The Stanley Museum’s “Sundays with the Docents” kicked off its February event Sunday with a celebration of the rich heritage of Indigenous Americans. The museum was transformed by the unspoken stories of Indigenous artists.
Throughout the year, Stanley Museum’s docents — trained volunteers who provide educational services — had the freedom to create tours for visitors.
The leader of this Sunday’s tour was David Duer, who had earned both a bachelor’s degree in general studies and a master’s in teaching at the University of Iowa.
Duer has been a docent ever since the Stanley museum opened, due to his shared love for teaching and art.
“I’ve always admired the mixture of art by Indigenous Americans,” Duer said. “I love giving tours here and the variety of work, voices, and perspectives that we have.”
One of the highlighted artworks was “Another Side Inside of You,” by Jeffrey Gibson, an artist of Cherokee descent. For the piece’s title, he contextualized a line from a song, “Behind the Groove,” by Teena Marie.
It consisted of a canvas a little bigger than a twin bed frame, with a border of red, green, yellow, black, and white glass beads assembled into a repeated pattern of a square cut into triangles.
The inside of the canvas was flush with color with the use of acrylic paints. Gradients of blue, purple, and green triangles clashed against the darker, warmer tones of the opposing shapes.
Everything echoed the same pattern save for the middle of the canvas. The center was laden with squares of differing colors and symbols like diamonds and zigzags.
One of my favorite parts about this piece was not only the explosion of color, but when Gibson wanted the viewers to know that Indigenous peoples were too often pigeonholed. As Duer explained, this meant other people had decided that they belonged to a certain group without considering other qualities they had.
Participant Roxane Mitten appreciated how Gibson went through layers of university and eventually returned to his craft.
“[The action] transcended time and [gave a] message in the art,” she said.
Another participant, Jeanette Oleskowicz, said that her favorite piece(s) was the Pueblo pottery.
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The exhibit was introduced by a painted summary with a three-word title, “Clay is life”. Next to it, different types of pottery adorned the walls, perched atop display ledges and stands varying in size on the ground.
“All of them had different symbols of certain kinds of animals, very unique, different colors. They were not just pure color, they had dimension and depth. These are ancient representations,” she said.
A work that became an ongoing topic of conversation was “Static Broadcast, American Prayer Rug”, made by Nicholas Galanin, an artist of Tlingit Indigenous person of the Pacific Northwest Coast of America) origin. It was made during a tumultuous time in history, the year 2020.
It was a textile made of wool and cotton, with a thick, midnight black border encompassing a square of tiny dots ranging from gray to light blue to white, mimicking the static of an old TV screen.
It was a smart way of integrating the rise of technology — although it was an older, 2000s-type TV screen — with religion because there is no way the average American would hope to function without some type of screen nowadays. It all started with the TVs and just went downhill from there. I also appreciated the humorous vibe the piece had carried along with it.
Oleskowicz thought that the piece was very much symbolic of American culture. At the end of the tour, she noted the importance of history.
“It’s all abstract, but at the same time, we can look and see multiple meanings and dimensions that we can learn from and reflect on,” Oleskowicz said. “These are from people that have cultivated and lived on our land. They reached across many centuries to tell us how to guard, protect, and appreciate our future. We have to protect these pieces.”