By LORNA CHEROT LITTLEWAY
THE THOMAS COLE National Historic Site hosts the exhibit, “Native Prospects: Indigeneity and Landscape” in the New Studio. The exhibit is presented in partnership with the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, CT, and runs through October 27. The exhibit is curated by Associate Professor Scott Manning Stevens, an Akwesasne Mohawk, who serves as director of Native American and Indigenous Studies at Syracuse University.
The exhibit is a contrast of contemporary Native and Indigenous peoples’ perspective of 19th century landscape painting as practiced by notable artists Thomas Cole, credited as founder of the Hudson River School art movement, and his protégé, Frederick Church. The exhibit features the works of nine Native artists.
In his essay, “Native Prospects: Indigenous Peoples and the Landscape-Painting Tradition,” published in the exhibition catalog, Prof. Stevens writes, “For many Indigenous peoples…it is our relationship with the land that is of paramount importance…We say we have a custodial relationship with our environment…Unlike European Christian notions regarding humankind’s dominion over the earth and all of creation.”
Stevens cites Genesis 1:28 (King James version), “God said unto them, be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” Stevens notes that there is no word for “wilderness” in the Mohawk language. The closest equivalent is “forest” and “the Mohawk language renders the term ‘wild’ as ‘free.’”
A criticism of early 19th century landscape painting is the erasure of Native and Indigenous peoples; and when included [they] are “reduced to staffage…to signal locale, period and scale.” Generally Cole’s landscapes did not include Native imagery unless it was a commissioned work like the illustrations in James Fennimore Cooper’s “The Last of the Mohicans,” or at the request of a patron.
In an 1826 letter to Cole regarding the painting “The Clove,” Robert Gilmor suggested that the inclusion of an “Indian hunter” could assist the idea of solitude. Stevens notes, “…the generalized sartorial vocabulary of ‘Indianness’ [was] signaled by feathers and semi-nudity…”
Stevens explains, “Every contemporary Native American artist…inherits the American landscape tradition established by Thomas Cole, and each artist…must decide to engage with or ignore that tradition. Some…eschew the landscape tradition…because of its association with cultural erasure, manifest destiny, and [an unacceptable]…concept of wilderness.” Artists who eschew the American landscape tradition work in abstraction or a combination of abstract and traditional landscape.
Although Cole’s career paralleled President Andrew Jackson’s campaign to remove Eastern Native tribes, Cole’s letters and paintings do not acknowledge this traumatic period in American history. Cole’s paintings are described as romantic and nostalgic.
Kay Walking Stick, a Cherokee born in Syracuse, tweaks Cole’s painting “View From Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm – The Oxbow” in her painting “Thom, Where are the Pocumtucks (The Oxbow).” The Pocumtuck was an Algonquin tribe living in western Massachusetts and adjoining parts of Connecticut and Vermont. In 1600 their numbers were estimated to be 1200. Walking Stick’s painting is an example of landscape-abstraction diptych.
Alan Michelson, a Mohawk, also riffs on a Cole painting “Home in the Wilderness.” Stevens describes Michelson’s paper sculpture “[he] meticulously recreates Cole’s settler’s log cabin but covers it in text of the 1809 Treaty of Fort Wayne…that…forced allied Native nations to surrender…three million acres…to the United States. Cole presents…an idyllic scene of domestic life…untroubled by territorial conflict, [while] Michelson…reminds us…how such lands were forcibly taken…and made available to Euro-American homesteaders.”
The exhibit, also, includes Michelson’s lightbox installation “Third Bank of the River (Panorama).” Stevens describes the work as “two parallel silhouettes of the banks of the St. Lawrence River, which separates the United States and Canada but is also the location [of] the Mohawk reservation Akwesasne. The international border divides the reservation…and creates myriad problems around issues of jurisdiction and sovereignty.”
The exhibit, also, includes sculptor Truman Lowe’s “Waterfall VIII” made of wood and metal fasteners. Lowe was raised in the Ho-Chunk community in Black River Falls, Wisconsin. Lowe’s “Waterfall” series is based on childhood memories of his parents collecting ash wood for the splints used to make traditional Ho-Chunk baskets. Contrast “Waterfall VIII” with Cole’s “Kaaterskill Falls.”
Speaking about her work in the catalog, Walking Stick says, “The landscapes are not past. They’re not about a memory or history. They’re not about what was; they’re about what it is. Indian people are here right now, living on this land, and that is the subject of these landscapes.”
