New collection focuses on Indigenous perspectives on the American Southwest
Sun Journal, May 19, 2023
A collection installation centering Pueblo perspectives on the context that informed the social and cultural landscape of Taos from 1915 to 1927, when the Taos Society of Artists, a group of Anglo-American painters, was active. It also sheds light on issues that affect Native people today, in the Southwest and beyond.
The exhibition features paintings by TSA artists from the Lunder Collection in dialogue with works by twentieth- and twenty-first-century Native American artists, including new acquisitions, to illuminate the varied, complex, and rich art histories of the U.S. Southwest, in particular the city of Taos and Taos Pueblo, New Mexico. This collection installation also will include writing, sound, and artworks from the featured artists and other Native culture bearers as part of new research initiated by the museum’s Lunder Institute for American Art, which was established in 2017.
In keeping with its long-term commitment to furthering collaborative methodologies, the Colby Museum is integrating and centering input from Native community partners throughout the project. The reinstallation’s co-curators are 2021–22 Lunder Institute research fellows Juan Lucero (Isleta Pueblo) and Jill Ahlberg Yohe, who worked in collaboration with Siera Hyte, the Colby Museum’s assistant curator of modern and contemporary art. Virgil Ortiz (Cochiti Pueblo) is the project’s exhibition designer. A curatorial advisory council made up of Pueblo and Wabanaki artists and stakeholders provided essential guidance on the installation and its interpretative elements. The council members are Ron Martinez Looking Elk (Isleta Pueblo/Taos Pueblo), Patricia Michaels (Taos Pueblo), Theresa Secord (Penobscot), Sarah Sockbeson (Penobscot), and Dr. Joseph Suina (Cochiti Pueblo). Through this project, and specifically through the advisory council, the museum seeks to facilitate opportunities for intertribal dialogue between Wabanaki and Pueblo communities.