Many Wests: Artists Shape an American Idea

Audio Guide

#1
Introduction

Commonly accepted ideas about the American West are often based on a past that never was and frequently diminish, if not overlook entirely, the experiences of Indigenous and Black people and people of color. For some, “The West” can conjure images of rugged colonial settlers, gun-toting-cowboys, or scenic expanses of vacant land. These stereotypical associations took hold in the eighteenth century, as the U.S. government aggressively expanded westward across the continent. Over this period, the United States fought and displaced Indigenous people, stripped the region of its natural resources, and seized lands through treaties and wars.

Many Wests: Artists Shape an American Idea offers counterviews of “the West” through the perspectives of forty-eight modern and contemporary artists. Their artworks question old and racist clichés, examine tragic and sidelined histories, and illuminate the multiple communities and events that contribute to the past and present of this region. The exhibition’s three sections—Caretakers, Memory Makers, and Boundary Breakers—highlight the various ways artists challenge mythic conceptions of the American West, often demonstrating the resilience of marginalized communities. They reveal that “the West” has always been a place of many stories, experiences and cultures.

This exhibition is the culmination of a multi-year Art Bridges Initiative organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum that aims to expand access to, and experiences of, American art. Since 2019, SAAM has partnered with four Western region museums—the Boise Art Museum (Boise, Idaho), the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (Salt Lake City, Utah), the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art (Eugene, Oregon), and the Whatcom Museum (Bellingham, Washington). Many Wests brings together artworks from the permanent collections of all five museums and shows how art can help us reflect on history and envision a more inclusive future.

Many Wests was organized by:

Amy Chaloupka, Curator of Art, Whatcom Museum

Melanie Fales, Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer, Boise Art Museum

Anne Hyland, Art Bridges Initiative Curatorial Coordinator, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Danielle Knapp, McCosh Curator, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, University of Oregon

E. Carmen Ramos, former Acting Chief Curator, Curator of Latinx Art, and Art Bridges Initiative Project Director, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Whitney Tassie, Senior Curator and Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Utah Museum of Fine Arts

This is one in a series of American art exhibitions created through a multi-year, multi-institutional partnership formed by the Smithsonian American Art Museum as part of the Art Bridges Initiative.

Art Bridges logo and Smithsonian American Art Museum logo

Sponsored at the Boise Art Museum by

THE HARDY FOUNDATION
Kay Hardy and Gregory Kaslo

 

Land Acknowledgment | The subject of this exhibition makes us especially cognizant of the Indigenous people who are the original stewards and protectors of this continent. The Boise Art Museum, the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, and the Whatcom Museum collectively acknowledge and honor the tribal communities upon whose homelands our institutions reside today.

Doeg Tribe
Goshute Tribe
Kalapuya Tribe
Lhaq’temish—Lummi People
Nacotchtank Tribe
Nuxwsá7aq—Nooksack People
Paiute Tribe
Piscataway Tribe
Shoshone Tribe
Shoshone-Bannock Tribe
Shoshone-Paiute Tribe
Ute Tribe

#2
Section Topic: Caretakers

Through their work, artists can redefine what it means to take care of themselves, their communities, and their futures. The artistic choices they make are often influenced by commitments to the stewardship of land, history, language, and culture. Artists have tremendous power as the custodians of their own truths. They draw upon their personal narratives, communal ties, and collective experiences in the American West to honor the past and shape legacies for generations to come. Artworks made in response to urgent political, social, or environmental needs are often calls to action. For many, the act of creation is personally therapeutic and life-affirming. As caretakers, artists bridge past and present and work toward better futures.

#3
Laura Aguilar, Nature Self-Portrait #12

Laura Aguilar
born San Gabriel, California, 1959;
died Long Beach, California, 2018

Nature Self-Portrait #12, 1996
gelatin silver print

Laura Aguilar’s identity as a queer Chicana informed her work as an artist throughout her career. In the Nature Self-Portrait series, Aguilar uses her own nude body as both sculptural object and photographic subject, juxtaposing the soft folds in her flesh with the harsh elements of the natural landscape surrounding her. The duality of her introverted posture and the extroverted vulnerability of her nude body invite the viewer to reconsider conventional notions of beauty and body politics in relation to the female form in art and photography. Aguilar’s effortless existence within this landscape also reclaims the American Southwest by a person of Mexican descent for her community. She has said, “My photography has always provided me with an opportunity to open myself up and see the world around me. And most of all, photography makes me look within.”

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the American Women’s History Initiative Acquisitions Pool, administered by the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative.

In the center of this black-and-white photograph, a nude woman with medium-dark skin lies on flat and barren land among several large, dark boulders. She is lying on her side with her knees bent toward her chest and her back toward us.

#4
Michael Brophy, Beaver Trade

Michael Brophy
born Portland, Oregon, 1960

Beaver Trade, 2002
oil on canvas

Brophy’s paintings explore the dramatic changes that have occurred in the Northwest landscape across time, while reflecting on the complex relationship between humans and nature. Human destruction is indicated in the painting by footprints embedded in a large totem and leading to a figure dressed in eighteenth-century colonial clothing. A white flag bears the Latin phrase PRO PELLE CUTEM, meaning “a pelt for a skin,” the motto of the fur-trading Hudson’s Bay Company. Felled branches and a flooded landscape further allude to the environmental harm caused by human actions. “I’m not interested in a romanticized or sanitized vision of nature,” the artist says, “but one in which the marks of civilization are given their due. I like the idea of nature on the edge, with people pressing against it.”

Boise Art Museum Permanent Collection, Collectors Forum Purchase, 2008

A painting depicts a lone man standing atop a large totem pole with a stylized beaver carving on its base and carved footprints leading up to the man. The figure overlooks a calm body of water with bare trees emerging from the water's surface in the background. Floating, fallen lumber gathers at the water’s edge in the foreground. A white flag repeating the Latin words PRO PELLE CUTEM appears in the top left corner of the artwork.

#5
Rubén Trejo, Roots

Rubén Trejo
born Saint Paul, Minnesota, 1937;
died Spokane, Washington, 2009

Roots, 1982
steel, wood, metal, and wood shavings

In Roots, Rubén Trejo blends elements of abstraction with recognizable objects. The work’s title is evocative of his personal story, suggesting the struggle and reward of exploring familial and cultural ties. Trejo began a teaching position at Eastern Washington University in Cheney, Washington, in 1973. Over the next thirty years, he nurtured a vibrant and welcoming community for Chicanx students there and committed his art practice to cultural reclamation. Trejo was deeply influenced by the artistic legacy of Mexico, which informed his identity as a Chicano man living in the Pacific Northwest: “In all of my works I feel like I am trying to be conscious of history, of our multiple histories, where they intersect and where they divide,” he explained in 2001. “I am acutely aware of how language, quite literally, shapes who we are.”

Collection of the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, University of Oregon,
Museum purchase

A wood-framed box with opposing glass sides sits at a height of 5 feet on an attached wooden pole with four-legged base. Visible inside the box, a green root-shaped structure hangs from the top over a bed of brown wood shavings.

#6
Patrick Nagatani, Nuclear Enchantments series

Patrick Nagatani
born Chicago, Illinois, 1945;
died Albuquerque, New Mexico, 2017

Nuclear Enchantments series, 1988–1993
chromogenic prints

As a Japanese American born just thirteen days after the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima, Nagatani was fascinated with New Mexico’s nuclear weapons industry. As he studied the contaminated sites of uranium mines, he also learned about the oldest continuous culture in North America, the Pueblo Indians, whose land and people were disproportionately impacted by U.S. atomic ambitions.

The surreal scenes of Nagatani’s Nuclear Enchantment series use elaborate sets, hand coloring, and printing techniques to weave together images of toxic test sites, schools, atomic monuments, radioactive waste dumps, and sovereign Native lands. The artist exposes the abuses of the New Mexico landscape and its inhabitants perpetrated by the mining industry and the military in answering the government’s thirst for atomic power.

Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Gift of Dr. Mark Reichman

With a red-and-black sky background, this layered print depicts two groups of three people with black hair wearing sun glasses, with some holding bowls of food and eating utensils. One person in each group is looking back toward two, tall, rocket-shaped objects in the distance.

Patrick Nagatani, National Atomic Museum, Kirtland Air Force Base, Albuquerque, New Mexico1989, from the series Nuclear Enchantments, 1988–1993, chromogenic prints, Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Gift of Dr. Mark Reichman

A bright, yellow sky forms the background for this print of a rural scene. A tall, industrial structure, constructed of thin bars, is centered on the horizon. A black-and-white cow stands in the left foreground, with its backend facing us.

Patrick Nagatani, Cow Pie/Yellow Cake, Uranium Mine, Homestake Mining Company, near Mt. Taylor, Milan and Grants, New Mexico, 1989, from the series Nuclear Enchantments, 1988–1993, chromogenic prints, Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Gift of Dr. Mark Reichman

A collaged photograph depicting a one-story, brown building with tall blue-and-white structures resembling rockets in the background and a parking lot in the foreground. Six translucent black-and-white portraits of men and women of varying ethnicities and genders are overlaid across the parking lot.

Patrick Nagatani, Missile Display, Robert Goddard High School, Roswell, New Mexico, 1990, from the series Nuclear Enchantments, 1988–1993, chromogenic prints, Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Gift of Dr. Mark Reichman

A collaged photograph depicting a brown, rocky landscape and small, white crosses, with a green-and-yellow sky is bisected by a thin, vertical rod and an illustration of a black-and-brown twisting fish hanging from the rod.

Patrick Nagatani, Japanese Children’s Day Carp Banners, Paguate Village, Jackpile Mine Uranium Tailings, Laguna Pueblo Reservation, New Mexico, 1990/1993, from the series Nuclear Enchantments, 1988–1993, chromogenic prints, Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Gift of Dr. Mark Reichman

A collaged photograph showing a pyramid-shaped monument made of dark rock in the center of the composition with a mountain in the distant background. Angled, thin, white lines and green, stone forms appear to be raining down from the sky. In the foreground, a man, seen from the neck up, holds a black umbrella and wears a yellow radiation hood.

