Beyond Artifact: Native Artists Struggle to Find a Niche
By JANE GORDON
Published: January 28, 2001
GARY MEECHES stands in his modest apartment in Meriden and shells out a pack of small paintings onto his dining room table like the card dealers at Foxwoods: acrylic paintings of nature in the crisp orange-yellows of a burning sunset, the blue of a seaside sky, the green of summer leaves.
School field trips taught mainstream Americans the anthropology of the American Indian. Summer vacation gave them souvenirs. But little, if anything, prepared them for the art of the American Indian, particularly contemporary art -- art that isn't artifact, and that can't be worn as a beaded belt.
Since he arrived in Connecticut five years ago, Mr. Meeches, an Ojibway Indian from the Long Plain reservation in Manitoba, has been determined to make a living from his art in his chosen state. He has had to adopt a more traditional approach to his work to sell it, and has had an uphill battle anyway, because Connecticut, indeed much of New England, is only beginning to take note of its own American Indian artists.
''There's a certain kind of stereotype that is expected of Native artists,'' said Joanna Bigfeather, the director of the Institute of American Indian Arts Museum, a college and museum in Santa Fe, N.M. devoted to the contemporary art of the American Indian. ''While there are venues for our traditional arts all over the United States, there are not that many venues for contemporary work. It's not as acceptable, it's not as collected as easily because it's not tied to the romantic notions of the American Indian.''
Although the tribes of Connecticut splintered once colonists set foot on their lands, the artistic and cultural traditions of the state's American Indians were kept whole for many years in small ways. Collections at the Mashantucket tribe's reservation in Ledyard, exhibitions at the Institute of American Indian Studies in the town of Washington, anthropological exhibitions at state museums and the three small rooms that make up the Tantaquidgeon Museum on the Mohegan reservation in Montville all combined to present a sense of history. Gladys Tantaquidgeon, the matriarch of the Mohegan tribe, has long been an advocate of American Indian arts and crafts, helping to found the Indian Arts and Crafts Board in 1938.
Yet mainstream America was confining Native art in one of two categories: as artifact or souvenir. For both traditional and contemporary Native artists, neither was a good place to be. How to get out?
The fruits of gambling have helped. The Mashantucket Pequots have used some of their proceeds to build a museum and research center that rivals state and national institutions. Within the museum, the tribe, whose name means ''much wooded place,'' has curated the exhibition, ''Gifts of the Forest: Native Traditions in Wood and Bark,'' on display through March 4.
In the darkened, temperature-controlled room that contains the exhibition, prehistoric woodworking tools mix with late 19th-century snowshoes and contemporary paintings. A soft brown ash splint basket made by a Pequot, Martha Hoxie, in the early 1900's is a particularly sentimental piece; she was the great-grandmother of the center's executive director, Theresa Hayward Bell. Contemporary acrylic paintings on birch bark by a noted American Indian artist, James A. Simon Mishibinijima, hang on the wall, a stone's toss from a recent sculpture by two Penobscot Indians, Richard Love and Calvin Francis, that tells the Abenaki story of creation, with man, woman, tree and a variety of animals carved into it. Mr. Meeches also has a piece in the exhibition: a modern version of a traditional cradle board, in which Native populations carried their little ones. He worked the wood and paint. His wife, Erin Meeches, worked the beads and fabric.
''American Indian artists in the state are ready to emerge,'' said Nick Bellantoni, the state archaeologist and curator of archaeological collections at the University of Connecticut's Museum of Natural History.
''There's an increased awareness of the complexity and creativity of New England native material culture. Some of the things Mashantucket has been able to find in terms of textiles and motifs that have been associated with its tribe and others -- this stuff is beautiful. With the museum there, there will be more awareness.''
Although the exhibition focuses on traditional arts, its inclusion of some art simply for the sake of art was deliberate, said Trudie Lamb-Richmond, manager of educational programs at the museum and also o is Mr. Meeches' mother-in-law.
Many Natives struggle to have their work accepted as art, she said. ''I know Native artists want to be taken seriously and not be categorized in arts and crafts,'' she said. ''But until there is a Native culture museum, they are stuck in natural history. That's what Mashantucket is trying to change.'
Native artists have other challenges in Connecticut. For one, there aren't many of them.
''We're dealing with the sheer facts of numbers: smaller tribes, fewer Indians,'' said Melissa Fawcett, the tribal historian for the Mohegans and executive director of the Mohegan's museum authority. ''Percentagewise, we are going to have fewer artists.''