Artist once known, Apsáalooke (Crow), Lance Case, ca. 1890, hide, wool, glass, paint, 51 1/2 x 8 x 12 3/4″ (Buffalo Bill Center of the West, Cody, Wyoming)
A profound exhibit at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art challenges the canon with new perspectives on American history
How do you know the American West? It’s a simple question. The latest special exhibition at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art gets us pondering how we know what we know about the West and what else can we learn about it.
Turns out that the stories, more precisely, the pictures, of the West are quite a bit more complex than we were led to believe. What happens when we find new stories, makers and objects from people no one paid much attention to? It’s weirder and richer than you might think. The binary mythos of cowboy vs. Indian, for example, has never done justice to the profound cultural entanglements that have unfolded for millennia across the Americas.
Through 120 fascinating objects, “Knowing the West: Visual Legacies of the American West” brings together new perspectives in both American and Indigenous art while expanding the boundaries of inclusion. There’s never been a better time to consider what “American” or “Western” can, and has, looked like for the last 200 years.
This meaning-questioning exhibition pierces the dusty veil of an earlier art historical canon and turns the curatorial lens back on the multiplicity of makers and artists inhabiting the Western milieu: especially the contributions of women, Native artists from hundreds of distinct tribal nations, Spanish, French, English and American colonials, and the overlooked artistic production of soldiers, slaves, immigrants, scientists, tourists and settlers.
Sure, who doesn’t love some jaw-dropping landscapes by Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran, both immigrants by the way, but there was so much more going on visually and materially in the West. Led by co-curators Mindy N. Besaw, PhD, curator of American art at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and Jami C. Powell, PhD, Osage Nation, associate director of curatorial affairs and curator of Indigenous art at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, an advisory group of 20 curators and scholars intentionally embraced different viewpoints.
Besides, for far too long the American West has been defined by a decidedly masculine, “dude energy” of conquest, exploration and extraction. The curators wisely took another path, selecting objects by known and “once known” artists that expand our definitions of art and help untangle our sticky binary biases.
A touchstone of the exhibition is “Winter Count” by Joseph No Two Horns, a Hunkpapa Lakota warrior-artist who lived to see the complete transformation of his tribal way of life from the second half of the 19th century into the first half of the 20th. While less an art object than a visual mnemonic device, winter counts were a common practice of recording history among the Plains tribes. Count keepers, often spanning generations, were responsible for visually documenting events that occurred in a period from first snow to first snow.
Pictograph drawings were rendered chronologically on animal hide, and later on cotton muslin, representing meaningful tribal events whether environmental, social or spiritual. Produced by No Two Horns
in 1922, the wall-sized “Winter Count” indexed each year since 1785. These winter counts were shared with the community, accompanied by an oral narration of recorded histories, sometimes supported by written keys recorded in Indigenous dialects and held in count keeper families. The artist, in this context, was also a historian and storyteller who performed a crucial community service. A small inscription in the corner of the work urges the viewer to “Please pay $2.50 to see this map,” indicating that the count keeper’s knowledge was valuable and to be protected well into the 20th century.
The inclusion of such a work in “Knowing the West” resets our perspective and time scale of how pictures tell stories, how art functions in oral cultures, and how culture becomes a tool of persistence and resistance in the face of radical change — in this case, the colonial settlement of the American West and its devastating effects on Native people. Perusing No Two Horns “Winter Count” reveals poignant images of migrations, battles, disease, animals, agriculture, astronomy, and encounters with soldiers, priests, settlers and railroads. It is a complex picture of lived experience over time. Call it continuance.
Another unusual Indigenous object that demonstrates the continuance of an artistic tradition over centuries is an exceptional beaded rawhide lance case by a once known, likely female, Apsaálooke (Crow) artist. Designed to sheath a warrior’s lance while not in use, and often accompanied by a shield, they were made and carried exclusively by women when moving the camp on horseback, or later, in tribal parades.
