Exhibitions Archive
Trade Canoe: Forty Days and Forty Nights
Jaune Quick-to-See SmithTrade Canoe: Forty Days and Forty Nights is part of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s well-known Trade Canoe series, which she began in 1992 as a critical response to quincentennial celebrations of Columbus’s arrival to the "New World." In her Trade Canoes and other large-scale paintings, Smith often layers images, paint, text, and objects to convey entangled webs of history, colonization, and extraction that characterize the American experience. Within Forty Days and Forty Nights, Smith draws on imagery from the Christian Bible, Salish creation stories and homelands, art historical references, and pop culture. She creates a cacophonous visual narrative, signaling a possible future of mass flooding as a result of global climate change and rising sea levels. Through this painting and The Rancher, also on view in the exhibition, Smith invites audiences to engage in a complex dialogue and to reconsider the visual landscapes that shape our understandings of Native Americans.
Conceptualized by photographer Will Wilson, the collaborative project Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange (CIPX) responds to the widely circulated ethnographic photography of Native Americans beginning at the turn of the twentieth century. During a ten-day residency at the museum, Kali Spitzer (Kaska Dena) and Will Wilson (Diné) will take tintype portraits of Dartmouth community members, then exhibit selected images.
Recycle, Resist, Protect, Sustain
Native EcologiesTwentieth-Century Inuit Art from the Collection of the Hood Museum of Art
Tradition and TransformationThe majority of artists in this installation represent a generation of Inuit from the arctic and subarctic regions of Canada who lived fully “on the land.” Several changes occurred during the mid-twentieth century that pressured the Inuit to change their traditional life ways by moving into settlements. Although the Inuit had been trading works they made out of a variety of materials since the time of contact, new visitors encouraged them to use their knowledge and skills to create work—in stone, fabric, drawings, and on paper—that would be oriented for a non-Inuit art market.
The majority of works in this installation were made by the first generation of Inuit artists to exhibit and sell their work to new markets in the south through art dealers and cooperatives. The objects they produced are remarkable works of art, widely sought after by collectors, and now in the collections of major museums all over the world. Most importantly, the production of this work created a vehicle for preserving cultural knowledge and sustaining tradition while innovating and creating new forms of expression.