Patrick Nagatani, Trinitite, Ground Zero, Trinity Site, New Mexico, 1988–1989/1993, from the series Nuclear Enchantments, 1988–1993, chromogenic prints, Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Gift of Dr. Mark Reichman

A collaged photograph depicts a dry desert landscape with tall, sagebrush bushes and a rocky hill. A child with short, black hair, in swim trunks stands next to a green highway sign that reads “Radium Springs.” Two people in swimsuits and a small dog stand behind him.

Patrick Nagatani, Radium Springs, New Mexico, 1989, from the series Nuclear Enchantments, 1988–1993, chromogenic prints, Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Gift of Dr. Mark Reichman

#7
Ka’ila Farrell-Smith, Enrollment

Ka’ila Farrell-Smith
(Klamath Modoc)
born Ashland, Oregon, 1982

Enrollment, 2014
oil on canvas

Ka’ila Farrell-Smith painted this androgynous figure, wrapped in a Hudson’s Bay point blanket, after she received her tribal enrollment number as a citizen of the Klamath Tribes. Citing Indigenous aesthetics as influential, she makes work that honors ancestral lineage. She has explained, “Enrollment is a painting that visually explores the complexities of Tribal enrollment rules like blood quantum and the trendiness of Hudson Bay Company’s wool blankets that were historically used to spread smallpox disease to Indigenous communities, and navigates contested terrains that inform contemporary Indigenous identity.”

Collection of the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, University of Oregon.
General Acquisition Fund purchase made possible with support from Native American Studies, University of Oregon

This painting depicts an abstract figure standing in profile with their head tilted back, red-orange face looking upward, and long, black, braided hair hanging down. The person is wearing a white blanket that has the recognizable set of Hudson's Bay stripes (indigo, yellow, red and green) horizontally wrapped across their chest. A rectangle of blue color fills the bottom third of the painting's background.

#8
Fritz Scholder, Indian and Contemporary Chair

Fritz Scholder
(Luiseño)
born Breckenridge, Minnesota, 1937;
died Phoenix, Arizona, 2005

Indian and Contemporary Chair, 1970
oil on linen

Fritz Scholder undercuts nostalgic stereotypes that confine Native people to long gone landscapes and points to the complexities of living in a modern world. Throughout his life, Scholder struggled with his dual identity as a Native American and white man. He rejected the label of “American Indian artist” and instead found his inspiration in mid-twentieth century artists such as Wayne Thiebaud. Later in his career, Scholder began creating images of Indigenous people in direct response to what he perceived as the “over-romanticized paintings of the ‘noble savage.’” In the past, white artists have often depicted Indigenous subjects in natural settings, grounding their identity within the landscape. In Indian and Contemporary Chair, Scholder’s choice to place his subject indoors, in a mid-century modern chair, undercuts stereotypes that confine Native people to nostalgic landscapes and points to the complexities of living in a modern world.

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Judge and Mrs. Oliver Seth

In this painting, formatted like a collage, the outline of an abstract human form with dark hair sits on a white chair with a flared base, atop a dark purple, oval rug. An orange colored, four-legged animal lies on the rug to the figure’s left. A band of alternating light-and-dark-green rectangles fills the top one-quarter of the painting.

#9
James Lavadour, Fire and Bones

James Lavadour 
(Walla Walla)
born Pendleton, Oregon, 1951

Fire and Bones, 1990–1991
oil on linen

James Lavadour learns about the land by walking it, internalizing its rhythms and curves. His work reflects both external and hidden elements of the landscape. In this two-panel painting, a skeletal figure rises out of the ridge, revealing the bones of the mountain. The left panel refers to natural occurrences of fire as well as the passion that the artist feels for his home terrain in eastern Oregon’s Blue Mountains. Lavadour states, “A painting is a structure for the extraordinary and informative events of nature that are otherwise invisible.”

Boise Art Museum Permanent Collection, Museum Purchase, 1993

This painting depicts two scenes on individual panels. The left scene suggests a sloping hillside on fire with orange-and-red flames along with black smoke in the distance. In the center of the right scene is the head and torso of a skeleton with the legs buried in a smoldering mound and white smoke is seen in the distance.

#10
Rick Bartow, Buck

Rick Bartow
(Mad River Wiyot)
born Newport, Oregon, 1946;
died Newport, Oregon, 2016

Buck, 2015
acrylic on canvas

Rick Bartow spent most of his life on the Oregon coast but also traveled widely, and wove imagery and influences from around the world into his art. He served in the Vietnam War and, following his recovery from PTSD and alcoholism, frequently made images of himself to express his thoughts about culture and identity. He called art-making his “affordable therapy.” Bartow painted Buck, his final self-portrait, two years after suffering a stroke. He included his wheelchair in a rare depiction of his physical vulnerability. The three-chevron insignia refers to Bartow’s rank as a non-commissioned Sergeant, or “Buck,” during the war. The words “Indian Hero” prompt viewers to consider his veteran status, his Native American and European heritage, and contemporary Indigenous or Native American identity as a subject for art.

Collection of the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, University of Oregon.
Gift of the Estate of Rick Bartow and Froelick Gallery

This painting depicts an abstract human figure facing us, dressed in red, with blue outlines, on a tan background, and seated in a wheelchair which is suggested by the outlines of armrests and two, large, oval wheel shapes with smaller circles inside.

#11
Awa Tsireh artworks

Awa Tsireh
also known as Alfonso Roybal (San Ildefonso Pueblo)
born San Ildefonso Pueblo, New Mexico, 1898;
died San Ildefonso Pueblo, New Mexico, ca. 1955

Awa Tsireh, Buffalo Deer Dance

ca. 1930–1940
ink, watercolor, and pencil on paperboard

Awa Tsireh created stunning works depicting the daily and ceremonial life of Pueblo communities in the Southwest. During his life, the U.S. government, under an assimilationist mandate, attempted to stamp out ritual Pueblo practices even as white anthropologists and patrons, believing in preservationist ideas, supported his work and in a sense, defended the value of Native culture. Awa Tsireh’s work emerged out of his careful negotiation of these forces and his efforts to resist cultural oppression and protect Pueblo sacred knowledge. Pueblo culture reserves sacred knowledge to groups of initiates who are trained to protect it and understand its uses and power. Rather than paint scenes of rituals meant only for the initiated, Awa Tsireh chose to portray aspects of public ceremonies that were acceptable for outsider eyes.

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Corbin-Henderson Collection, Gift of Alice H. Rossin

An illustration of eight figures standing side-by-side, wearing black face coverings and a variety of ceremonial clothing including headdresses with horns and antlers, skirts and fringed footwear.

Awa Tsireh, Buffalo Man, Buffalo Dance

ca. 1920–1925
gouache and pencil on paperboard

For decades, scholars attributed Awa Tsireh’s use of blank backgrounds to time he spent painting Pueblo pottery when he was younger and his interest in modern elements that would make his work relevant in the art market. But according to recent scholarship, Tsireh avoided portraying esoteric aspects of Pueblo rituals, like ceremonial settings and specific objects, to safeguard sacred meaning. Secrecy around important cultural knowledge is important to Pueblo people. This knowledge is best conveyed through speech to those who are trained to use it and not through recordings like drawing or photography, which can easily circulate in a wider context. Tsireh’s art upholds Pueblo values and ultimately helped safeguard cultural knowledge from indiscriminate circulation.

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Corbin-Henderson Collection, Gift of Alice H. Rossin

In this illustration, a man wears a black face covering and a large brown headdress with two black horns, one on each side of his head. He stands in profile, with one foot raised, and one arm outstretched holding a bow and arrow.

Awa Tsireh, Eagle Dancers

ca. 1917–1925
watercolor, ink, and pencil on paperboard

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Corbin-Henderson Collection, Gift of Alice H. Rossin

An illustration of two figures standing side-by-side bent forward from the waist with outstretched arms, mimicking a bird in flight. They wear identical costumes with yellow face coverings, white head coverings, skirts with tail feathers, and black feathers hang from their arms.

Awa Tsireh, Sparring Antelopes

ca. 1925–1930
watercolor and ink on paper

In the 1920s, Awa Tsireh experimented with compositions that combine animal figures and abstract designs. The semicircular form seen here represents a rainbow, which in Pueblo cosmology is the demarcation between terrestrial and extraterrestrial worlds. The thin, black lines that descend from its center signify rain, and the stepped forms at its base signify mountains. The circular form in the sky is the sun. Tsireh shows only enough to reference elements of Native culture, while conveying deeper information and meaning to Pueblo people who have the necessary ritual knowledge to understand the interrelated meaning of these symbols. Tsireh’s strategy is a clear example of people living side by side, in the same landscape, having vastly different experiences and understandings of “the West.”

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Corbin-Henderson Collection, Gift of Alice H. Rossin

An illustration depicts two, horned antelopes butting heads under a deep yellow arch with a circular form hovering above. Sets of stairs, one on each side, are positioned beneath leading up to the arch. Two temple-shaped structures, one on each side, rest on the arch and lean outward.

#12
Marie Watt, Witness (Quamichan Potlatch 1913)

Marie Watt
(Seneca)
born Seattle, Washington, 1967

Witness (Quamichan Potlatch 1913), 2015
reclaimed wool blankets, embroidery floss, and thread

A Hudson’s Bay point blanket is the backdrop for Marie Watt’s embroidered scene of a Coast Salish nation’s potlatch. The Canadian and U.S. governments banned these gift-giving ceremonial feasts from 1885 until the 1950s. Unlike the original 1913 photograph of this event (shown below), Watt’s version shows a group of figures with fists raised in protest. Watt also appears with her two small daughters on the right side of the blanket. The younger one peeks over her mother’s shoulder to meet our gaze. A tall stack of blankets behind her refers to the great displays of generosity at potlatches, as well as Watt’s own sculptural and installation work.

