breaks it down. This visual culture
is, in a way, Native people telling their own stories in their own terms.”
Reflecting on this visual culture, Woodruff wrote, “The prints and drawings in the exhibition are
extraordinary. Each time I return to one of the works I see something that I had missed before;
they grow more and more complex and magnetic. Everything that I thought I understood about
the work is unsettled by each new discovery.”