Katharine J. Wright

Project Curator, organized in conjunction with the American Federation of Arts. Guest Curator Jaune Quick-to-See Smith and Neal Ambrose Smith.

“For years, the media has portrayed us as a vanishing race and museums have ignored us. This exhibition will visually prove to ourselves and to the public that we are still here and that our communities are producing extraordinary contemporary art that deserves to be seen. Seeing is believing.” —Jaune Quick-to-See Smith

Since our country’s founding, Native American history has been consigned to an extinction narrative. Although Indigenous artists have created groundbreaking contemporary art for decades, museums have rarely exhibited it, instead displaying “traditional crafts” as artifacts of a past life. In opposition, leading Native American artist and curator Jaune Quick-to-See Smith powerfully asserts that contemporary Indigenous art is not only extant but thriving.

Building upon the success of Quick-to-See Smith’s recent curatorial collaborations with the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, the AFA will present the first museum tour devoted entirely to the subject of Maximalism as a defining quality of Native American art today. Increasingly, contemporary Indigenous artists are being recognized for their innovations in painting, sculpture, video art, performance art, and countless other fields. As manifold as their creators’ tribal affiliations are, these artworks frequently share a common thread: vibrant and dynamic compositions that celebrate the pride, exuberance, and richness of Native identity past, present, and future.

A late twentieth-century movement meant to liberate artists from the sober restraints of modernism, Maximalism can be summed up by the common colloquialism: “More is More!” Although most closely associated with interior and architectural design, in 2002 scholar Robert Pincus-Witten noted a maximalist sensibility in Neo-Expressionist art of the late 1970s. It was then, he argued, that artists began making free flowing, layered compositions out of “sheer despair with so long a diet of Reductivist Minimalism.” Across the fine and applied arts, Maximalism rejects rigid values and imposed structures, embracing an aesthetic of excess via riotous colors, patterns, layers, and disparate points of view. As a result, Maximalism glorifies the irrepressible, expansive perspectives of artists long excluded from sedate Modernist discourse.

The crosscurrents between Maximalism and Indigenous art today cannot be understated. Since the early twentieth century, when fine art schools in the United States began to admit Native students, Indigenous artists were taught that they must adhere to standard Western art subjects and techniques to be recognized as working professionals. Coinciding with the Great Relocation, such early and pervasive constraints on creative and cultural autonomy deeply affected the trajectory of Native artmaking. Quick-to-See Smith argues that twenty-first century Indigenous artists are finally breaking through the glass ceiling—of the art market, art gallery, and art museum—by embracing the visual and thematic freedoms afforded by a Maximalist aesthetic. Counter to settler narratives and practices, today’s Native American artists employ audacious color palettes and complex compositional overlays to extol the vibrancy and depth of their personal, artistic, and communal experiences.

Indigenous Maximalism will comprise approximately 80 artworks created by living artists from dozens of different tribes, ranging from renowned figures including Jeffrey Gibson, Rose B. Simpson, and Melissa Cody, to emerging talents such as Cara Romero, Crystal Worl, and Sky Hopinka. Showcasing the breadth of Native creativity today, the exhibition will feature a wide variety of mediums, including avant-garde applications of traditional artisan techniques (such as Terri Greeves’s beadwork Converse sneakers) and cutting-edge explorations of new technologies (such as Kite’s EEG-generated digital mind maps). Adopting through the multifocal lens of Maximalism, this exhibition will spotlight Indigenous artists’ trailblazing contributions to the future of digital, ecological, and activist art, among many other fields shaping contemporary art today.