Courtesy of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian “From the Mad River to the Little Salmon River, or The Responsibility of Raising a Child” by Rick Bartow, Wiyot, is on display in “Vantage Point” at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian.

The work, part of an exhibition of contemporary Native art called “Vantage Point” now showing at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, grew out of Bartow’s impressions of boys incarcerated at Oregon’s MacLaren Youth Correctional Facility. Aged 12 to 18, many of the boys Bartow met already had girlfriends and babies. Around them swirled a history of alcohol and drug addiction, perhaps abuse, perhaps being an abuser of someone else. Out of empathy for the imprisoned boys whom he mentored, Bartow carved the sculpture, later casting it in bronze.

Here are some of the images Bartow used:

The sculpture is built on the back of a coyote, the trickster.

A grandmother mask on the coyote’s back end carries a tattoo that Bartow’s mother saw when she was a girl on the face of an elder healing woman at Siletz, Ore. A grandfather mask sits on the coyote’s hip.

A pair of salmon rest on the coyote’s back. Salmon give up their lives for their children. A Pacific lamprey eel feeds on the male salmon.

A basket holds a smiling baby. It is Bartow’s daughter, which makes the sculpture one of hope, not despair.

The killdeer is one of many birds on the piece. The mother killdeer acts like she has a broken wing to distract predators from her young.

The eagle with wings outstretched rises from the coyote’s back. A raven chases it. On the eagle’s tail, the moon mask represents women; on the eagle’s wing, the sun mask represents men.

The sculpture is one of 25 pieces by established and emerging Native artists in “Vantage Point.” The pieces are in the National Museum of the American Indian’s collection of contemporary Native art. It will be at the museum in Washington until August 7, 2011. Bartow’s sculpture was a gift from the artist, Charles Froelick and the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde.

Bartow, Wiyot, was born in 1946. The description of his sculpture was drawn from an essay on the Froelick Gallery website, www.froelickgallery.com/Artist-Detail.cfm?ArtistsID=227

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Courtesy of the National Museum of the American Indian A Walla Walla bag, made about 1915 of seed beads, wool, canvas, hide and cotton thread, is on display in "A Song for the Horse Nation" at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian in New York City.

The exhibition celebrates the relationship between American Indians and horses, featuring 98 elaborate examples that include horse trappings, objects with horse motifs and new works specially commissioned for the show. Originally indigenous to the Americas, the horse had become extinct before being reintroduced to the Western Hemisphere by way of European ships in the 15^th century. The exhibition revolves around the return of what some Native peoples call the Horse Nation, a great ally to the Native nations.

“Even though the pinnacle of the horse lasted only a century, this exhibition details how Native people rapidly integrated the horse into their lifeways, quickly becoming among the best mounted soldiers in the world,” said National Museum of the American Indian Director Kevin Gover, who is Pawnee.

The online exhibition, www.AmericanIndian.si.edu/exhibitions/horsenation, shares the script with the actual one, offering photos of many objects on display at the museum. Web viewers who live far away from the museums in Washington, D.C., and New York get a chance to share the experience in real time thanks to the online version’s simultaneous launch.

“It’s a comprehensive representation of the gallery exhibition that will grow in time to include additional educational resources and incorporate more interactive elements that might not be possible in the physical exhibition,” said Jason Wigfield, a web developer for the museum. “It’s a good opportunity for people, who, geographically speaking, may not be able to make it to the museum. And in addition to that, it’s accessible anytime and for long after the exhibition closes.

“This online exhibition is a great resource for teachers, parents, and anyone interested in exploring this topic.”

Interactive features, such as the opportunity to hear the word for “horse” in several Native languages through the computer, are a natural on the Web. Both the online exhibition and the one in New York provide recordings for the following languages: in Assiniboine, thongatch-shonga or sho-a-thin-ga (“big dog”); in A’aninin (Gros Ventre), it-shuma-shunga (“red dog”); in Lakota, Sunkakhan (“holy dog” or “mystery dog”); in Siksika of the Blackfoot, ponoka-mita (“elk dog”); in Cree, mistatim (“big dog”).

The exhibition uses video, images and commissioned artwork to carry the story of American Indians’ relationship with the horse into contemporary times.

“A Song for the Horse Nation” will be on view at the museum in New York until July 7, 2011. It is scheduled to reopen at the museum in Washington, D.C., in October 2011 and run through January 2013, followed by a national tour.

If you can’t wait for a chance to see it in person, visit www.AmericanIndian.si.edu/exhibitions/horsenation to view it from home or classroom.

