Knowing Native Arts

by Nancy Marie Mithlo

Knowing Native Arts brings Nancy Marie Mithlo’s Native insider perspective to understanding the significance of Indigenous arts in national and global milieus. These musings, written from the perspective of a senior academic and curator traversing a dynamic and at turns fraught era of Native self-determination, are a critical appraisal of a system that is often broken for Native peoples seeking equity in the arts.

Mithlo addresses crucial issues, such as the professionalization of Native arts scholarship, disparities in philanthropy and training, ethnic fraud, and the receptive scope of Native arts in new global and digital realms. This contribution to the field of fine arts broadens the scope of discussions and offers insights that are often excluded from contemporary appraisals.


 

272 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2020

Reviews

[David Martínez · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mithlo, through eight carefully chosen chapters, avails her reader with her decades-long experience as a curator and art historian working in the field of Indigenous North American art. Mithlo's objective in this volume is to argue for more representation in Indigenous art curation and scholarship. For as more museums acknowledge the need for more Indigenous art collection and exhibitions, so too must there be an increase in the number of Indigenous people doing the intellectual work of setting the discourse on Indigenous arts.

With the above in mind, Mithlo leads her reader through an array of artists, works, subject-matter, Indigenous history, and the political issues they generate for artist and viewer alike. More specifically, Mithlo raises issues with the familiar but problematic ways in which Indigenous people have been portrayed, such as historic photographs valuing the white gaze of a "vanishing race," most notoriously Edward S Curtis, or ethnographic images of the "traditional Indian." The significance of the Indigenous voice in curating and explicating Indigenous art works through historical and theoretical analyses is the significance of an understanding of the Indigenous experience as a lived experience of living communities, not merely as relics of a bygone era.

At the same time, Mithlo's book is limited by its focus on mainstream museums, be it the Whitney, the Heard, the Metropolitan Museum, or the National Museum of the American Indian. Granted, Mithlo is clear that she is referring to her experience. Still, the absence of regional and tribal museums from her discourse is noticeable. It highlights the minimal presence of Indigenous voices that are not artists, curators, or historians. Insofar as Mithlo argues for an Indigenous museum experience that is free of elitism, institutionalism, and commercialism, it never occurs to Mithlo to ask what Indigenous people want from museums.

[L. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am not a student of art history and as a white German, my exposure to Native Arts has been limited. In her book, Nancy Mithlo characterizes and criticizes the state of the engagement with Native Arts, both on a public level in museums and other arenas of art, as well as on academic and political levels. The author connects the field of Native Art to many other relevant fields and outlines the relevance of it for the state of Native American sovereignty in the US specifically. She uses examples from many contemporary and historical artists, both Native and non-native.