ArtBreak: Reclaiming Native Narratives in American Art

About this event

During the 19th century, many American artists embraced the theme of the “Vanishing Indian.” By depicting Native Americans as disappearing, such artists spread the idea that the extinction of Native groups was unavoidable. At stake was an accurate accounting of Indigenous peoples’ experiences in the United States. In this talk, Dr. Laura E. Smith will reveal the hidden narratives of Indigenous erasure prevalent in American art of the 19th and early 20th centuries. She will also respond to works by contemporary Native artists. Laura E. Smith is a professor of art history in the Department of Art, Art History and Design at Michigan State University, where she teaches course in the arts of the Americas, Indigenous arts, and photography. She is the author of Horace Poolaw, Photographer of American Indian Modernity (University of Nebraska Press, 2016). Edward S. Curtis, The Vanishing Race, Navaho 1904, 1904, orotone. Collection of the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts; Gift of Jon Stryker and Robert Schram, 1999.46. Artwork is currently on view in our For the People exhibition. The “vanishing race” concept, crystallized in Curtis’s photograph, helped to justify perceptions of white racial supremacy and Native inferiority and helplessness. Recent research on Curtis has focused on how his photographs and publications, and especially The Vanishing Race, have continued to perpetuate inaccurate and condescending stereotypes about Native Americans in the time since they were produced.