Here Now: Indigenous Arts Of North America At The Denver Art Museum, edited by John P. Lukavic, Dakota Hoska, and Christopher Patrello

It would be easy to joke about a book like this one. With its strangely uncertain title and its subject material, the eager reader of this book will go into this work seeking to understand what sort of art qualifies as indigenous art. And that is by no means a simple question. There are, broadly speaking, two types of art that are exhibited here. There are artifacts from the past that are taken from tribes all over North America, including the Cape Dorset people of Greenland and the Mik’mak of the Atlantic provinces of Canada, which include various pieces of clothing, bags, moccasins, boxes (some of which are very finely made, it must be admitted), and the like. The other pieces of art are more contemporary and often highly political in nature. In looking at these pieces of art, it’s pretty easy to me that I appreciate art that is lived in rather than art that is coming from the perspective of more recent artists with more bones to pick. Perhaps in an age like our own, the best art is unintentional, created for our own use and remaining after we are gone to tell about the sort of people we were by what we did, rather than exposing our politics as is the case with so much of the more modern art here.

This book is about 300 pages long or so. It begins with a discussion of how contemporary people seek to become native artists. This is followed by a foreword from the director of the museum. After this comes an introduction from the editors as well as their acknowledgements. The bulk of the rest of the book is divided into sections regionally. While this makes a good deal of sense, there are plenty of pieces of art whose precise tribal identity or even geographic area is not known for certain. Nevertheless, the book shows artifacts among plains’ tribes, the tribes of the Southwest, Californian tribes, those of the plateau and Great Basin, those of the Northwest coast, Alaska natives and tribes of the arctic, tribes of the Northeast, Great Lakes, and Woodlands (all together), and finally those of the Southeast. The book then ends with notes, an index, contributors, and index credits. While there are considerable essay sections from the author, including photographs, each artifact itself is labeled with the name of the artist (where known, or tribal information where not known, sometimes this is guessed), the name of the item, and a rough or exact time of when the artifact was made, the materials used in the art, the size of the artifact, and apparently how it was obtained by the museum, though this is sometimes vague to the reader not familiar with the museum’s acquisition process.

One of the notable aspects of this book is the way that it prompts the reader to ask questions. How much of the modern art was purchased with taxpayer money? If so, it should be refunded, for the most part. How were the pieces of art acquired originally? How did they become part of the collections of the Denver Art Museum? How and why was the art ascribed to certain artists, and how would this have been verified, especially for the older works? There is in this book a certain threshold, where the older works offer genuine enjoyment and what appears to be a more genuine and genuinely worthwhile worldview. It is unclear, though, which of these artifacts was created for use and which always had a Western audience in mind. How are we to judge the art? A great deal of the contemporary art, for example, directly mocks Western art while seeking to copy it at the same time, thus negating a great deal of the artists’ claims for authenticity in the goal of scoring cheap political points. On the one hand, the older the art, the easier it is to appreciate it for usefulness as well as for a genuine desire to communicate, but the more modern the art, the more it is colored by the political environment of the contemporary age. As is so often the case, it is easier to appreciate art which has survived and which speaks to us as a relic of the past rather than an art which, in seeking to be relevant, merely becomes repulsive.