In 2020, New Jersey’s Montclair Art Museum received a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation to hire a curator of Native American Art and “to develop new strategies for the presentation of MAM’s collection of the Native Art of North America in [its] Rand Gallery and throughout the museum.”
Exhibition installation with Holly Wilson’s What Was, What Is, What Will Be in the window. Image credit: Jason Wyche/Montclair Art Museum.MAM was founded in 1914 with a significant collection of historical and contemporary Native American Art. The Luce grant enabled the museum to assemble an advisory council of Native and non-Native scholars, curators and art world colleagues, and to hire Laura Allen as curator. Allen was curatorial associate for the Northwest Coast Hall renovation at the American Museum of Natural History from 2017-2018, where she facilitated the project’s Indigenous partnerships.
The result of MAM’s rethinking its Native American collection is a collaborative long-term exhibition, Interwoven Power: Native Knowledge / Native Art, which opened in September.
Holly Wilson’s installation surrounding William Couper’s 19th-century sculpture in the museum’s rotunda. Image credit: Jason Wyche/Montclair Art Museum.Allen, who organized the exhibition, notes, “The Luce grant enabled the museum to reassess the collection in view of contemporary best practices and NAGPRA guidelines (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Regulations).”
The exhibition includes 50 historical, modern and contemporary works by artists from more than 40 Native nations, including numerous new commissions and recent acquisitions. The installation will not remain static. There will be rotations of the museum’s Lanape contemporary collections as well as contemporary acquisitions.
The land the museum occupies is in Lenapehoking, the traditional territory of the Lenape.
The reinstallation of the Native American collection puts it on a par with the museum’s distinguished collection of American art from the 18th century to the present.
Meghann O’Brien (Jaad Kuujus) (Haida/Kwakwaka’wakw), Kuugan Jaad IV, 2018, Merino wool, cashmere, cedar bark, 2½ x 20¾". Museum purchase; acquisition fund 2023.6. Image credit: Jason Wyche/Montclair Art Museum.
Prominent in the rotunda of the museum is Crown for the Victor: Beauty’s Wreath for Valor’s Brow, 1896, a marble sculpture by William Couper (1853-1942) who was a resident of Montclair and a founding trustee of the museum. The museum notes, “The work depicts a young Greek woman crafting an olive wreath for a victorious Olympian.”
Holly Wilson is an enrolled member of the Delaware Nation, Lenape and a Descendent of the Delaware Tribe of Indians. Part of her site-specific installation is a column of fringe that surrounds the Couper sculpture. The museum explains, “By encircling this sculpture with a new layer of embodied materials—fringe that would be worn by Native people—Wilson foregrounds Indigenous North Americans as the first Americans and invites fresh interpretations of the worldviews within the sculpture.”
Potter once known (Kewa (Santo Domingo Pueblo)), water jar, 1910-1920, clay and pigment, 10½ x 11¾". Gift of Mrs. Henry Lang in memory of her mother, Mrs. Jasper R. Rand, 1921.7. Image credit: Jason Wyche/Montclair Art Museum.Visible through the door of the adjoining gallery is her piece, What Was, What Is, What Will Be, installed in a window, which “offers a vantage on the sky and prairie of Oklahoma, where she lives and works.” Wilson’s ancestors, who occupied all of New Jersey, lower New York State, and some of Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Connecticut, were forced off their homelands in the 1700s and 1800s to land that would become Oklahoma.
Now open
Interwoven Power: Native Knowledge / Native Art
Montclair Art Museum
3 S. Mountain Avenue, Montclair, NJ 07042
(973) 746-5555, www.montclairartmuseum.org
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