The backstory of a blockbuster Native American Art exhibit in Raleigh – Garden & Gun

When Nancy Strickland Fields saw the impeccable craftsmanship of a 700 AD pot discovered at Town Creek Indian Mound in Mount Gilead, North Carolina, she was in awe of its maker. “It was just so perfect, and I felt the artist step forward and I could see her,” recalls the Lumbee Tribe member and director of the Museum of the Southeast American Indian in Pembroke. Fields knew then and there what she wanted to do for an exhibition to which she had been invited as a guest curator at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh. It would focus on three-dimensional works, such as this pot, that captured the story and spirit of Indigenous identity.

Over the next year and a half, she collected contemporary pieces for the exhibition, calling on a diverse cast of seventy-six artists, including celebrated sculptors Roxanne Swentzell and Virgil Ortiz and legendary textile weaver Margaret Roach Wheeler, plus local Southeast artists who in different mediums. The result – titled Taking Form and Meaning: Form and Design in Contemporary Native American Art-runs through July 28 in Raleigh.

photo: Courtesy of the North Carolina Museum of Art

There are more than fifty tribes represented in the exhibition, and thematically the pieces cover everything from indigenous stories to contemporary fashion. North Carolinian Harlen Chavis recreated the deity Bird Man in copper, inspired by a representation of the warrior found on a canyon near the Spiro Mounds in Oklahoma. Caddo artist Raven Halfmoon contributed a huge, two-tone sculpture titled “Soku and Nish,” or Sun and Moon. Jeremy Frey made an intricate beaded basket in the shape of a snowy owl, a messenger for his tribe, the Passamaquoddy. Cherokee artist Laura Walkingstick made dolls from corn husks, which were believed to protect the home, livestock and personal well-being. Potter Kathleen Wall, who has Jemez and Chippewa ancestry, created a clay figurine portrait of her daughter that celebrates the multiplicity of identity. “She is wearing a traditional Pueblo manta dress, a sash with a southeastern belt, and is holding two Cherokee baskets,” Fields says. “It makes you think about what it means to be Indian today, when indigenous peoples can be members of multiple tribes and embody multiple identities.”

photo: Courtesy of Raven Halfmoon and Kouri + Corrao Gallery, Santa Fe, NM

photo: Courtesy of the Minneapolis Institute of Art

Fields invites everyone – Indigenous and non-Indigenous – to engage with the arts. “I hope the exhibition shows who we are and that we are still here, that we are diverse and that we have so many stories to tell,” she says. “The range of art, from basketry to ceramics to mixed media, shows the impressive breadth of Native American art… it’s not just Native American art, it’s American art.”

The three-dimensional aspect of all the pieces, whether baskets or stiletto heels, gives the performance a special power. “When we shape something, Indigenous people give it meaning and it takes on a life,” Fields explains. “That means this exhibition is alive.”