“This Path We Travel:
Celebrations of Contemporary Native
American Creativity” at the National
Museum of the American Indian, New York.
October 30, 1994–July 30, 1995
The ponderous Beaux-Arts Custom House on Bowling Green in lower
Manhattan, designed by Cass Gilbert and opened in 1907, must seem to
some prospective visitors an incongruous setting, given its Parisian
stylistic provenance, for the National Museum of the American Indian, a
subsidiary of the Smithsonian Institution.
Once inside, however, visitors to the new museum will find the
contrast between foreign architecture and indigenous artifacts less
striking. Most of the Indian works on display are patently
post-Columbian, dating from the nineteenth, and particularly the
late nineteenth and twentieth century. Consequently, many of the
materials used in fabricating or decorating these works, which
include ceremonial blankets, moccasins, pouches, baskets, rugs, and
pottery, come from non-Indian, even overseas sources. Some of the
most startling and impressive objects, like sections of the massive
totem poles of the Northwest Indians, could not have been made
without steel tools obtained from the new settlers from Europe. And,
inevitably, the most recent non-utilitarian work, including paintings
on canvas, reflect influences that Indian artists have absorbed far
from their ancestral lands.
There are two major reasons for the emphasis on the recent at the
expense of the more truly indigenous. The first is that the bulk of
the museum’s Western-hemisphere Indian artifacts
were assembled not by archeologists and other
scholars under the aegis of the Smithsonian, but by