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By Kara Briggs, American Indian News Service

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Fritz Scholder with buffalo head, Taos, New Mexico, 1977. Photo courtesy of Meridel Rubenstein

An abstract expressionist, Scholder died in 2005 at the age of 67. He was one-quarter Luiseño from Southern California, though he was born in Minnesota, where his father worked as an administrator in Bureau of Indian Affairs schools. As a young man in the 1960s, Scholder taught art and art history at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, N.M. In a few years his art would take off, making him one of the most successful Native artists of his generation.

“‘The Indians’ were a small part of my career, a series that seemed logical at the time,” Scholder said in 1981. “But an artist has to transcend a subject, or he loses his battle. The subject wins.”

Still, it was his “Indian” series, in which he fused historic imagery with expressionism, that imploded conventions of what was and wasn’t Indian art.

“To me he was an inspiration because he was a serious artist while also being a successful artist,” said National Museum of the American Indian Curator for Contemporary Native Art Truman Lowe, Ho-Chunk.

Lowe, who co-curated the retrospective with National Museum of the American Indian Associate Curator Paul Chaat Smith, Comanche, is a professor of art at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. At 64, Lowe is also a prominent sculptor, whose “Bird Effigy,” in aluminum, was displayed in the White House’s Twentieth Century American Sculpture Exhibit in 1998. In 1999 he was among the first to receive the Eiteljorg Fellowship For Native American Fine Art. Lowe’s work was also the subject of the book, “Woodland Reflections: The Art of Truman Lowe,” by Jo Ortel and Lucy R. Lippard, published in 2004.

In an interview with American Indian News Service Editor Kara Briggs, Lowe explained why Scholder matters to Native American communities today.

Briggs: This is the first major retrospective since Fritz Scholder’s death in 2005. But NMAI had been in touch with Scholder, who lived in Scottsdale, Ariz., about including his work in exhibits since before the museum on the National Mall opened.

Lowe: Our intention was to initially accomplish it while he was alive. As things turned out, we knew that really honoring Fritz Scholder was what we needed to do. In the early 2000s, I took it upon myself to call him. We talked through the concept of the exhibition which became “who stole the teepee?” It paired historic pieces with contemporary Native artists’ works. The next day he called back and said, “Yes, I will participate.” That was our last conversation; he passed away a couple of years later.

Briggs: Scholder was a tremendously creative and prolific artist, who made art in every media he tried. He is known for being provocative, even political, in his grappling with Indian identity, whether in art or in his own personal identity.

Lowe: He was enrolled Luiseño, a California Mission Indian, but his statements about not being Indian are really a paradox. His work was a new interpretation of what Indian art could be. Up to that time, the rubric of Indian art in painting was very restrictive. The subject had to be a ceremonial subject, or even an anthropologic depiction. The kind of work Scholder was doing really broke all the boundaries of what was then considered Indian art.

Briggs: Scholder grew up with his half-Luiseño father and his white mother. Even though he lived close to the Indian schools where his father worked, Scholder was sent to local public schools.

Lowe: I think that’s an indication of why he felt comfortable saying, “I’m not Indian. I didn’t grow up in boarding school.” It gave him a freedom as an artist to continue to work in whatever manner he chose. Another part of the paradox is his most famous statement, “I am never going to paint Indians.” But he ended up doing that.

Briggs: One of Scholder’s most famous paintings, “Indian with Beer Can” is also among his most controversial. When it was painted in 1969, it was perceived by Indians as washing dirty laundry in public.

Lowe: Indians hated the painting because of the issue it raised. But alcoholism is everyone’s problem and it still is. The alcoholic is also a stereotype of how others perceive Indian people. It was a stereotype that Scholder confronted in the Southwest in the 1960s, where he was bombarded by various influences. These include the cultural revolution going on around him, the work of other contemporary artists and the deep experience of tribal people, who were his students at the Institute of American Indian Arts, (IAIA).

Briggs: Many famous Scholder paintings seem to have been inspired by photos of Indian leaders or even chiefs. Some are wrapped in flags. These images are iconic to non-Indians and Indians, too. Do they express resignation or survival?

Lowe: When you see them interpreted by a contemporary artist, it raises not only a feeling but an artist’s interpretation. What that is, is up to the viewer to interpret. There are historic pictures that would have been available to Scholder at IAIA, and some of them are of Indian people who, when given flags, wrapped them around themselves. The American Indian Movement was part of the cultural revolution at this time when Scholder was painting. They took the flag as one of their symbols. Fritz, he didn’t agree with AIM.

