Postcard from Arkansas: American Sunrise at the Crystal Bridges Museum

Installation photos, American Sunrise: Indigenous Art at Crystal Bridges, November 9, 2024-March 23,2025. Photos by Jared Sorrells.

By NINA CHKAREULI-MDIVANI December 14, 2024

American Sunrise: Indigenous Art at the Crystal Bridges Museum, Bentonville, Arkansas, is on view through March 23, 2025

I came to Bentonville, Arkansas, and to the Crystal Bridges Museum with an open mind to find out something new about this country that I supposedly know but might not know in the end, as it  never was fully homogenous. What I found here is a tightly knit community centered around a well-funded and well-maintained museum that pushes the boundaries in curating and conservation in a meaningful way. American Sunrise: Indigenous Art at the Crystal Bridges Museum is an exhibition presented by Jordan Poorman Cocker (Kiowa), curator of Indigenous art and NAGPRA officer at Crystal Bridges, and Ashley Holland (Cherokee Nation), curator and director of curatorial initiatives at Art Bridges. It brings together 30 Indigenous artists whose practice cumulatively spans over 150 years, all of them new acquisitions. The opening, accompanied by three thoughtful panels comprised of the artists, centered narratives we rarely hear about when we look at Indigenous art.

Formally focusing on Indigenous futurism, place, and kinship as themes, the exhibition aims to facilitate inquiry. Instead of dread and gloom, trauma, and tokenism, the overwhelming sense from American Sunrise and the associated panels with artists is that of resistance, continuity, and change. Of history and traditions passing from matriarch to matriarch who became cultural advocates. I heard stories of strong women who were not only able to raise families in very hostile sociopolitical environments but also to become pillars for their communities. These roles came organically and naturally to them, and they are continuing their mission by educating next education. We as a society can learn from these strong figures who were able to maintain and rebuild what was lost to them, -- the land, the language, the ecosystem, the freedom of speech, and the freedom to maintain cultural identity.

Installation photos, American Sunrise: Indigenous Art at Crystal Bridges, November 9, 2024-March 23,2025. Photos by Jared Sorrells.

The exhibition includes different media symbolically reflecting existing Indigenous languages across the United States. The breadth of the visual traditions on display in the forms of ceramics, painting, collage, drawing, photography, and video speak of wisdom coming from knowing a land, but also from a strong lineage of masters. The four-panel multimedia collage Final Ikwe, 2024 by Andrea Carlson of Grand Portage Ojibwe tribe works with the convoluted entanglement of time, space, memory, and belonging by bringing in ancestral stories of a cannibal who is a stand-in for colonization and cultural assimilation. Roy Bony’s intriguing acrylic and watercolor on-board work Right Now, 2024 references the loss of the language of the Cherokee speakers, a tribe from which Bony comes from. A speaker of a deer clan is portrayed crouching and intently looking at the signs from the outside. The work is laden with symbols from the Cherokee visual tradition including three deer skulls oriented westerward, towards the setting sun, but also the eye of knowledge is portrayed on the girl’s palm presents a new hope, a link between the past and the future. Will Wilson’s archival print Alaina Tahlate (Mun Ha’ahut), Caddo Language Revitalizationist, Citizen of the Caddo Nation of Oklahoma, 2018-2024 is part of the artist’s Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange project. In Wilson’s words “this project creates a contemporary vision of Native North America.” During his session Wilson gives agency to his sitters by allowing them to determine their pose, clothing, attributes, and the final title.

All thirty works on view present the Indigenous heritage of the country and the elaborate story behind it. Only through exhibitions such as these we, outsiders, could hope to understand the complexity. This authentic approach towards engagement is achieved through the deep curatorial knowledge of both Jordan Poorman Cocker and Ashley Holland, equally well-versed in Indigenous heritage, but also in the complexities of representation and inclusion.

Installation photos, American Sunrise: Indigenous Art at Crystal Bridges, November 9, 2024-March 23,2025. Photos by Jared Sorrells.

“At Crystal Bridges and through this exhibition, we are interested in the potential to explore ways that American stories are told and shared. Through this exhibition, we were thinking about what American art is and who decides what exactly it stands for,” Cocker told Whitehot Magazine. “Interdisciplinary methodologies that are inclusive of artists’ voices are critical for changing how art history responds to us. When the immediate context has been removed you get an institutional tone instead of the human voices. Approaching it through the oral history tradition and artist-led dialogues is the key. Sunrise is a metaphor for the future, a new chapter we have been observing, and what we are experiencing right now is different. This exhibition is aiming to ask questions, not attempting to resolve all of them”

It was strange to visit the middle of the United States on the weekend following the 2024 election, knowing that probably the majority of the people here have an outlook of the American present and future that is different from mine. The best part of writing about arts is the freedom it gives to go to new cultural ecosystems and experience visions different from yours, to open yourself up to healing through symbols and languages of others. WM