Janet Cantley
Curator
Heard Museum, Phoenix, AZ
(602) 252-8840, www.heard.org
What event (gallery show, museum exhibit, etc.) in the next few months are you looking forward to, and why?
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has been very supportive of the American Indian Boarding School exhibition at the Heard Museum. After supporting the initial installation of Remembering Our Indian School Days: The Boarding School Experience (opened 2000), and more recently funding the planning and implementation of an update, re-named Away From Home: American Indian Boarding School Stories (opened February 2019). Now NEH has selected the project as one of their traveling exhibitions, scheduled to hit the road April 2020 and traveling across the U.S. for five years. We are very excited to see the exhibition get wider national access and opportunities for in-depth programming at each venue.
What are you reading?
While researching American Indian Boarding schools for the exhibition, Away From Home: American Indian Boarding School Stories, I became interested in the topic of “showcasing” the U.S. Indian Schools at the World’s Fairs in the late 1800s and early 20th century. Two books have been particularly informative on the topic: Nancy Parezo and Don Fowler’s Anthropology Goes to the Fair: The 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition (2007) and Elizabeth Hutchinson's The Indian Craze: Primitivism, Modernism and Transculturation in American Art, 1890-1915 (2009). It is uplifting to see how American Indian students over time, through agency and advocacy, changed the institutions that were to make them in the mold of mainstream society. So, too, the field of anthropology was changed through the negotiations and agendas of Native peoples at the World’s Fair.
Interesting exhibit, gallery opening or work of art you’ve seen recently.
The Heard recently acquired What Will I Say to the Sky and the Earth II (printed in 2019) by Meryl McMaster, from the series As Immense as the Sky, chromogenic print flush mounted to aluminum composite panel, 40 by 60 inches, edition one of five. This other-worldly art will be in Larger Than Memory: Contemporary Art From Indigenous North America, opening in May 2020. In the self-portrait the artist poses in a dramatic landscape wearing a dress and hood covered with winged and six-legged insects. As in most of her work, McMaster made the outfit. This portrait has narrative qualities suggesting exploration and connection to the place and the artist’s representation and identity.
What are you researching at the moment?
I am working with the Heard’s digital technologies and websites manager, Jewel Clark, on developing the website for Away From Home. I am learning how unique a digital presentation of an exhibition can be. It is a challenge to successfully engage viewers and facilitate exploration online—different and yet the same, in some ways, to our in-gallery visitor to the Heard Museum.
What is your dream exhibit to curate? Or see someone else curate?
I love the idea of taking a nondescript, static object from the Heard Museum collection and sharing its story, making it come alive, in the style of The Red Violin, a 1998 dramatic film telling the story of a red-colored violin and its many owners. Many of the musical instruments in the collection have social histories and artists’ personal stories to share. An example would be the harp made by Alex Maldonado in the Yaqui section of Home: Native People in the Southwest. The history of the harp in Yoeme dance and celebration extends across generations, recorded both photographically and with sound and film recordings. Harp performance continues in Pascola dances today, in both the U.S. and Mexico. You could do a similar in-depth look at an Apache fiddle and a Pueblo drum. These narrative stanzas could be woven into a symphony of American Indian musical traditions. —
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