Sometimes Powerful Show Uncovers Native American Roots

“We are part of the Earth, and it is part of us,” Chief Seattle replied to a U.S. government request to buy Native American land in 1854. “The perfumed flowers are our sisters; the deer, the horse, the great eagle, these are our brothers. . . . Whatever happens to the beasts, soon happens to man. All things are connected.”

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, artist, member of the Flathead tribe in Montana and guest curator of the current exhibition at the Centro Cultural de la Raza, quotes Chief Seattle in both the title of the show and her introductory wall statement. His words serve as a screen of ideas, a philosophical filter through which to experience the work on view.

“Indian people,” she writes, “have lived by this philosophy for eons of time. The Native artists have made and still make their work in reverence and praise of this philosophy.”

“We Are Part of the Earth: Contemporary Native American Works on Paper,” at the Centro (in Balboa Park’s Pepper Grove) through May 20, joins 11 artists on the basis of their ethnic identity. Like most shows organized along racial or cultural lines, this one is both problematic and enlightening. Its curatorial premise constricts the audience’s focus to questions of identity, ancestry and cultural history. The extent to which these issues are manifested in the work often becomes an unspoken gauge of its relevance.

Nevertheless, attention paid to artists belonging to traditions other than white and Eurocentric is always refreshing, at least in intent, and often the concentration of such work is intellectually and spiritually broadening. Chief Seattle’s words alone give ample food for thought here with their poetic evocation of the unity of all living things.

A handful of works in the show resonate powerfully with this notion, especially Emmi Whitehorse’s large drawings in oil. A rich and beautiful chaos reigns in the fluid, interconnected world that Whitehorse visualizes. Smooth, shadowy blues or warm reds dominate each page, creating a translucent veil of color from which figures and forms emerge and recede, taunting both gravity and expectation. In one work, a straight band, split at top and bottom, doubles as a tree and exhilarated human--in either case, an emblem of growth and vitality. Leaves, fish, a crescent moon, a house and numerous linear patterns all float in the layered flux of Whitehorse’s world. Whitehorse seizes this flux and presents it as if a gift, a reminder that the chaos need not be tamed, but can be embraced and celebrated for its endless possibilities.

In one of Gail Werner’s large acrylic and charcoal works, the affinity between human and animal realms peaks in the symbiosis of a human head and three birds. The trio of birds fills in where the head form ends above the nose, and the two halves of the face--and by extension, the personality--become one, the contained, crisply defined facial features and the free, restless feathered creatures.

At the end of his speech, Chief Seattle asks: “Where is the thicket? Gone. Where is the eagle? Gone. The end of living and the beginning of survival.” Victor Curran’s landscape triptychs echo this sense of oppressed, stifled nature. One of the drawings reads as a lively mosaic of snugly interlocked shapes until the title, “Designated Landscape,” transforms it into a view of the earth as unfree, compartmentalized, assigned. “Riparian Thicket,” too, suggests a landscape lost, obstructed, inaccessible.

Few other artists in the show pay homage to the theme of Chief Seattle’s speech in as overt and meaningful a way as these three. Joe Feddersen’s computer-generated prints impose patterns over a human silhouette in a gratuitous display of technical prowess. Michael McCabe and Susan Stewart seem to derive their abstract, patterned imagery as much from a generic vocabulary of decorator wallpaper as from the spirals and snaking lines of Native American art.

Corwin Clairmont’s “Trade Goods Series” of laminated photographs and text introduces provocative ideas about cultural exchange and the reduction of a living culture to a material souvenir, but the work remains stunted at a conceptual level, never quite ascending to a level of visual interest. The toned and tinted photographs of Carm Little Turtle inject some narrative appeal, especially the four-part sequence, “She Wished for a Husband, Two Horses and Many Cows.”

Linda Lomahaftewa, Armond Lara and Jeanne La Marr are also represented in this scattered survey of Native American works on paper, a mixed blessing of a show tethered to the profound simplicity of Chief Seattle’s words: “What is there to life if a man cannot hear the lonely cry of the whippoorwill or the arguments of the frogs around a pond at night?”

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith will give a free lecture about the exhibition and Native American art tonight at 7:30 at the Centro Cultural de la Raza.