BMA to Launch Expansive Initiative Centering the Voices and Work of Native Artists and Leaders in April 2024

April 21–December 1, 2024
Dyani White Hawk (Sičáŋǧu Lakota) presents one new and two existing sculptural works from her Carry series. Each Carry piece, composed of a large copper bucket and ladle adorned with glass beads, bears extravagantly long fringe whose draping emulates arboreal root structures. Alongside the artist’s works, White Hawk selected historic Lakota belongings from the BMA’s collection. Through these works, White Hawk insists upon an interdependence between art and function—and by extension art and life—effectively calling into question art history’s tendency to devalue craft. These works operate as physical metaphors for the carrying of history, cosmology, generational teaching, and deep thought.

May 12–December 1, 2024
This exhibition reflects upon the buffalo as essential to Indigenous lifeways on the Plains since time immemorial. Euro-American colonizers and the United States government attempted to eradicate the species in a calculated strategy to subdue Native people and force them onto reservations in the late 19th century. This effort fundamentally transformed Native artmaking, both historically and presently. The critical importance of the buffalo within Plains Indigenous cultures can be felt across artworks that pre- and post-date the attempted eradication of the species. Among the artists included in the exhibition are Long Soldier (Hunkpapȟa Lakȟota) and Cannupa Hanska Luger (enrolled Three Affiliated Tribes of the Fort Berthold Reservation, Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota descent).

May 12–December 1, 2024
This presentation speaks to Native people’s dynamic and powerful relationship with land, home, and sanctuary. While they have beliefs and practices as wide and vast as this continent, Native communities share a recognition that humans exist as part of a larger ecosystem that must stay in balance. As the pressures of colonization and contemporary life have assaulted traditional lifeways, the works in this exhibition demonstrate the resilience and versatility with which Native artists maintain their cultures, community connections, and sense of home. Both historic objects and contemporary works by Duane Linklater (Omaskêko Ininiwak from Moose Cree First Nation), Mark Tayac (Piscataway Indian Nation), Marie Watt (Seneca Nation of Indians and German-Scot ancestry), and others are featured.

May 12–December 1, 2024
This exhibition highlights the ways in which Native artists have increasingly asserted agency—the exertion of one’s own power—over representations of their communities and identities over time. In the early 20th century, white arts educators encouraged Native artists to create “authentic” art—as defined by settlers—that embraced traditional subject matter while often neglecting present realities. In the decades that followed, generations of artists have shrugged off settler expectations by depicting their community on their own terms. Such work illustrates the modern Native experience, problematizes harmful stereotypes, and pointedly challenges outsider understandings of Indigenous identity. Among the featured artists are Julie Buffalohead (Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma), T.C. Cannon (Kiowa/Caddo), Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation), Wendy Red Star (Apsáalooke (Crow)), and Rose B. Simpson (Santa Clara Pueblo).

May 12–December 1, 2024
Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation and descendant of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) is curating a film program that will be presented on a continuous loop in the BMA’s Black Box gallery. A founding member of COUSIN, a collective supporting Indigenous artists expanding the form of film, Hopinka has identified experimental films by five Native filmmakers, including We Only Answer Our Landline (2019) by Olivia Camfield (Muscogee Creek Nation) and Woodrow Hunt (Cherokee, Klamath, and Modoc Tribes descendent); All-Around Junior Male (2012) and seeing her (2020) by Lindsay McIntyre (Inuk); ✧Ⓑ☻Ⓛ♡Ⓞ✇☟☽Ⓓ✰ⓜⓐⓣⓔⓡⓘⓐⓛⓢ✦ (2021) by Fox Maxy (Mesa Grande Band of Mission Indians and Payómkawichum); and Cerro Saturno (2022) by Miguel Hilari (German/Aymara).

May 12–December 1, 2024
For this new solo site-specific installation, Caroline Monnet (Anishinaabe/French) interweaves inspiration from eel trap pots made by Indigenous people of the Chesapeake Bay watershed along with traditional Anishinaabe longhouses. The artist responds to the BMA’s architecture as a departure point for her distinct aesthetic vocabulary, which inscribes traditional Anishinaabe motifs and cultural practices within contemporary forms and materials. Optically vibrating and resonating outwards, the forms forcefully claim space while also reflecting both a sense of reception and transmission. Through doing so, the artist and her work affirm the long-denied place of Indigenous peoples within the world of museums and the fabric of society at large.

July 14, 2024–February 16, 2025
Nicholas Galanin’s (Tlingit and Unangax̂) exhibition presents existing works alongside new work inspired by his continued critical examination of cultural appropriation, colonization, and the complexities of Indigenous identity in the contemporary world. His work in Baltimore finds root in his conversations with the local Native community, which sparked directions for his sculptural installations and interventions.

July 17, 2024–January 5, 2025
This exhibition puts Laura Ortman’s (White Mountain Apache) My Soul Remainer into conversation with a historic Apache fiddle by Amos Gustina. Ortman’s video work features the artist playing her violin against the dramatic backdrop of the Southwestern landscape, while her collaborator Jock Soto (Diné) assumes reverential postures. Ortman’s original score builds upon, then radically departs from the overwhelmingly white, male canon of classical music—her score samples a classical Mendelssohn piece, which bleeds into an atmospheric and ethereal composition. The pairing of the piece with the Apache fiddle insists upon the ingenuity and enduring community traditions of the Southwest.

August 4, 2024–January 5, 2025
Dana Claxton (Hunkpapa Lakota) presents a solo exhibition of her large-scale, backlit, color transparency photography, which she terms “fireboxes.” Works from her “Lasso” and “Headdress” series, including a newly commissioned “Headdress” portrait, portrait draw together contemporary Native subjects with regalia and items from the subject’s own cultures. The exhibition situates many of the objects depicted in the firebox images alongside objects from the BMA’s historic Native art collection. Together, these recognize cultural belongings as extensions of the people who made them, provoking a consideration of personal and institutional care.