American Indian Exhibit Opens

How artists have shown American Indians--depictions ranging from bloodthirsty savages to helpless victims--is examined in an exhibit at the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum in Griffith Park. The show opened Thursday.

The exhibit, entitled “Native Americans, Five Centuries of Changing Views” and based on a book with the same title, covers eight major groups--from Eastern American Indians hundreds of years ago to contemporary views by modern artists.

Works of artists such as George Catlin, Albert Bierstadt, Winslow Homer, Charles Russell, John Sloan, Eastman Johnson and Joseph Sharp are presented, along with actual artifacts depicted in some of the exhibited drawings, paintings and photographs.

Curator James Nottage displays a buckskin shirt found in a European flea market along with a painting by Catlin, who produced the picture in 1831 and then returned to France with several Native Americans from the Plains. The shirt resembles the one in the painting.

Among the artifacts are American Indian clothing, jewelry, pottery, weapons and a hand-sized medal presented by President George Washington to Iroquois leaders at treaty negotiations in 1792. A carved horse effigy used as a dance stick by a Sioux named “No Two Horns,” who went on his first war party at age 14, is shown next to Frederick Remington’s 1908 painting called “Indian Warfare.”

The exhibit runs through March 1.