Paul Chaat Smith. Photo courtesy of Paul Chaat Smith

Smith has curated many exhibitions including ones about two of the most prominent contemporary Native artists, as well as a permanent exhibition about the history of indigenous Americans.

In 2008, he co-curated a major retrospective of the late Luiseño abstract expressionist Fritz Scholder, titled “Fritz Scholder: Indian/Not Indian.” Last year, Smith curated a retrospective of another provocative artist, Brian Jungen, the Dunne-za sculptor from British Columbia. Smith calls him the best Native artist of the 21^st century.

Recently Paul Chaat Smith joined American Indian News Service editor Kara Briggs for a conversation.

Briggs: When did you come to the National Museum of the American Indian?

Smith: August, 2001, when the museum on the National Mall was still a very large excavation site.

Briggs: Is the National Museum of the American Indian an important institution to the Indian world?

Smith: I think in some ways it’s more important than the people who created it imagined it would be. Going back to the 1970s and some of these early conferences when people talked about a museum of our own, then to the ’80s and the actual planning of it, I think most of them would be surprised at how important the institution is within Indian Country in the U.S. It’s one of the largest and richest Indian institutions in the United States, so its importance is beyond its standing as one of the Smithsonian
museums. It is also significant in terms of indigenous issues in Latin America. It is in a lot of ways a model for Native peoples in some Latin American countries where a museum like this would be inconceivable.

Briggs: The museum has a world-class collection, containing 800,000 objects collected a century or more ago by industrialist George Gustav Heye. Yet is the National Museum of the American Indian symbolically important for Indian nations in the U.S.?

Smith: Establishing this kind of museum is one way that nations like the United States make an effort toward reconciliation. Even though the circumstances were almost accidental, it really was about the George Gustav Heye collection being up for grabs and the competition between the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the Smithsonian Institution and Ross Perot to buy it. All those things were sort of coincidental and accidental to some degree. But the way it played out with the Smithsonian acquiring that collection, and then the legislation to found the museum, that was significant.

Briggs: When the museum opened in 2004, there was a message that we are still here. Some people took that as not intellectual or missing the point, but you’ve said that was a very particular and important message, considering that there are people today who think that Indians are extinct.

Smith: Some scholars think that the missing component is that visitors do not get the depth of what happened and how singular it was in human history, that the level of the biological catastrophe is greater than anything else that’s happened in recorded history. For that reason, it’s really a singular event, the two halves of the world coming together. There are a lot of scholars who really talk about how that Columbus contact created the world we live in now. The problem, though, is that this isn’t a story that Indians are comfortable with, or even think about in a personal way—the loss of an estimated 30 million people from North and South America to epidemics brought by Europeans in those 150 years after 1492. The last 200 years is a story that is part of our historical memory, when we talk about boarding schools and other particular stories that are authentically true, because we get them through our relatives. The first 150 years after European contact, we don’t. It’s not part of our collective history in an emotional way or in a personal way.

Courtesy of Ralph and Ricky Lauren “Indian With Beer Can” by Fritz Scholder, who was Luiseño, oil on canvas (1969).

Briggs: Fritz Scholder, who was one-quarter Luiseño and who resisted the label “Indian artist,” really redefined what Indian art was, moving it from anthropologic depiction to abstract expressionist paintings like “Indian with Beer Can.”

Smith: Scholder’s work is really amazing in the way that it provides a window into what’s happened in Indian Country during the last 50 years. The way you can talk about Scholder’s life is kind of a guide to how much it’s changed since the 1950s. It was something that you could resonate with because so many Indian people can remember when this was shocking, when Scholder’s work would literally stop people in their tracks. So there were a lot of things to explore in that project.

Briggs: “Strange Comfort,” the Brian Jungen retrospective, deconstructs consumer goods and reconstructs them as art that plays on some of the most ancient and traditional forms of Native art.

Photo courtesy of Debra and Dennis Scholl “Prototype for New Understanding # 23” by Brian Jungen, who is Dunne-za, made from Nike Air Jordans.

Smith: Jungen is creating Indian art without Indian artifacts. I’ve always felt that, generally speaking, Indian people have always wanted to be part of the world as it is. This idea that we really want to go back in time, that we’re against modernity, I don’t think that’s our real tradition. So I think Brian Jungen creates work from the artifacts of our time. He is doing it as an artist who came of age at the end of the 20^th century, an artist who is affected by what artists are doing internationally. He went to art school in Vancouver, B.C., and he is a Native person who is totally informed by the art that he sees. His art feels very much of the moment, and also timeless.

Briggs: Jungen’s masks made from Air Jordans, totem poles from golf bags, and a whale skeleton cut from those white plastic lawn chairs, are almost a comic puzzle for someone who sees this art in its traditional form every day.

Smith: Most of these pieces were first exhibited in British Columbia, so that’s a province where it’s common in the neighborhoods of Vancouver to see people make their own totems. For non-Indian folks there, it’s such a motif, such a popular thing. And of course, Jungen’s not Salish; he’s not from the Pacific Coast. His people are at least 1,000 miles north of Vancouver, and east, and his culture has nothing to do with whales or totems or any of that. So it’s sort of nervy in a way that he’s appropriating Northwest Coast art.

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By The 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.