Katharine J. Wright

Project Curator, organized in conjunction with the American Federation of Arts. Guest Curators Dr. Chelsea M. Herr, Jack and Maxine Zarrow Curator for Indigenous Art and Culture, Gilcrease Museum; Dr. Janet Berlo, Professor of Art History (Emerita), University of Rochester.

Past Forward: Native American Art from Gilcrease Museum is the first exhibition to showcase the collection’s outstanding strength in Indigenous art, rooted in the connoisseurship of a Native philanthropist.

Past Forward: Native American Art from Gilcrease Museum showcases the extensive collection of Indigenous art created by Thomas Gilcrease (1890 –1962), an arts patron and a citizen of the Muscogee Nation. Gilcreaseʼs unprecedented efforts and devotion to Indigenous traditions—continued today by Gilcrease Museum affirmed these works as vital to American art history. Surveying more than 3,000 years of Native American art, this enriching and illuminating exhibition encompasses portraiture, archaeological, and archival works, allowing for exploration of visual motifs and shared systems of knowledge that connect different ancestries, time, and space.  

American oilman Thomas Gilcrease, the founder of Gilcrease Museum, was of Muscogee (Creek) ancestry and sought to tell the story of the United States through art that emphasized Native cultures and the history of the American West. As scholars and curators increasingly embrace the imperative to foreground Native perspectives, Gilcrease Museum is distinct for having been shaped by the tastes and interests of an Indigenous collector who maintained personal relationships with a number of the Native artists whose works he acquired. Whereas Gilcrease Museum’s holdings of Western art by artists such as Charles Russell and Frederic Remington have been the focus of previous traveling exhibitions,  Past Forward  is the first to showcase Gilcrease Museum’s remarkable Indigenous art collections. 

Past Forward  takes a thematic approach to Native American art history, considering ways in which Indigenous artists across time have conceptualized and represented similar subjects. The exhibition will be structured around transhistorical themes each featuring two- and three-dimensional Indigenous objects ranging from ancient to contemporary. Works within the first thematic section highlight the use of visual abstraction in Indigenous art and are intended to foster an appreciation of how abstraction plays an integral role in sustaining tribal wisdom across generations. The next section focuses on ceremonial events, which serve in Indigenous communities to ensure the continuity of all creation and to perpetuate the balance of the universe, while the third section examines issues of sovereignty, and how artists have pictured relationships between autonomous communities. Past Forward culminates in an exploration of the ways in which many artists have determinedly negotiated their Indigenous identities in relation to Euro-American visual and cultural traditions.   

Across all the sections, a small selection of comparative works by Euro-American artists such as Russell and George Catlin will help underline the distinctive visual languages found within Native art that form the exhibition’s primary focus. 

In addition to offering an overview of Indigenous visual culture through highlights from Gilcrease Museum, Past Forward also amplifies the perspectives of Native community members, scholars, and artists through the exhibition’s multi-vocal interpretive program and catalogue entries that feature varied Indigenous perspectives. At a time when marginalized peoples across North America are uniting to magnify their voices in the fight for socio-political reform, it is even more crucial to provide spaces in which members of these communities can present their own histories, cultures, and modes of expression. Spotlighting works created and collected by Native individuals,  Past Forward: Native American Art from Gilcrease Museum  helps contribute to the widening narrative of American art history.