Briggs: He didn’t agree with the radicalism of AIM, which is part of Scholder’s paradox, given that he was radical in the 1960s conceptions of Indian art. Is there a Scholder painting that influences you as an artist or a curator?

Lowe: “Four Indian Riders” is emblematic of the whole exhibition. The four riders are obviously drawn from a historic photo, and they all look off in different directions. It conveys the way most of us go. We carry histories with us, but we aren’t limited to any one particular direction.

Briggs: What can Native artists today take from Scholder’s legacy?

Lowe: They can embrace all the artistic media open to them. Historically, we talked about beads as a trade item, but for many generations beads stopped being a trade item and became instead a method of expression for Indian artists. I equate beadwork with pixels. All those computer images we are bombarded with daily are made up of pixels, which are little squares, which actually could be considered little beads. These beads are totally integrated into the palette of the young contemporary Native artist.

Courtesy of the Smithsonian National Postal Museum Hollow Horn Bear, who fought in the Battle of the Little Bighorn, was featured in the first 14-cent stamp issued by the U.S. Postal Service in 1923.

The modest scale of this art—usually less than 2 square inches—is no barrier to the Smithsonian National Postal Museum, which has launched an online exhibition, “The American Indian in Stamps: Profiles in Leadership, Accomplishment and Cultural Celebration.” And for the first time the National Postal Museum turned to another museum, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, for help in adding history and cultural context to one of its exhibitions.

“We have about six million objects and a small space so we can’t display most of them,” said Thomas Lera, who is the Winton M. Blount Research Chair at the National Postal Museum. “That’s why we have decided to digitize our collection. It’s a great tool for people, like kids who want to do a report. They can go on the website. It’s American history in the mail.”

“The American Indian in Stamps” can only be viewed at www.postalmuseum.si.edu/ARAGOAmericanIndian. It features colorful images of 40 of the approximately 70 stamps that the U.S. Postal Service has issued featuring Native Americans since 1875. The site also features many other exhibitions on other themes. The technology of the museum’s website enables viewers to magnify images to almost the size of their computer screen—allowing the artistry of the stamps to be seen in even more detail than a magnifying glass could provide.

Other facts, including the artist who designed the stamp and the medium in which the art was created, are a click away. The collaboration between the two museums, with contributions from the Library of Congress, expands viewers’ understanding of both familiar recent postage and less-familiar stamps dating back to the late 19th century.

“We took a celebratory approach,” said José Barreiro, of the Taino Nation, assistant director for research at the National Museum of the American Indian, “and helped define some concepts of diplomacy and leadership.”

A 1980 stamp featuring Sequoyah, the Cherokee man who completed a ground-breaking syllabary of his native language in 1821, is based on a 1965 portrait. Accompanying the stamp in the exhibition is a photo of the cover of a 1975 publication of the English-Cherokee syllabary from the American Indian museum’s collection.

A 1968 stamp depicting Chief Joseph is based on a portrait painted from life by artist Cyrenius Hall in 1878, which resides in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. A modern art work of Chief Joseph’s picture in beads from the nearby National Museum of the American Indian is displayed with the stamp to show a different interpretation. It is titled “The Blue Face Bracelet” (2003) by Choctaw artist Marcus Amerman.

The evolution over time of national perceptions about American Indians and the technology of stamp-making are both evident in the online exhibit. An 1898 engraving of an Indian in horseback pursuit of a buffalo gives way in a century to the 1998 lithography stamp commemorating Olympian Jim Thorpe, of the Sac and Fox Nation, as one of the most significant figures of the 20th century.

Lera said stamps are typically issued for “the big historical moments. They’re an overview. It’s a crash course in history.”

Since 1958, the Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee has consulted on about 100 new stamps released each year, providing the “breadth of judgment and depth of experience in various areas that influence subject matter, character and beauty of postage stamps,” according to the U.S. Postal Service.

For Native American subject matter, the committee shifted its focus starting in the 1990s to original artwork showing Native American themes, and photography of Native Americans’ art. Even when significant people are featured, they tend to be more educational in nature, Lera said. The 1998 Jim Thorpe stamp shows not only his face as a young man, but also an inset of him competing in the Olympic Games of 1912.

“The American Indian in Stamps,” debuted in November, and will be displayed indefinitely. It can also change as more research is done on existing material, and as the U.S. Postal Service issues new stamps, Lera said. – Kara Briggs