Collection of the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, University of Oregon. This work was acquired with the assistance of the Ford Family Foundation through a special grant program managed by the Oregon Arts Commission, and additional support from the Hartz FUNd for Contemporary Art

A 15-foot-wide rectangular fabric that has the recognizable sets of Hudson's Bay Blanket stripes (indigo, yellow, red and green) -- one set on each end with two sets equidistant to the center. An outlined scene, stitched in black thread, shows a large group of people, most having their backs to us, except for the face of a child who is a person's arms. People in the distance show raised fists.
Photo: Quamichan Potlatch, Coast Salish, 1913. Photograph by Reverend Tate. Image PN1500, courtesy of the Royal BC Museum and Archives.

#13
Marita Dingus, Untitled Bowl

Marita Dingus
born Seattle, Washington, 1956;
active in Auburn, Washington

Untitled Bowl, ca. 2005
wire and found objects

This delicate vessel, made of wire, strands of old Christmas tree lights, and other found objects, is a metaphor for the treatment of enslaved people of African descent. By using materials that are normally discarded, the artist celebrates the resilience and beauty of spirit in people who have had to overcome the harsh realities of colonialism.

Boise Art Museum Permanent Collection, Gift of Ben and Aileen Krohn

Silver wire and green-string lights are loosely woven into an 8-inch-tall open-weave basket with multiple flat, eye-shaped, copper-colored metal pieces woven into the sides through the wires.

#14
Marita Dingus, Green Leaves

Marita Dingus
born Seattle, Washington, 1956;
active in Auburn, Washington

Green Leaves, 2001
mixed media

Between college and graduate school, Marita Dingus spent a summer working with a road crew in Washington state, picking up trash along highways. The experience sharpened her commitment to environmentalism and made the re-use of materials a central component of her work. Here, bottle caps, telephone wire, fabric scraps, bells, and aluminum cans have been salvaged and repurposed to create an exuberant composition that expresses growth and rebirth. Dingus says, “My art draws upon relics from the African Diaspora. The discarded materials represent how people of African descent were used during the institution of slavery and colonialism, then discarded, but who found ways to repurpose themselves and thrive in a hostile world.”

Whatcom Museum Permanent Collection, Gift of the Washington Art Consortium through gift of Safeco Insurance, a member of the Liberty Mutual Group

In this wall-mounted sculpture, a cord made of black fabric and tightly wrapped in silver wire is shaped into the outline of a flower with four petals. In the center are four, small, white, flower-shaped objects. Green wire-leaf shapes are attached around the outer edges of the sculpture.

#15
Marcos Ramírez ERRE & David Taylor, DeLIMITations Portfolio

Marcos Ramírez ERRE
born Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico, 1961

David Taylor
born Beaufort, South Carolina, 1965

DeLIMITations Portfolio, 2016
48 archival pigment prints and Adams-Onis broadsheet

In this photographic series the artists document their epic effort to mark and photograph the never-before-surveyed 1821 border between the United States and Mexico. It presents the beautiful diversity of landscape and settlement in the American West while drawing our attention to the constructed and fluid nature of man-made borders. “Before this was Mexico or the U.S.,” Ramírez points out, “this whole land was Native American.”

In the 1819 Adams-Onís Treaty between the United States and Spain, which was ratified by the newly independent Mexico in 1821, the U.S. renounced “forever all their rights, claims, and pretensions” to the lands south of the treaty line. Yet, today those lands are known as the U.S. states of Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Texas, Colorado, Kansas, Wyoming, and Oklahoma. The artists offer the treaty text to visitors to underscore the fallibility of promises and the force of U.S. westward expansion.

Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Purchased with funds from The Phyllis Cannon Wattis Endowment Fund

Each of the photographs in this grid of 48 (arranged in 4 rows of 12 photographs each) captures a tall steel obelisk in various settings. Some are urban landscapes with buildings, roads, and underpasses, others show natural landscapes, such as beaches, mountains, forests, and deserts.

#16
Roger Shimomura, American Infamy #2

Roger Shimomura
born Seattle, Washington, 1939;
active Lawrence, Kansas

American Infamy #2, 2006
acrylic on canvas

American Infamy #2 portrays Camp Minidoka in Idaho, where Roger Shimomura and his family were incarcerated from the spring of 1942 until summer 1944. This painting is made in the style of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Japanese Muromachi era byobu screens and details living conditions under the camp’s armed guards. The artist exposes the racial conflicts during World War II, when 120,000 Japanese Americans were unjustly imprisoned as a result of Executive Order 9066, and surfaces the incarceration camp in Idaho. Though Camp Minidoka is designated as a national historic site, its history remains relatively unknown, even among descendants of the people who were imprisoned there.

Boise Art Museum Permanent Collection, Purchased with donations to the Roger Shimomura Acquisitions Fund

A 6-foot x 10-foot painting depicts a silhouetted guard, wearing a helmet, and using binoculars to observe tar-paper-covered buildings and people in a fenced, Japanese-American incarceration camp below. Three layers of dark clouds create undulating horizontal bands across the foreground, middle ground, and background.

#17
Wendy Maruyama, Minidoka, from the Tag Project

Wendy Maruyama
born La Junta, Colorado, 1952;
active San Diego, California

Minidoka, from the Tag Project, 2011
paper, ink, string, and thread

Wendy Maruyama began the Tag Project when she was conducting research about Executive Order 9066, which gave the U.S. military broad powers during World War II to incarcerate Japanese Americans. The project consists of ten paper sculptures, each representing a U.S. camp built to confine citizens and legal residents. Each sculpture consists of thousands of paper tags printed with the name and identification number of a person incarcerated at one of the camps. Maruyama and a team of volunteers painstakingly recreated the tags using information from government archives. This sculpture represents incarcerees at Camp Minidoka in Idaho and serves as a visual reminder of the devastating impact this unjust policy had on tens of thousands of people and their descendants who continue to reside in this region.

Boise Art Museum Permanent Collection, Collectors Forum Purchase, 2015

An 11’ tall, 2’ in diameter sculpture composed of a bundle of more than 13-thousand manila-colored, paper-identification tags, that appear used, tied to one another in strands with string, hangs from the ceiling by a wire, almost touching the ground.

#18
Section Topic: Memory Makers

Artists act as transmitters of cultural memory as they give form to neglected histories. Using documentation, reconstruction, portraiture, and manipulation of archival imagery, they bring the past vividly into the present. This group of artists explores Black, Indigenous, Asian American, Latinx, and gendered experiences in the American West, going beyond the familiar accounts of European colonizers, bringing lived histories and identities that are essential to a truthful history. Indigenous artists often remind us that these memories are made on their ancestral homelands and represent living cultures, despite a history of government policies designed to make Indigenous people forget culture, language, and identity. By bearing witness to the traumas of the past through visual storytelling, artists express resistance and ensure that cultural memory lives on.

#19
Al Rendón artworks

Al Rendón
born San Antonio, Texas, 1957

In the 1980s, Al Rendón began documenting the elaborate performances and dress of the San Antonio Charro Association in Texas (est. 1947), which was the first established organization of competitive Mexican American horsemen and women in the United States. He captures the traditions of charros and charras, whose equestrian feats are rooted in Spanish and Mexican ranch culture, which emerged in the sixteenth century when the Spanish introduced horses and cattle to the Americas. U.S. cowboy culture is an outgrowth of this history. Hints of our contemporary world creep into Rendón’s photographs, suggesting how these traditions live in the present. Some photographs undermine Mexican “bandito” stereotypes common in racist “cowboy and Indian” films. His photographs assert charro customs as fixtures in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands.

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Smithsonian Latino Initiatives Pool, administered by the Smithsonian Latino Center

A sepia-toned photograph depicts a portrait of a white-hair mustachioed man, viewed in profile from the waist up, seated in a saddle. The man wears a suit and a tall, wide-brimmed hat that is strapped around his chin. He rests his left hand on the saddle and his right hand on the top of his thigh.

Al Rendón, Don Socrates, 1998, printed 2015, digital exhibition print made from the original gelatin silver print, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Smithsonian Latino Initiatives Pool, administered by the Smithsonian Latino Center

A sepia-toned photograph depicts a woman seated on a dark horse, wearing a long, layered, white dress and a white, wide-brimmed hat. Behind her on her left, three people wearing cowboy hats are seated on a tall brick wall, their faces obscured by a horizontal bar. A vertical bar bisects the photograph between the woman and the people.

Al Rendón, Adelita, 1987, printed 2015, digital exhibition print made from the original gelatin silver print, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Smithsonian Latino Initiatives Pool, administered by the Smithsonian Latino Center

A sepia-toned photograph depicts a grassy field with a person wearing a wide-brimmed hat standing in the center holding a lasso rope tethered to a running horse mid-movement. In the background a horse stands still beneath a cluster of trees.

Al Rendón, Charreada Warm Up, 1981, printed 2015, digital exhibition print made from the original gelatin silver print, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Smithsonian Latino Initiatives Pool, administered by the Smithsonian Latino Center

A sepia-toned photograph of a rodeo arena and a man riding a horse captured in mid-action with its two front legs in the air. The rider wears a black jacket and a wide-brimmed hat. A sign across the corrals behind them reads “San Antonio Charro Ranch.”

Al Rendón, Horse reining rayar, 1986, printed 2015, digital exhibition print made from the original gelatin silver print, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Smithsonian Latino Initiatives Pool, administered by the Smithsonian Latino Center

#20
Juan de Dios Mora artworks

Juan de Dios Mora
born Yahualica, Mexico, 1984;
active Laredo and San Antonio, Texas

Juan de Dios Mora’s prints emerge from his close observation of immigrant life in the border town of Laredo, Texas. His scenes of vaqueros (or cowboys) riding flying brooms or driving exaggerated, powerful motorcycles, combine fantasy and realism to honor how Mexican immigrants make do and affirm their culture against the odds. The artist’s father, who routinely repaired things with discarded scraps of metal and wood, inspired Montando a la Escoba Voladora (Riding the Flying Broom). “Even when you don’t have the right tools or technology,” the artist said, “you can still be clever and creative.” Mora’s works also reconceive representations of the cowboy, showing how Southwest ranch culture is indebted to Mexico.

