Dimensions of Native America: The Contact Zone [SOLD]

Dimensions of Native America: The Contact Zone

by Jehanne Teilhet-Fisk, et al

From the Introduction:

The collision and reconciliation of meanings and interpretations found in the arts of and by Native Americans is the theme that dominates Dimensions of Native America: the Contact Zone. Arts change through cultural drift or through a form of acculturation or contact with a foreign culture. This exhibition focuses on the Native American arts that changed as a result of contact with Euroamericans through acculturation or assimilation. At the same time, Euroamerican art also changed through contact with Native American cultures. The exhibition is concerned with those acculturated art forms made by both Native Americans and Euroamericans that deliberately converge with and often appropriate each other’s cultural properties. New concepts of technology in making art, new media, new subject matter, new styles, and new or different canons of aesthetics that were absent in a pre-contact situation for the Native and non-Native are now integrated into the visual and performing arts. By focusing on the acculturated arts, this exhibition will provide our multi-cultural community with a framework for better understanding and appreciating how these arts express fertile new ideas that are integrated into the matrix of tribe, culture or society. A further objective is to question the accuracy and intentions of the Western artists (particularly from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) who appropriated cultural property from the different American Indian tribes, making visual constructions of them in alignment with the prevailing objectives of the dominant culture at that time. These arts can then be compared with the visual constructions made by contemporary North American Indian and non-Indian artists (of the late twentieth century) whose internationally recognized works address in avant-garde terms what it means to construct ethnic identities and cultural experiences that can and have led to misrepresentations of cultural truths and stereotypes.

This exhibition is the effort of a group of enthusiastic undergraduates and graduates who took in the spring of 1996 my art history course on the arts and cultures of the Southwest (the Pueblo and Navajo / Diné peoples). Since Florida State University has identified with and valorized the achievements of the Florida Seminole Tribe, the group felt it fitting for FSU students to organize and develop a campus exhibition addressing aspects of past and present American Indian art and culture.

Working under extraordinary time constraints and limited funding, these six undergraduates and eleven graduates never wavered in their commitment to this project. All of the students felt the need to see the arts and visit the cultural areas they were writing about...