Last Chance Review: Groundbreaking Native photographers exhibit to close at Mia
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It’s a good sign when an art exhibition is still buzzing with people — on a weekday — months after it opened and the PR blitz has died down.
That means it’s hit on something: a nerve, a heartstring, a void. That’s the case for “In Our Hands: Native Photography, 1890 to Now,” a sweeping and emotional exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. The show opened in October and will close Sunday, Jan. 14. Even if you’ve seen it, it requires repeat viewing, and unfortunately, the show will not tour, so this is your chance.
“In Our Hands” features more than 150 images by 70 Native photographers of First Nations, Métis, Inuit and Native American backgrounds.
Over several years, the show was guest-curated by local documentary photographer Jaida Grey Eagle (Oglala Lakota), who until recently was a photojournalist for Sahan Journal.
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In planning the show, Grey Eagle was joined by a council of primarily Native artists, scholars and knowledge-sharers. Grey Eagle has often said she has been discouraged from pursuing photography, with many telling her, “That’s a job for white dudes.”
Knowing that she had a guiding hand in this exhibition, then, makes it all the more powerful. What Grey Eagle and company have created is an unprecedented and astounding array of images that are full of love, history, play, community, resilience, protest and aching.
The show includes the work of heavy hitters — Frank Big Bear (White Earth Nation), Wendy Red Star (Crow), James Luna (Luiseño, Payómkawichum, Ipi and Mexican American) — as well as relatively unknown photographers, or those overlooked by history. Don’t miss Big Bear’s humongous 2014 photo collage “We Are Still Here”; Red Star’s 2021 pedestal cutout series “Amnía (Echo)”; and Luna’s 1991 “Take A Picture with a Real Indian” series.
In a show that feels like it captures 10,000 moments, my favorites are the intimate ones.
Look for the small informal snapshots taken in 1915 by Lucy Sumpty (Kiowa) and Parker McKenzie (Kiowa) of Nettie Odlety (Kiowa), their friend and future wife, respectively. They show happy, carefree moments, an eternal valentine to friendship. Who can photograph us like our friends?
More than a hundred years later, contemporary photographer Kali Spitzer (Kaska Dena, Jewish) created an image with a mother breastfeeding a baby. Spitzer presents them in soft tintype glory; the mother’s hair is frizzy, tousled, her flannel shirt unbuttoned, her blissful baby plays with her necklace. It’s sweet and real. Spitzer said of her work: “Part of my hope is that by making beautiful, intense, loving images that are so large … I’m hoping to make a deep, human connection.”
Edward Curtis couldn’t capture these moments in a million years, because they require a reciprocity between photographer and subject that the white early 20th-century photographer couldn’t, or wouldn’t, fathom.
Curtis is famous for his imagery of Native American life, often inaccurately portraying Native people as a vanishing one. Unfortunately, his imagery and ideas continue to shape mainstream conceptions of Native American life.
Although it’s not the burden of this show to right the wrongs of Curtis, it is certainly an antidote. It’s a privilege to share in the intimacy that “In Our Hands” offers. Go see this gift to the community while you can.