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Frank K. Ribelin Endowment

In this non-photorealistic, stylized black-and-white print, a man, dressed in cowboy attire rides on a long broomstick fashioned into a stick pony with wings, a saddle, a gas tank made with a Sprite bottle, and a flag with the words "Vola Dora!"

Juan de Dios Mora, Montando a la Escoba Voladora (Riding the Flying Broom), 2010, linocut, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Frank K. Ribelin Endowment

In this non-photorealistic, stylized black-and-white print, a man sits on a three-wheeled motorcycle with over-sized rear wheels and vertical tail pipes. He extends his right arm straight forward to hold a long, wooden rod topped with a coyote head and flag.

Juan de Dios Mora, Bien Arreglada (All Decked Out), 2010, linocut, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Frank K. Ribelin Endowment

#21
Ken Gonzales-Day, Erased Lynchings

Ken Gonzales-Day
born Santa Clara, California, 1964;
active Los Angeles, California

Erased Lynchings, 2006
fifteen inkjet prints

These fifteen photographs are digitally altered reproductions of lynching postcards, which were widely circulated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Such postcards, meant to instill fear in targeted communities and often inscribed with racist language, were sometimes kept as macabre souvenirs. While lynching is historically associated with the murder of Black people in the American South, this work is based on postcards that come from Western states, where the lynching of Native Americans, Asian Americans, and Latinx populations has been largely erased from memory. By removing the victims from these images, Ken Gonzales-Day forces the viewer to focus on the white perpetrators of this violence, made mundane through repetition. He challenges us to consider lynching as a widespread trauma and acknowledge its destructive legacy and connection to Western expansion.

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment

A sepia-toned photograph depicts a line of six men standing in a sandy landscape, facing away from us, with rifles pointed toward a large clump of brush. Written on the bottom of the image is "Executing Bandits 854." An oval-shaped, black-and-white photograph depicts a crowd of white men and boys, some barefoot, facing us. Those visible are wearing dirty suits and hats. One boy holds a looped rope. A nearly black photograph depicts the faint image of a bare tree trunk on the far left, with the base of its limbs rising skyward and fading into the darkness of what appears to be the night. The back of a tea-stained-color, antique postcard inscribed with "this is what he got" handwritten in cursive across its center. A photograph taken at night depicts a crowd, mostly of white men, dressed in suits and hats, standing at the base of a tree, which is faintly visible in the light in the background.

#22
Jacob Lawrence, The Builders

Jacob Lawrence
born, Atlantic City, New Jersey, 1917;
died, Seattle, Washington, 2000

The Builders, 1980
gouache on paper

Lawrence’s African American heritage and expression of Black identity are fundamental to his work. He made portraits of historical figures such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman and painted scenes of the Great Migration. A careful observer and storyteller, he also focused on scenes of the everyday. Lawrence returned to the subject of builders over half a century. This theme refers to his own migration to the West and his time working with the WPA and New Deal programs, as it tells stories of aspiration, cooperation, and equality. The dynamic scene highlights the hard work and perseverance of the laborers rather than focusing on the completed building.

Whatcom Museum Permanent Collection, Gift of the Washington Art Consortium through gift of Safeco Insurance, a member of the Liberty Mutual Group

A brightly colored abstract painting depicts five construction site workers in denim coveralls, some with pink skin, some with brown skin, working at multiple building tasks. In the center of the foreground, a man with brown skin raises a hammer to pound a nail while leaning on a red-and-yellow sawhorse.

#23
Barbara Earl Thomas artworks

Barbara Earl Thomas
born Seattle, Washington, 1948

Barbara Earl Thomas was a student of Jacob Lawrence at the University of Washington and, like him, is a narrative storyteller. In this work, as in many others, she incorporates themes of human connection and rituals of survival in her visual allegories as she draws on her family’s migration from the American South to the Pacific Northwest in the 1940s.

These prints come from a series of eight linocuts titled The Book of Fishing, which elaborates the fisherman’s story as Thomas has lived it. The artist shares that while fishing methods vary across cultures, the act of fishing is a common and eternal custom. She recalls that growing up, her family fished for bottom-feeding fish, which was a very different method of fishing from the salmon fishing of the Scandinavians and Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest. She says, “Bottom-fish people are a special kind of people because they are living off of what nobody else wants.”

Whatcom Museum Permanent Collection, Gift of the Washington Art Consortium through gift of Safeco Insurance, a member of the Liberty Mutual Group

A black-and-pale-yellow print depicts four silhouetted figures, crawling on the ground, foraging for earthworms in the grass. In the background, long, tall grass extends to the top of the artwork.

Barbara Earl Thomas, Nightcrawlers and Earthworms, 2006, linocut, Whatcom Museum Permanent Collection, Gift of the Washington Art Consortium through gift of Safeco Insurance, a member of the Liberty Mutual Group

White lines on the black background of this print depict a figure sitting at a table eating a piece of a whole fish on a platter. A knife rests next to the platter on the table, while a basket of fish sits next to the table on the floor.

Barbara Earl Thomas, Fish Eater, 2006, linocut, Whatcom Museum Permanent Collection, Gift of the Washington Art Consortium through gift of Safeco Insurance, a member of the Liberty Mutual Group

#24
Christina Fernandez, María’s Great Expedition

Christina Fernandez
born Los Angeles, California, 1965

María’s Great Expedition, 1995–1996
digital exhibition prints and bilingual narrative Exhibition prints are made from the original five gelatin silver prints, one chromogenic print, and one inkjet print.

Fernandez’s installation mimics the kind of museum display that tells the stories of European conquistadors or white U.S. expansionists in the Southwest. Rather than focus on these dominant histories, Fernandez turns to the story of her great-grandmother María González, the first member of her family to migrate to the United States from Mexico. The artist photographed herself in the guise of her relative and paired these images with detailed stories that relate her family history to larger accounts of the trials and milestones of Mexican migration and settlement in the early twentieth century. Fernandez pointedly adopts photography’s evolving techniques from Depression-era documentary-style black-and-white prints to mid-century color snapshots—to highlight how Chicanx experiences have consistently been omitted from histories of the West.

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment

A tan-color map depicts the southwestern United States and Central America outlined in black. A red line starting in Central Mexico curves upward and to the left, making a large arc into Colorado, coming down to Arizona, jutting out left and ending in Southern California. The words "Gulf of Mexico" and "Pacific Ocean" label these bodies of water. A black-and-white photograph depicts a woman in profile standing in the right half of the picture. She is facing to the right into a light source and wears a long, white dress and dark shawl with her hands folded in front at her waist, holding the shawl. The dark background hides details in the room behind her. A black-and-white photograph depicts a woman facing us, standing in the center of a dark background, wearing a white dress and clasping a dark pouch with both hands. Behind her hangs a clothesline with three white garments and a white sheet. A washboard, bottle of bleach, box of detergent and a metal bucket with white laundry spilling out sit on the floor in front of her. A black-and-white photograph depicts a woman next to railroad tracks sitting on a large, dark trunk with a knitting bag at her feet. She holds papers in her left hand and knitting needles in her right hand, while looking expectantly to the right up the tracks. A black-and-white photograph depicts a woman in a grassy field walking toward us carrying a wooden crate in her left hand with her right hand extended for balance. In the foreground are more crates, filled with produce. On the right is a corner of the bed of a truck with stacked, full crates. A black-and-white photograph depicts a woman standing next to the trunk of a large tree growing in front of a tall apartment building and a clothesline with white laundry. She wears a shirt-dress and white apron, with her hands clasped and posed with her right foot crossed in front of her left foot. A photograph depicts a woman wearing a red sweater and brown skirt, with a newspaper tucked under her left arm, standing in profile in front of a large, white, vintage oven placed against a blue-green wall. Her face turned toward us, she pours liquid from a kettle into a cup.

#25
Miguel A. Gandert artworks

Miguel A. Gandert
born Española, New Mexico, 1956;
active Santa Fe and Albuquerque, New Mexico

Miguel Gandert’s photographs of genízaros add levels of complexity to our understanding of Native heritage in New Mexico. Genizaros are descendants of de-tribalized Indians from various tribes—the Utes, Apaches, Comanches, Kiowas, Navajos, and Pawnees—whose ancestors were taken captive during the Spanish colonial period. Many were forced into indentured servitude, where they adapted to Spanish culture while passing elements of their Native traditions and beliefs to their descendants. Gandert captures their present-day ceremonies, like Los Cautivos (or The Captives), which dramatize aspects of their history. Gandert’s photographs are a testament to genízaro resilience in the face of adversity.

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Smithsonian Latino Initiatives Pool, administered by the Smithsonian Latino Center

A black-and-white photograph centers on a man wearing a feathered headdress while in mid-action, with his arms raised and knee bent. People, including spectators and other participants of a ceremony, stand behind him on both sides in an outdoor, snowy landscape.

Miguel A. Gandert, El Comanche David, Talpa, NM, 1996, digital exhibition print made from the original gelatin silver print, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Smithsonian Latino Initiatives Pool, administered by the Smithsonian Latino Center

A black-and-white photograph depicts a group of people in an outdoor setting with two men in everyday clothing caught in motion, facing a man who wears a feathered headdress and ceremonial dance clothing and has raised fists. A man in the left foreground also wears a large, feathered headdress and has a raised, open, right hand.

Miguel A. Gandert, Los Cautivos, Talpa, NM, 1995, digital exhibition print made from the original gelatin silver print, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Smithsonian Latino Initiatives Pool, administered by the Smithsonian Latino Center

#26
Marie Watt, Canopy (Odd One)

Marie Watt
(Seneca)
born Seattle, Washington, 1967

Canopy (Odd One), 2005
salvaged industrial yellow cedar and steel rebar

Marie Watt uses symbolically charged materials to explore ideas related to her First Nations heritage. In the Seneca Nation and other Indigenous communities, blankets are given to honor people who attend important events, such as weddings and other ceremonies. In Canopy (Odd One), Watt salvaged an old-growth timber once used as a beam in a warehouse and had it carved to represent a stack of folded blankets. She intentionally kept the steel rebar intact, reclaiming the beam’s history, reaching back through its use as industrial infrastructure to its origin in a forest now destroyed, and offering it a contemporary life.

