The mission of the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is “to respect and support, record and present, the living traditions and creative expressions of Native American peoples.”
Activation/Transformation installation. Wheelwright Museum Collection, 2021. Photography by Addison Doty.
The museum’s chief curator, Andrea Hanley (Navajo), invited multi-disciplinary artist Nathan Young (Delaware/Kiowa/Pawnee) to research the 11,000-piece collection and to create an installation based on his findings. Young had been Hanley’s first intern when she worked at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.
“We selected Nathan because of his broad practice and his ability to move fluidly among various media. The personality of the museum and its directors began to unfold as Nathan made selections and saw their consistent respect for quality.
“The museum has always acted as a creative catalyst and this project reflects its history of experiments with the methodology of interpreting the collection. Nathan has selected and arranged the works but the objects speak for themselves. The line between the functional and fine art becomes blurred as he tells a story about the mystique of the Southwest. In his installation Activation/Transformation, he provides new ways of contemplating and understanding the work.”
Nathan Young arranges bracelets, cups, flasks, lighter covers and other objects for his installation, Activation/Transformation. Photo courtesy of the Wheelwright Museum
“I’m from eastern Oklahoma,” Young says. “We’re a family of ranchers, real cowboys. I’ve spent time with family in New Mexico, but the legacy of the great plains is something that’s still a big part of my life. The horse is an important part of ranching today and in the history of intertribal Oklahoma Indians. The skills of horsemanship developed by Plains Indians are still highly valued and the role of the horse still figures in our systems of measurement. Today, we measure the capacity of our vehicles in terms of horsepower.
Nathan Young examines objects in the museum’s collections storage. Photo courtesy of the Wheelwright Museum
Objects with Native American motifs in Activation/Transformation. Wheelwright Museum Collection, 2021. Photography by Addison Doty
“I’m a kind of a storyteller and my narrative is about being an Oklahoma intertribal Native tied to the Southwest by horses. At the Wheelwright, I started with bridles and bits that have Native designs and made them the center of my installation. The owners and riders of the pieces may have been of Anglo or Indigenous descent, but it’s all about the way that symbols transform the utilitarian nature of the objects. I thought of the large horse pieces sculpturally as the centerpiece and arranged the other objects like the spokes of a wheel, exploding from the center. As I researched the collection, I imagined what people might be wearing and what they might own. The objects reflect the spirit of independence in Santa Fe—the wilder side of the southwest. The people who owned these objects were risk takers and not averse to transgress boundaries.
“The mystique of Santa Fe is people coming here for a spiritual connection to the land, some coming for the freedom of attitude and others for the freedom and opportunity to live an alternative to the typical American narrative.”
This opportunity to see objects from the Wheelwrights collection in a new light continues through April 3. —
Through April 3, 2022
Activation/Transformation
Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian
704 Camino Lejo Santa Fe, NM 87505
(505) 982-4636, www.wheelwright.org
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