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Cara Romero/Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Cara Romero, “Water Memory,“ 2015
Cara Romero/Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Perhaps the most surprising object in the Water Memories exhibition, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is a denim jacket. It’s a fake Wrangler, with a red felt thunderbird on the back and a row of blue beads along the sleeves and waist.
However, the exhibit is about the importance of water to Native American tribal nations and how it is represented in their art. How does a jacket behave?
“The Thunderbird is a sacred image to the Anishinaabe,” said Patricia Norby Marroquin, curator of the exhibition. “It actually represents a thundercloud.”
The beads represent drops of water, she said. The Thunderbird and Pearls were added by then 19-year-old Rick St. Germaine and his mother Saxon St. Germaine of the Lac Courte Oreilles Band of the Lake Superior Chippewa Indians in Wisconsin.
Rick St. Germaine wore the jacket while participating in the Native American occupation of Winter Causeway in Wisconsin in the early 1970s. Norby saw the jacket in a small Midwest museum and knew she needed it in the exhibit because she wanted to represent different generations of Native Americans and explore how their art speaks to their activism around water.
Rick St. Germaine’s denim jacket represents storm clouds – and power, too. It was loaned to the exhibition by the Chippewa Valley Museum.
Anna-Marie Kellen/Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
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Anna-Marie Kellen/Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Rick St. Germaine’s denim jacket represents storm clouds – and power, too. It was loaned to the exhibition by the Chippewa Valley Museum.
Anna-Marie Kellen/Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Norby is Purépecha; Her family is from a Pueblo in Mexico. She is the museum’s first curator of Native American art, and Water Memories is the first exhibition she curated at the Met.
“I find [the exhibit] beautifully showcases your indigenous and ecological approach,” Sylvia Yount, the curator in charge of the museum’s American wing, told Norby when they gave a tour.
Just a few years ago, Native American art in the museum was lumped together with art from places like Africa, Southeast Asia, and South America. But in 2017, Charles and Valerie Diker promised the museum important gifts, donations and loans from their collection. As a result, the museum moved its Native American art to where it always belonged, Yount said: the American Wing.
Water Memories is a complement to the intricately beaded garments and other objects in the Art of Native America galleries. But “Water Memories” tells a story.
“As you walk through the exhibit, you’ll find that we’re creating a stream, a stream of stories and memories,” Norby said.
The exhibition explores the diverse uses of water – for fishing, for travel, for rituals, for play. But it also shows how political water is. American energy companies have flooded tribal lands by building dams; A photograph by Carla Romero shows two Native Americans submerged in water, “still and floating in a drowned landscape,” according to the artist’s website. And a documentary video by Cannupa Hanska Luger shows a line of “water protectors” holding their mirrored shields at the Standing Rock Reservation. They slide across the snow to form a spiral – it depicts a giant water snake.
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Norby’s fellowship as an art historian is based on environmental activism, she said. Her research focuses on the links between agribusiness, fine arts and water rights in the Southwest. Taking a political stance may be new to the Met, she said, but not to her.
“I want people to go with the understanding that we all have a role to play in protecting freshwater sources,” Norby said. “That we are all closely connected to water and that we will not survive without fresh water.”
All the objects are linked to water in some way – the finely crafted glass lamps once held whale-derived oil; The intricate baskets were made by softening the reeds in water. But the exhibit is in an art museum, not an anthropological one, so there are many beautiful, provocative objects, like a feather-filled canoe frame by Truman T. Lowe; a triptych of a beach landscape with a sinister, dark angel in the center by Fritz Scholder; and a pile that looks like shiny, hollow whale teeth on a weather-beaten dock.
This work by Shinnecock artist Courtney M. Leonard is one of Norby’s favorites because of its personal nature. And she loves the aesthetics of those teeth.
“They shine. You are beautiful. They are pearly. You almost want to reach out and touch them because of their smooth texture,” she said. Then she laughed. “But we strongly advise against doing that here in the museum.”
Fritz Scholder’s painting “Possession on the Beach” towers over a gleaming pile of whale teeth, dubbed “Beach Logbook 22/Breach #2” by Courtney M. Leonard.
Anna-Marie Kellen/Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
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Anna-Marie Kellen/Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Fritz Scholder’s painting “Possession on the Beach” towers over a gleaming pile of whale teeth, dubbed “Beach Logbook 22/Breach #2” by Courtney M. Leonard.
Anna-Marie Kellen/Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
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