Boise Art Museum Permanent Collection, Gift of Driek and Michael Zirinsky

A 10-foot vertical wood beam, carved to look like a column of stacked, folded blankets, sits on a flat, grey metal base. The sculpture is the natural, pale-yellow color of the wood, with carving marks visible on its surface. Rusted metal rods pass through the sculpture horizontally at several points.

#27
NATIVE PERSPECTIVES ON THE TRAIL
A Contemporary American Indian Art Portfolio

NATIVE PERSPECTIVES ON THE TRAIL,
A Contemporary American Indian Art Portfolio 
Commissioned by the Missoula Art Museum
2004–2005

On the occasion of the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Commemoration in 2004, the Missoula Art Museum in Montana invited fifteen Native American artists to participate in a limited-edition print project. Three of the fifteen prints created for the portfolio are on view here. On the monitor, you will find images of the entire portfolio.

The Lewis and Clark Expedition (1803–1806), also known as the Corps of Discovery Expedition, was commissioned by President Thomas Jefferson. The Corps was a group of U.S. Army and civilian volunteers, under the command of Captain Meriwether Lewis and Second Lieutenant William Clark, who were charged with exploring the western portion of North America by traveling across the Continental Divide to the Pacific Coast and back.  Their objectives included mapping the newly acquired Louisiana Purchase, finding a practical route across the western half of the continent, and establishing U.S. ownership over the land occupied by many Indigenous tribes along the Missouri River before European countries tried to claim it.  Sacagawea, a member of the Lemhi Shoshone tribe, was a valued member of the Corps. She advised Clark on optimal routes through difficult terrain, served as an interpreter and, through her presence, conveyed the peaceful intent of the group when encountering Indigenous people.

Corwin Clairmont, a Salish and Kootenai tribal member who was a co-curator of the project, noted that the portfolio provided “an opportunity to present a point of view that is often overlooked and may be in direct contrast with the celebratory mood of many Lewis and Clark admirers.”

Neal Ambrose-Smith, Now That’s a Coyote Story / sêy łu pn sqwllu

Neal Ambrose-Smith
(Salish)
born Texas, 1966;
active Corrales, New Mexico

Now That’s a Coyote Story / sêy łu pn sqwllu
from Native Perspectives on the Trail, 2004
monotype and screen print, edition 10 of 24

In Now That’s a Coyote Story / sêy łu pn sqwllu, Ambrose-Smith relates the traditional Native American character to modern “trickery.” Indian teaching stories often feature Coyote, a trickster who can change shape and form to teach a lesson. In this print, alongside images of corn and a food nutrition label, we see Coyote wearing a winking mask. Ambrose-Smith weaves a traditional warning into his visual story. “Coyote knows the importance of corn for the people. He sees that GMO corn can be trickery, but how is it that the people come to accept it? He sees that someone else is also crafty in his or her ways. Coyote sees all.”

Boise Art Museum Permanent Collection, Museum Purchase with a Grant from the Idaho Governor’s Lewis and Clark Trail Committee

A screen print depicts a bright, red mask in its center with a long, thin handle that extends to the bottom edge. Printed in black in the background is a nutrition label and a stencilled cob of corn.

Dwight Billedeaux, Lewis and Clark Back to Earth

Dwight Billedeaux
(Blackfeet)
born Dillon, Montana, 1947;
active Ronan, Montana

Lewis and Clark Back to Earth
from Native Perspectives on the Trail, 2004
monoprint

Lewis and Clark Back to Earth is an extension of Billedeaux’s experimental and tactile artistic practice. He created the figures of Lewis, Clark, and Sacagawea in wire and used the figures as elements on the birch bark printing surface, crushing the figures in the run through the press, which resulted in embossed lines. Each of the twenty-five prints in the edition is unique.

Billedeaux’s interpretation contradicts romantic depictions of Lewis and Clark pointing into the distance as though they knew exactly where they were going. Billedeaux represents Sacagawea in the foreground, leading the party. She knew the difficult terrain and was a skilled translator. The print pays homage to an unacknowledged leader, suggesting that, without Sacagawea, Lewis and Clark would have been lost.

Boise Art Museum Permanent Collection, Museum Purchase with a Grant from the Idaho Governor’s Lewis and Clark Trail Committee

This print centers on a large turquoise turtle shape with a light lavendar outline. Three barely visible figures on the shell, shown in red-and-blue, appear to be holding rods. There are squiggly lines in each of the print's four corners.

Melissa Bob, Ways of Seeing, Ways of Being . . . Then and Now

Melissa Bob
(Lummi)
born Bellingham, Washington, 1982;
active the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla

Ways of Seeing, Ways of Being . . . Then and Now
from Native Perspectives on the Trail, 2004
collagraph, serigraph, collage, edition 10 of 25

Ways of Seeing, Ways of Being . . . Then and Now contrasts two worlds — one before and the other after contact with Europeans. The upper portion of the print reflects a natural existence with green, forested land. The lower portion depicts the post-colonial landscape as a dull, gray, over-developed mass. The red lifeline of pre-contact tribal life is vigorous and dynamic while, in the artist’s view, post-contact Native culture is flat-lining. The lifeline does continue, however, as Bob signifies the passage of time through the changed landscape, perhaps implying that while Native culture has been largely absorbed into the dominant society, it has not completely died away.

Boise Art Museum Permanent Collection, Museum Purchase with a Grant from the Idaho Governor’s Lewis and Clark Trail Committee

The background of this print is vertically divided in half with blue at the top and yellow at the bottom. Depicted over each background color, is a hillside shape with roots underneath. The top shape is green with trees, and the bottom shape is purple with the black outline of houses. A bold, red line cuts across each hillside like a heart rate monitor. In the top section, the line is jagged. The bottom line begins jagged but immediately transitions to being flat.

Damian Charette, Strokes of Truth

Damian Charette
(Crow)
born Crow Agency, Montana, 1960;
active San Antonio, Texas

Strokes of Truth
from Native Perspectives on the Trail, 2004
collagraph, edition 10 of 25

To create this collagraph print, Charette used a printing plate built up with collaged elements, a method developed by his late teacher, Don Bunse. Strokes of Truth pays homage to the spirit of the Indian artist through time. The Native artist in the print is surrounded by images ranging from abstract pictograph symbols to realistic renderings of buffalo. A large can of paint is placed next to a “Big Chief” drawing pad as reminders of the interplay between traditional and contemporary artistic expressions and the long history of cultural appropriation.

Boise Art Museum Permanent Collection, Museum Purchase with a Grant from the Idaho Governor’s Lewis and Clark Trail Committee

A black-and-white print depicts a man on our left wearing a jacket with a fringed sleeve, painting a buffalo. The background includes images of a car, a horse with a rider, an elk, floral and geometric patterns, and a scene of Native Americans next to a stream.

Corwin Clairmont, Indian Land Passage Denied

Corwin Clairmont
(Salish, Kootenai)
born St. Ignatius, Montana, 1946;
active Ronan, Montana

Indian Land Passage Denied
from Native Perspectives on the Trail, 2005
collagraph with chine collé, edition 10 of 25

Indian Country Passage Denied questions the objectives of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. The Expedition leaders were commissioned to explore and map the newly acquired Louisiana Purchase territory but also to establish the United States government’s sovereignty over the Indians, claim their “discovery” of the lands, and set up trade agreements with the Indians. Lewis and Clark did not proceed as guests in a foreign land, but as conquerors. Though the expedition paid lip service to the independence of the Indian nations, Clairmont’s print leads us to ask: what if Lewis and Clark had needed passports, and what if their passage had been denied?

Boise Art Museum Permanent Collection, Museum Purchase with a Grant from the Idaho Governor’s Lewis and Clark Trail Committee

The background of this print is a gradient of rainbow color overlaid by two, open, side-by-side passports at its center. The passports, one for Meriwether Lewis and the other for William Clark, are stamped "passage denied" and are partially obscured by the universal "no" symbol -- a red circle with a diagonal line.

Jason Elliott Clark, Jefferson’s Saints Surveying the Real Estate

Jason Elliott Clark
(Algonquin, Creek, Swiss, Scottish)
born Panorama City, California, 1967;
active Missoula, Montana

Jefferson’s Saints Surveying the Real Estate
from Native Perspectives on the Trail, 2004
relief print with gold leaf

Using dark humor, Jefferson’s Saints Surveying the Real Estate addresses the Corps of Discovery Expedition and its consequences. The expedition leaders wear spacesuits, signifying that they are not merely out of place, but in a land profoundly distant and different from their home. These explorers, sent by President Jefferson, wear golden halos even as they stand on sacred Native burial grounds. The image and its title suggest that Lewis and Clark, though revered by many historians, were in the West as glorified real-estate agents for the government to claim lands already “discovered” and long occupied by Indigenous people.

Boise Art Museum Permanent Collection, Museum Purchase with a Grant from the Idaho Governor’s Lewis and Clark Trail Committee

An abstract black-and-white landscape print depicts two figures in space suits standing to our right. One figure is pointing toward tent-like structures in the distance, and the other is holding a rifle, vertically, by the barrel. Across the bottom of the print is a black band filled with skulls and bones depicted to be in the layer of earth under the ground that the two figures are standing on.

Joe Feddersen, Untitled (mother and child)

Joe Feddersen
(Colville)
born Seattle, Washington, 1953;
active Omak, Washington

Untitled (mother and child)
from Native Perspectives on the Trail, 2004
lithograph, edition 10 of 25

Feddersen’s untitled print draws on the geometric patterns and artistry of traditional American Indian baskets, blankets, and parflēches (rawhide carrying bags, usually painted and incised). He contrasts images of contemporary logging and construction with a photograph of a mother and child clothed in ancestral Plateau dress to comment on the survival of Indigenous people in a changing environment.

Boise Art Museum Permanent Collection, Museum Purchase with a Grant from the Idaho Governor’s Lewis and Clark Trail Committee

A sepia-toned print depicts metal scaffolding overlaid by grey triangles and a lined grid with a pink-toned photograph of a woman holding a child, close to the center. In the lower left corner is a purple-toned photograph of a man on heavy equipment in the forest.