Ascending geometric patterns decorate the rawhide shaft in natural primary pigments, further adorned with glass beaded tabs of wool cloth. The spade-like top sheath repeats pyramid-like designs in white, red, yellow and blue beads, bordered by a tasseled fringe. The visual form of these lance cases has changed little over the last 200 years, and as the exhibition shows us, they are still cherished in Apsaálooke families and proudly carried in the annual Crow Fair Parade every August with the status of living entities. Geometric abstraction indeed has a very long multicultural history in American visual art.
Then we return to Albert Bierstadt. His giant canvases of pristine Western landscapes are epitomized by the exhibition’s “Sierra Nevada Morning” (1870). In this seductive work with its serene depiction of frolicking deer amidst a glorious untamed wilderness, Bierstadt was creating a commodified fantasy in his New York studio, eliding any human presence or influence. The western wilderness was rendered as a theatrical stage awaiting occupation by any number of willing players. Romantic pictures like these were among the first to be canonized into American art history.
INTERROGATING THE CANON
“Knowing the West” interrogates the presumed authority of Bierstadt’s landscape with a simple but powerful museological adjustment. As we enter the sightline of the painting, the curators intentionally interrupt the view with a visually arresting pedestal display of masterful Native baskets by known artists like Louisa Keyser (Washoe), a contemporary of Bierstadt, living and sourcing her materials in the very same California landscape he depicted in the painting. Bierstadt is said to have collected Native baskets himself. By repopulating Bierstadt’s spectacular view with such tactile, curvilinear objects as basketry made from the flora and fauna of the land itself, we can appreciate these contrasting artistic achievements with new eyes.
It’s nearly impossible to think about the West without horses, reintroduced by the Spanish in the 16th century and quickly adopted by many Native nations, especially in the Great Plains. One of the oldest objects in the exhibition is an exquisitely embroidered California Mexican saddle from around 1820-1850. The surprising display of saddles in the exhibition demonstrates how a common utilitarian form evolved over centuries through remarkable cultural interchange. Spanish saddles with Muslim decorative influences and symbols would be adapted by Comanche makers, for example, while tribes like the Diné (Navajo) or Apsaálooke (Crow) created elaborately ornamented saddle shapes unique to specific genders or functions.
Chinese coins, 37 x 59″ (National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, Oklahoma City)
Since the West inevitably leads to the East, the exhibition highlights additional directional examples of overlooked cultural exchange. How did dozens of Chinese coins come to adorn the tinkling fringe of a beautifully beaded Nimíipu (Nez Perce) saddle blanket in the 1880s? The answer can be seen in a nearby painting by Joseph Becker depicting Chinese immigrant laborers employed on the Central Pacific Railroad plowing through the snowy Sierra Nevada mountains. Chinese coins were used as ship ballast and repurposed as tradable commodities when immigrants from the East arrived on the West Coast in the 1850s.
The work of Japanese born artist Chiura Obata unexpectedly stands out. After immigrating to the United States in 1903, Obata was inspired by the same California landscapes as Bierstadt, but portrayed them using traditional Japanese watercolor and woodblock printing techniques to articulate an intimate and modernist vision of the Western landscape. Despite becoming an art professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Obata’s legacy was complicated by a three-year forced stay in a Japanese internment camp in Utah during World War II.
Images and stories of multiplicity are what make “Knowing the West” a meaning-making exhibition that is full of discoveries alongside a few of the usual suspects. Thanks to fresh scholarship, interpretive approaches and thoughtful engagement, extraordinary stories of the American West are still emerging. We need new stories, new understandings, to replenish our memories and renew our knowledge. Just imagine, all of these “artists once known” made up the American West too.
“Knowing the West: Visual Legacies of the American West” continues at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark., through Jan. 27. Hours are 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Mondays and Wednesdays; 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays and 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. For more information, 479.418.5700 or www.crystalbridges.org.
