Donald “Babe” Hemlock, “Ironworker Cradleboard,” 2011
Photo by Lee Rosenbaum
I’ve reviewed many large surveys of Native American art, but never one exclusively devoted to contemporary work. Usually, the recent pieces are shown alongside their historic counterparts, as if to lend them a kind of “legitimacy.”
In my latest Wall Street Journal piece, Native, North American, New, appearing on tomorrow’s “Leisure & Arts” page (but online now), I review two surveys in New York museums that are exclusively devoted to very recent, decidedly non-traditional art by Native Americans who, in the words of artist Donald “Babe” Hemlock, “maintain balance in our world, while walking in yours, which hasn’t always been easy.”
As you can see by the daredevil Mohawk ironworker at the bottom of the above image, he means “balance” both literally and figuratively.
And as you can see from the other side of his cradleboard—composed of the traditional infant-swaddling materials of animal hide, lined with fur—this is one of the many hybrid works uniting the comfortingly traditional with the jarringly contemporary that can be savored in the Museum of Arts and Design’s energetic and eclectic Changing Hands show (to Oct. 21):
Photo by Lee Rosenbaum
By happy coincidence, the National Museum of the American Indian is showing (at its New York satellite facility) a more in-depth representation of three of the 84 artists in MAD’s show. They are among those showcased in the NMAI’s We Are Here exhibition (to Sept. 23) of winners of contemporary art fellowships from the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, Indianapolis.
At this writing, there are no illustrative images on the WSJ’s website, but those usually go up after the text is posted.