Jeneese Hilton, 1803 to 1806 to 2004 (à la GW Bush)

Jeneese Hilton
(Blackfeet)
born Browning, Montana, 1942;
active St. Ignatius, Montana

1803 to 1806 to 2004 (à la GW Bush)
from Native Perspectives on the Trail, 2004
etching on paper, edition 10 of 25

Environmental health is the key theme in Hilton’s print, 1803 to 1806 to 2004 (à la GW Bush). An upside-down flag is the backdrop for images of Lewis and Clark who, while heroic to some, were to others the omens of dark days ahead. Superimposing images of smokestacks and pollution on a map of the country, her etching points to the consumerism and a disposable society that followed Lewis and Clark into the West and persists to this day.

Boise Art Museum Permanent Collection, Museum Purchase with a Grant from the Idaho Governor’s Lewis and Clark Trail Committee

On the darkly smudged background of this print is a map of the United States containing sketched images of oil rigs, tree stumps, and a chimney with smoke. Beneath the map is an upside-down American flag. Two figures on our left point at the map. A phrase in the upper left corner reads “from sea to polluted sea.”

Ramon Murillo, Dancing on the Lewis and Clark Trail

Ramon Murillo
(Shoshone-Bannock)
born Pocatello, Idaho, 1956;
active Bellingham, Washington

Dancing on the Lewis and Clark Trail
from Native Perspectives on the Trail, 2004
etching, edition 10 of 25

In Dancing on the Lewis and Clark Trail, Murillo uses a montage of tribal symbols and modern images to portray Native American culture before and after the Lewis and Clark journey. He demands space for Native culture in the contemporary landscape by contrasting two maps (nineteenth– and twenty-first–century); historical markers and modern signs; contemporary native dancers with a still from Edward Curtis’s film of Kwakiutl in a hunting canoe; an Indian woman and child; and a building crane. By juxtaposing historical and contemporary images, the artist underscores Indigenous people’s ability to survive by retaining cultural teachings while adapting to new environments.

Boise Art Museum Permanent Collection, Museum Purchase with a Grant from the Idaho Governor’s Lewis and Clark Trail Committee

In the background of this etching is a map of the western half of the United States. Across the top are three, dark photographic scenes. Across the bottom are three signs on tree trunk posts. In the bottom right corner, a backhoe is dropping pennies that are distributed around the perimeter of the artwork.

Molly Murphy, Market Imperialism

Molly Murphy
(Oglala/Lakota Sioux)
born Great Falls, Montana, 1977;
active Tulsa, Oklahoma

Market Imperialism
from Native Perspectives on the Trail, 2004
hand-colored linocut, edition 10 of 32

Murphy’s print, Market Imperialism, appears to be a traditional Native American parflêche (a rawhide bag, usually painted and incised) design. A closer look reveals that ancestral patterns have been replaced with commercial logos: Nike, Pepsi-Cola, Tommy Hilfiger. Murphy writes, “Advertising and lifestyle branding are the keys to contemporary market expansion in contrast to the historic need for physical control over a geographic area. Now instead of the cavalry fighting for land, we have cola companies fighting for brand loyalty.”

Boise Art Museum Permanent Collection, Museum Purchase with a Grant from the Idaho Governor’s Lewis and Clark Trail Committee

In this relief print, commercial logos in black outlines and filled-in with light-blue and light-red form the overall design. The composition is mirrored, top to bottom, and left to right. The rectangular design is surrounded by a thick black border. Pepsi logos, Nike swooshes, and Tommy Hilfiger logos are seen throughout.

Neil Parsons, Meriwether’s Dilemma

Neil Parsons
(Southern Pikuni)
born Browning, Montana, 1938;
active Blaine, Washington

Meriwether’s Dilemma
from Native Perspectives on the Trail, 2004
lithograph and monoprint, edition 10 of 25

Meriwether’s Dilemma is a mixed-media example of Parsons’s abstract expressionism. The haunting mystery of the image mirrors the conflicts and questions surrounding Meriwether Lewis’s death in 1809, three years after his return from his expedition to the Pacific Coast. Lewis’s personal and political problems began with the Corps of Discovery journey and ended with his death from multiple gunshot wounds at age thirty-five. His death was listed as suicide at the time, but experts since have questioned that conclusion.

Boise Art Museum Permanent Collection, Museum Purchase with a Grant from the Idaho Governor’s Lewis and Clark Trail Committee

An abstract print depicts colorful, irregular dots and circles overlaid on brown splatters and drips. The left, right, and top edges have a blue background, blending into white toward the center.

Lillian Pitt, Living with the Ancient Stories

Lillian Pitt
(Wasco, Yakama, Warm Springs)
born Warm Springs Reservation, Oregon, 1944;
active Big River (Columbia River) region of the Pacific Northwest

Living with the Ancient Stories
from Native Perspectives on the Trail, 2004
etching, edition 10 of 25

Lillian Pitt’s print, Living with the Ancient Stories, illustrates her love of the mystery and sacredness of ancient pictographs and petroglyphs. “The stories are rock paintings that were painted up to 10,000 years ago,” she explained. “No one knows the exact meanings of the pieces.” For Pitt, these stone stories reveal the history and continuity of a culture extending far back in time, long before the written records of the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

Boise Art Museum Permanent Collection, Museum Purchase with a Grant from the Idaho Governor’s Lewis and Clark Trail Committee

This etching of drawings in red-brown ink on a white background is organized into four sections and shows stick-figure humans interacting with animals and one another. In each quadrant, there is one roughly encircled area with figures or symbols drawn inside. Small, faint, symbols are drawn outside the circled areas.

Jaune Quick-to-See-Smith, I See Red

Jaune Quick-to-See-Smith
(Flathead/Cree/Shoshone)
born Flathead Reservation, Montana, 1940;
active Corrales, New Mexico

I See Red
from Native Perspectives on the Trail, 2005
stencil print, edition 10 of 25

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s depiction of a red snowman points out the gap between white and Native American world views. Just as viewers must adjust their expectations that snowmen should be white, Native Americans must adjust daily to prevailing cultural expectations. The artist includes symbols important in the Flathead Salish belief system: four snowballs represent the cardinal directions used in daily prayers; the black hat, a turn-of-the-century trade item, is still worn for special occasions; and the green tree signals respect for nature.

Boise Art Museum Permanent Collection, Museum Purchase with a Grant from the Idaho Governor’s Lewis and Clark Trail Committee

An abstract print depicts a red snowman as a flat, red, 4-part shape on a green background, wearing a black top-hat with a wide brim. Four overlapping red circles, that range from largest at the bottom to smallest at the top, are stacked to make up the snowman. A line-drawing near the center of the snowman depicts a tree.

Gail Tremblay, A Note to Lewis and Clark’s Ghosts

Gail Tremblay
(Mi’kmaq, Onondaga)
born Buffalo, New York, 1945;
active Olympia, Washington

A Note to Lewis and Clark’s Ghosts
from Native Perspectives on the Trail, 2004
linocut

In A Note to Lewis and Clark’s Ghosts, Gail Tremblay portrays Sacagawea, the Lemhi Shoshone woman whose deep knowledge of the region helped the Lewis and Clark Expedition complete its mission. She knew the difficult terrain and was a skilled translator. The image is striking in its graphic simplicity. Within the black field of the woman’s robe, Tremblay has printed in bold silver ink, “When you had such a good woman for a guide, why was it that all I wanted is for you to get lost, get lost, get lost….”

Boise Art Museum Permanent Collection, Museum Purchase with a Grant from the Idaho Governor’s Lewis and Clark Trail Committee

A black-and-white linocut print depicts the portrait of a woman from the waist up with long, center-parted hair, wearing a black robe with a cowel-neck collar. Bold, diagonal, white lines in the background frame her face and shoulders. The words "When you have such a good woman for a guide, why was it that all I wanted is for you to get lost, get lost, get lost...." are printed in silver in six lines of text across the center of her robe.

Melanie Yazzie, Honoring Her

Melanie Yazzie
(Navajo/Diné)
born Ganado, Arizona, 1966;
active Boulder, Colorado

Honoring Her
from Native Perspectives on the Trail, 2004
screen print, edition 10 of 25

Honoring Her depicts Sacagawea as a gingerbread doll with a curvilinear motif decorating her body. Around this figure are written the words, “A Woman with a party of men is a Token of Peace, William Clark.” The year “1812” and the word “Shoshone” refer to conflicting beliefs about Sacagawea’s origins and fate. While historical documents state that Sacajawea died in 1812 at age twenty-four of an unknown sickness, Native American oral tradition says that she died in 1884 at the age of ninety-five. She was born in the Lemhi River Valley in Idaho and was later held captive in a Hidatsa village before being sold to become a bride to a Canadian trapper.

Boise Art Museum Permanent Collection, Museum Purchase with a Grant from the Idaho Governor’s Lewis and Clark Trail Committee

A screen print depicts a gingerbread doll on our left in a patterned dress composed of white spirals, curves, and dots, on a mottled orange-and-blue background. The words "A Woman with a party of men is a Token of Peace, William Clark" along with the word "Shoshone" and the year "1812" follow the outline of the doll and fill the right side of the print in rows and shaped columns of text.

#28
Jaune Quick-to-See-Smith, I See Red
from Native Perspectives on the Trail

Jaune Quick-to-See-Smith
(Flathead/Cree/Shoshone)
born Flathead Reservation, Montana, 1940;
active Corrales, New Mexico

I See Red
from Native Perspectives on the Trail, 2005
stencil print, edition 10 of 25

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s depiction of a red snowman points out the gap between white and Native American world views. Just as viewers must adjust their expectations that snowmen should be white, Native Americans must adjust daily to prevailing cultural expectations. The artist includes symbols important in the Flathead Salish belief system: four snowballs represent the cardinal directions used in daily prayers; the black hat, a turn-of-the-century trade item, is still worn for special occasions; and the green tree signals respect for nature.

