Reflecting Lenses:
Exhibition Subtitle
Twenty Years of Photography at the Gorman Museum
Exhibit Length
March 06, 2024 - September 01, 2024
Rebecca Belmore
Mervyn Bishop
Dana Claxton
Brenda Croft
Lewis deSoto
Shan Goshorn
Tanya Harnett
Zig Jackson
Erica Lord
Lee Marmon
Larry McNeil
Kimowan Mechewais
Michael Namingha
Shelley Niro
Aimee Ratana
Jolene Rickard
Natalie Robertson
Cara Romero
Sarah Sense
Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie
Anna Tsouhlarakis
Will Wilson
For decades, the Gorman Museum of Native American Art has hosted artists who advance Indigenous visual sovereignty – understood as the assertion of Indigenous autonomy through visual media. Photographs are now central to the museum’s collection of contemporary art. Themes that are prevalent in the collection relate to social and environmental justice, connection to homeland, and Indigenous empowerment in the contemporary world. This exhibition presents highlights from the collection by more than two dozen Indigenous artists from North America, Aotearoa, and Australia.
Throughout its nearly two-hundred-year history, photography has been a tool for colonial projects across the globe. Non-Native photographers deployed images that dehumanized and stereotyped Indigenous people. The non-Native gaze produced narratives of vanishing cultures, primitive minds, and victims of progress. The work of early Indigenous photographers is seen as the emergence of a Native point of view. These images not only restore dignity to the subject, they reflect the priorities and realities of Indigenous experiences. Taking up the camera was an act of visual sovereignty.
Contemporary artists approach photography from a diversity of backgrounds including photojournalism, performance art, digital production, and film making. They produce visions of collective memory and counter narratives, in addition to portraits and landscapes. The subject of these images is Native presence. Many Indigenous artists have examined issues of self-representation through their artistic practice. In response, the museum uses the artists’ own words to present their ideas and artistic strategies.