Boise Art Museum Permanent Collection, Museum Purchase with a Grant from the Idaho Governor’s Lewis and Clark Trail Committee

An abstract print depicts a red snowman as a flat, red, 4-part shape on a green background, wearing a black top-hat with a wide brim. Four overlapping red circles, that range from largest at the bottom to smallest at the top, are stacked to make up the snowman. A line-drawing near the center of the snowman depicts a tree.

#29
Gail Tremblay, A Note to Lewis and Clark’s Ghosts
from Native Perspectives on the Trail

Gail Tremblay
(Mi’kmaq, Onondaga)
born Buffalo, New York, 1945;
active Olympia, Washington

A Note to Lewis and Clark’s Ghosts
from Native Perspectives on the Trail, 2004
linocut

In A Note to Lewis and Clark’s Ghosts, Gail Tremblay portrays Sacagawea, the Lemhi Shoshone woman whose deep knowledge of the region helped the Lewis and Clark Expedition complete its mission. She knew the difficult terrain and was a skilled translator. The image is striking in its graphic simplicity. Within the black field of the woman’s robe, Tremblay has printed in bold silver ink, “When you had such a good woman for a guide, why was it that all I wanted is for you to get lost, get lost, get lost….”

Boise Art Museum Permanent Collection, Museum Purchase with a Grant from the Idaho Governor’s Lewis and Clark Trail Committee

A black-and-white linocut print depicts the portrait of a woman from the waist up with long, center-parted hair, wearing a black robe with a cowel-neck collar. Bold, diagonal, white lines in the background frame her face and shoulders. The words "When you have such a good woman for a guide, why was it that all I wanted is for you to get lost, get lost, get lost...." are printed in silver in six lines of text across the center of her robe.

#30
Joe Feddersen, Untitled (mother and child)
from Native Perspectives on the Trail

Joe Feddersen
(Colville)
born Seattle, Washington, 1953;
active Omak, Washington

Untitled (mother and child)
from Native Perspectives on the Trail, 2004
lithograph, edition 10 of 25

Feddersen’s untitled print draws on the geometric patterns and artistry of traditional American Indian baskets, blankets, and parflēches (rawhide carrying bags, usually painted and incised). He contrasts images of contemporary logging and construction with a photograph of a mother and child clothed in ancestral Plateau dress to comment on the survival of Indigenous people in a changing environment.

Boise Art Museum Permanent Collection, Museum Purchase with a Grant from the Idaho Governor’s Lewis and Clark Trail Committee

A sepia-toned print depicts metal scaffolding overlaid by grey triangles and a lined grid with a pink-toned photograph of a woman holding a child, close to the center. In the lower left corner is a purple-toned photograph of a man on heavy equipment in the forest.

#31
Section Topic: Boundary Breakers

Artists unsettle common beliefs that inform the popular understanding of the American West. They remind us that the West is not simply a geographic region; those living here have complex identities and histories that transcend political borders. Using maps and documentary photography, some artists address physical borders and consider their impact on people and cultures. Others rely on poignant symbols to re-envision the movement of people across the land and water. They break down simplified notions of personal identity, affirm their lived histories, and refute romanticized imagery. They all consider form, process, and subject; question previous perspectives; and invite new ways of understanding the American West.

#32
Raphael Montañez Ortiz, Cowboy and “Indian” Film

Raphael Montañez Ortiz
born New York City, New York, 1934

Cowboy and “Indian” Film, 1957–1958
16mm film; black and white, sound
2:19

In the 1950s, Raphael Montañez Ortiz began exploring destruction as the basis for his art making. To create Cowboy and “Indian” Film, he used a tomahawk to chop up several copies of Anthony Mann’s classic Western, Winchester ’73 (1950). He then placed the hacked strips of film in a medicine bag, shook them while singing a war chant, and reassembled the snippets, boldly jumbling their narrative, visual, and sound elements. Ortiz used this shaman-like process to suggest and honor his Yaqui Indigenous heritage. Through his invented ritual, Ortiz sought, in his words, to “redeem the indigenous wound” of European colonialism. This work disrupts the familiar cowboy versus Indian narrative common in Western films.

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Gary Wolkowitz

#33
Tony Gleaton artworks

Tony Gleaton
born Detroit, Michigan, 1948;
died Palo Alto, California 2015

Selections from Manifesting Destiny, An Illustrated History Of Lesser Known Facts And Occurrences Utilizing Text and Landscapes, Chronicling The African Diaspora In The Territories West of the 96 Meridian (In The Sovereign Lands of Mexico, The United States and the Dominion of Canada) From The Years 1528 To 1918, circa 1999–2011
digital silver gelatin prints

Tony Gleaton’s expansive landscapes and quiet views of man-made structures across the American West construct a history that is largely unknown. In 1999, Gleaton began traveling west of the Mississippi River to continue his career-long quest to research and document the experiences of the African diaspora across the Americas. Pairing evocative images with descriptive text that details events that transpired in specific places, Gleaton reveals how Black people participated in historical events that made the American West, from the Indian Wars, to The Texas Revolution, the Gold Rush, Mid-West homesteading, and beyond. Gleaton’s motivation was not only to document this forgotten, epic history, but to “undermine perceptions of the genesis of “the West” [as we’ve come to see it].”

Smithsonian American Art Museum

This black-and-white photograph depicts a landscape scene. A river occupies the bottom third of the composition. The sun reflects off the river creating abstract patterns on its surface as it wends its way into the distance. The sky contains small white clouds, and there are hilltops in the background. There are grasses and bushes on both sides of the river and a lens flare appears in the top third of the photograph.

Tony Gleaton, The North Platte River, looking west towards the Rocky Mountains. George Washington Bush crossed the North Platte near here on his journey to the northwest along the Oregon Trail. Bush was one of the first African American (Irish and African) Non Amerindian settlers of the Pacific Northwest.
2011, printed 2021, digital silver gelatin prints, Smithsonian American Art Museum

A black-and-white photograph of a building made with stone blocks. The roof of the building has a cross, and the walls contain two, square window openings and one arched window opening, through which a hanging bell can be seen. There is a rectangular door to the building on our right and tree branches with leaves cover the left and right, top-quarter of the photograph.

Tony Gleaton, Goliad Mission, Goliad Texas. McCulloch, Samuel, JR or McCullock (1810–1893) A Free Black man, a soldier in Texas. On October 9, 1835 he fought at the Goliad and was severely wounded during the storming of the Mexican officers’ quarters. He was the only Texan wounded in the battle and became known as the first Texan casualty of the revolution.
2011, printed 2021, digital silver gelatin prints, Smithsonian American Art Museum

A black-and-white photograph of a cornfield. Dirt and corn stalks make up the bottom two-thirds of the picture while a sky with wispy clouds sky makes up the rest.

Tony Gleaton, Leased cornfield, Nicodemus, KS. One of a number of unsuccessful Black towns. Nicodemus was a Black pioneer town.
2011, printed 2021, digital silver gelatin prints, Smithsonian American Art Museum

#34
Delilah Montoya, Desire Lines, Baboquivari Peak, AZ

Delilah Montoya
born Fort Worth, Texas, 1965

Desire Lines, Baboquivari Peak, AZ, 2004, printed 2008
inkjet print

Delilah Montoya’s work focuses on the rich and complex histories of the landscape and communities of the borderlands between Mexico and the United States. Desire Lines: Baboquivari Peak, AZ shows the Tohono O’odham Reservation, which straddles the border of Arizona and the Sonora region of Mexico. The mountains seen in the distance are the site of the Tohono O’odham creation story. In having to travel between these regions, the people of the O’odham community become both migrants and natives within their own ancestral homeland. Scattered throughout the landscape are water jugs, placed along the reservation border to provide water to migrants on their journey. Montoya explicitly rejects the doctrine of Manifest Destiny and the misconception that these lands were unexplored terrain prior to the invasion of white settlers and the creation of borders between two nations.

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Gilberto Cardenas Latino Art Collection

This black-and-white panoramic photograph of a desert scene shows plastic, one-gallon water jugs amidst cacti and other desert plants in the foreground. A man, walking toward our left in the distance, pushes a wheelbarrow.

#35
Gail Tremblay, An Iroquois Dreams That the Tribes of the Middle East Will Take the Message of Deganawida to Heart and Make Peace

Gail Tremblay
(Mi’kmaq, Onondaga)
born Buffalo, New York, 1945;
active Olympia, Washington

An Iroquois Dreams That the Tribes of the Middle East Will Take the Message of Deganawida to Heart and Make Peace, 2009
16mm film, leader, rayon cord, and thread

Since the 1980s, artist, writer and activist Gail Tremblay has woven baskets using scraps of 35mm and 16mm film. She culls the film from a variety of sources, including old movie trailers and outdated educational documentaries. To add variations of pattern and color, Tremblay incorporates lengths of leader film, inserting white, black, blue, green, or vibrant red tones. The titles of her works sometimes point toward the content of her film sources. Of this series the artist writes, “I enjoyed the notion of recycling film and gaining control over a medium historically used by both Hollywood and documentary filmmakers to stereotype American Indians. I relished the irony of making film take on the traditional fancy stitch patterns of our ash and sweetgrass baskets.”

Whatcom Museum Purchase

This 2 foot-tall, 14-inch-wide cylindrical basket is made using thin, shiny, strips of brown-black movie film along with folding red, white, and blue lengths of leader film into triangular shapes and weaving all four colors of film together to create patterns of horizontal stripes.

#36
Angel Rodríguez-Díaz, The Protagonist of an Endless Story

Angel Rodríguez-Díaz
born San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1955;
active San Antonio, Texas

The Protagonist of an Endless Story, 1993
oil on canvas

Known for his richly textured and painterly style, Angel Rodríguez-Díaz has spent the last several decades painting portraits of important cultural icons of San Antonio and the Southwestern United States. The “protagonist” of this painting is renowned Chicana novelist and poet Sandra Cisneros, best known for her debut novel, The House on Mango Street. Cisneros stands before a fiery sunset, dressed in a traditional Mexican skirt embroidered with sequined imagery that refers to her profession as a writer. Her commanding pose, reminiscent of Old Master portraits, proclaims that she will endure in her native landscape. In the work’s title, as well as its composition, the artist asserts that Chicanx culture will not be erased.

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase made possible in part by the Smithsonian Latino Initiatives Pool and the Smithsonian Institution Collections Acquisition Program

This life-size painting depicts a realistic portrait of a Chicana woman looking down at us, shown from the knees up, in a black strapless dress with a black shawl draped over her forearms. She is wearing dangling earrings, bracelets and rings, and the A-line skirt of her dress is embellished with a pattern of blue dots. Her arms are crossed and she is standing in a field with green plants beside her. The dramatic, orange-and-brown sky and clouds in the background fill most of the canvas behind and around her.

#37
George Tsutakawa, North Cascades

George Tsutakawa
born, Seattle, Washington, 1910;
died Seattle, Washington, 1997

North Cascades, n.d.
sumi ink on rice paper

With an economy of calligraphic line and form, George Tsutakawa’s bold Sumi-e (brush and ink) painting captures a distinctly Pacific Northwest landscape. As the artist uses an Asian painting style to render an American scene, he demonstrates that the Pacific Northwest and the Far East, linked by a land bridge in the distant past, can be joined again in the present through artistic style and cultural reference.

Tsutakawa was a sculptor and painter, acclaimed for creating dozens of public fountains in both the United States and Japan. He frequently described his experience as a Japanese American and as an artist influenced by both Eastern and Western art as living “between cultures.” When asked, “Are you American or Japanese?” he would respond, “I’m neither, I’m both.”

Whatcom Museum Permanent Collection, Gift of the Washington Art Consortium through gift of Safeco Insurance, a member of the Liberty Mutual Group

This mountain scene is created with thick, black brushstrokes of ink on white paper. The mountain range is tall and jagged with thin, light-grey clouds above. Dotted in the foreground are clusters of short brushstrokes. A small, red, square symbol is stamped in the lower, left-hand corner.

#38
V. Maldonado, The Fallen

V. Maldonado
born Changuitiro, Michoacán, Mexico, 1976

The Fallen, 2018
acrylic on canvas

V. Maldonado’s art and performances “take up space”—physically and philosophically—in white-majority spaces. Maldonado uses the imagery and cultural significance of lucha libre wrestlers, especially masks, to represent double-consciousness and how marginalized groups and individuals often feel both seen and invisible. They begin creating large, vibrant paintings inspired by the concept of freedom in 2018. In exploring and celebrating their complex identity, Maldonado rejects the impositions of gender, race, and settler-colonial myths.

Collection of the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, University of Oregon
This work was acquired with the assistance of The Ford Family Foundation through a special grant program managed by the Oregon Arts Commission

Many layers of thin, curving lines in vibrant colors almost completely obscure a shirtless, human figure lying in the center of the painting. The figure wears a wrestling mask and boots. Other masked faces are hidden throughout the lines in the artwork.

#39
Sandra C. Fernández, Mojándose II (Crossing)

Sandra C. Fernández
born New York, New York, 1964;
active Austin, Texas, and Marlin, New Jersey

Mojándose II (Crossing), 2015
etching, relief, chine collé, thread drawings,
and blind embossing on paper

Fernández’s layered print brings the poignant history of the U.S.-Mexico border to life. Before the European conquest of North America, this area was home to Indigenous communities who have lived in the Southwest for hundreds of years. Later it was claimed by several colonial and national powers—Spain, Mexico, and the United States. Fernández’s linear forms evoke these shifting boundaries and the paths of migrants through the land and water. The artist’s needle pokes holes in the paper, suggesting wounds, while her stitches seem to tie the regions together. Embossed on the print itself is text written during the Spanish conquest.

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Frank K. Ribelin Endowment

Centered on embossed white paper is a small rectangular collage with torn pages of printed text along the top and bottom edges. Green-and-black threads are stitched in jagged, meandering paths, along the inside edges of the collaged text.

#40
Angela Ellsworth, Seer Bonnet XI and XII

Angela Ellsworth
born Palo Alto, California, 1964

Seer Bonnet XI and XII, 2010
pearl corsage pins, fabric, and steel

In this series, Ellsworth refers to a group of white settler women who donned homemade sunbonnets as they arrived in Utah in the middle of the nineteenth century. The artist, a fifth-generation Mormon and self-identified feminist and queer artist, envisions her bonnets as representing each of the thirty-five wives of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon faith.

According to Mormon theology, Smith received prophetic powers from “seer stones” to translate the Book of Mormon, but in Ellsworth’s reimagined history, the sparkling Seer Bonnets endow Smith’s wives with their own visionary and revelatory powers. In her work, Ellsworth highlights relationships of love that have been overlooked or feared and, these bonnets, with their sharp, menacing interiors, reveal the struggles and the resilience of a unique community of women.

Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Purchased with funds from the UMFA Young Benefactors and the Phyllis Cannon Wattis Endowment for Modern and Contemporary Art

A pair of white bonnets, each with a deep brim, wide ruffle at the neck, and two, long, trailing ribbon ties, are repeatedly pierced-through from the outside with thousands of pearl-headed, metal pins, creating subtle patterns on their exteriors. The inside of the bonnets and ribbon ties reveal the sharp ends of the pins.

#41
Hung Liu , Mandarin Ducks

Hung Liu 
born Changchun, China, 1948;
died Oakland, California, 2021

Mandarin Ducks, 2005
oil on canvas

Hung Liu was trained as an artist in China during the Cultural Revolution, which forced her to conform to a constrained, academic style. She immigrated to the U.S. in 1984. Through her images, she shows resistance to being assimilated into the stereotypes often imposed upon her subjects. The painting’s dripping appearance is Liu’s unique style that bears no resemblance to the rigid academicism of the Chinese Socialist Realist tenets in which she was trained.

This painting portrays Polly Bemis, the most renowned Chinese woman in the West. She is wearing her 1894 wedding dress and is surrounded by traditional Chinese motifs associated with marriage, including Mandarin ducks and water lilies. Polly became a heroine, especially among women and people of Chinese descent in Idaho, because she overcame domination and subjugation to forge her own independence and success as a business woman. She married a local saloon owner to escape deportation and remained with him until his death in 1922.

Boise Art Museum Permanent Collection, Gift of Anita Kay Hardy in Loving Memory of Her Parents, Earl M. and LaVane M. Hardy 

This life-size painting depicts a woman with Asian facial features standing in a garden, wearing a long-sleeve, high-neck burgundy dress, with her right hand resting on a book. Mandarin ducks, flowers, lily pads, and swirling water overly the woman. Paint appears to drip down the canvas throughout.

#42
Wendy Red Star, Four Seasons: Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer

Wendy Red Star
(Apsáalooke/Crow)
born Billings, Montana, 1981

Four Seasons: Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer, 2006
archival pigment prints, edition of 27

In this series of photographs, Wendy Red Star depicts herself in traditional Crow dress within four fabricated, majestic landscapes—one for each season. Inflatable animals, plastic flowers, Astroturf, and other artificial materials reference and make fun of the diorama settings in which Native people are often depicted in natural history museums. Panoramic images of the Western landscape, commercially produced in the 1970s, hang in the background. By picturing herself in a natural history museum display, the artist comments on the false assumption that Native American culture is frozen in the past. Through her presence, she counteracts this destructive “vanished people” stereotype.

Boise Art Museum Permanent Collection, Collectors Forum Purchase, 2019

In this series of four photographs, the artist, a Native American woman wearing a red, long-sleeve dress sits on the ground facing us. She is sitting within obviously staged landscapes, surrounded by cardboard cutouts of animals or inflatable animals; fake plants; artificial turf or snow; and a printed, photo backdrop. Each photograph depicts a specific season – spring, summer, fall, or winter. Fall: In this staged fall scene, plastic, orange leaves cover the ground; plastic, orange-and-red flowers surround her; an inflatable deer stands on the right; and a printed backdrop of mountains hangs behind her. Winter: Sitting in styrofoam snow next to a plastic pond, the woman is surrounded by fake, black birds; white, Styrofoam snowballs; an animal skull; and faux, red berries. Behind her is a printed backdrop of trees and plastic snowflakes. Spring: The woman, sitting on artificial, green turf, is flanked by cardboard cutouts of a deer, rabbit, and coyote, and plastic, white flowers are scattered on the ground. Behind her, a printed backdrop depicts a sunny lake with pink, flowering shrubs, and mountains in the distance. Summer: The woman looks slightly toward her left and sits in the center on artificial, green turf in front of a printed backdrop that depicts a sunny mountain scene with a lake. A cardboard cutout of a deer stands to her right, and a plastic skull with horns is laid on the turf near her left. Plastic, yellow-and-orange flowers dot the turf.

#43
Alfredo Arreguín, Bitterns

Alfredo Arreguín
born Morelia, Mexico, 1935;
active Seattle, Washington

Bitterns, 1980
oil on canvas

Ecology, nature and the preservation of the environment are pressing themes for Arreguín. Birds are often metaphors for fleeting memories of childhood, communion with and reverence for nature, and references to travel and migration.

Alfredo Arreguín immigrated to Seattle from Morelia, Mexico, in the late 1950s. Shortly after, he was drafted into the U.S. Army and served in Korea. While in Asia, he visited Japan and was introduced to the work of Hokusai, the Edo-period ukiyo-e (woodblock) master. These intricate prints have been as strong an influence on Arreguín’s work as the patterned mosaics and baroque architecture of his native Mexico. Over the last fifty years, he has developed a lyrical and decorative painting style, which he employs to explore ideas of interconnectedness, often using what he describes as a lace-like screen to overlay his compositions.

Whatcom Museum Permanent Collection, Gift of the Washington Art Consortium through gift of Safeco Insurance, a member of the Liberty Mutual Group

The foreground of this painting depicts a white, long-neck bird taking flight from the ground. In the background, the sand-colored land, the water, and the sky are painted in horizontal sections in pale red-and-brown hues. A second bird flies in the sky.

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