Nancy Marie Mithlo, Professor Departments of Gender Studies and American Indian Studies University of California Los Angeles
Elisabetta Frasca, independent curator, Rome, Italy
Red Skin Dreams: Twenty Years of Native Art Curation at La Biennale di Venezia 1997-2017
The "place" of contemporary Native arts in broader discourses of art history, visual culture and American Indian Studies remains contested, even twenty years after the opening of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian. While Indigenous arts receive more attention in the press than twenty years ago due to recent curatorial efforts, how sustainable is this inclusion given the lack of mainstream academic research needed to guide conversations? Anthropologists Elisabetta Frasca (independent curator) and Nancy Marie Mithlo (UCLA) discuss the emergence of Indigenous arts in global contexts from 1997-2017 drawing from their work together curating exhibits at the Venice Biennale.
"Red Skin Dreams” documents and theorizes the presentation of contemporary American Indian art through memoir and storytelling. The improbable and messy business of staging international exhibits that were non-institutional, non-commercial and anti-hierarchical involved collaborators from across the globe—Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, England, Norway, Germany, as well as Italy. These connections were made through Indigenous networks, institutions, and relationships, not the prestigious galleries, museums and art collectors that typically decide who is represented and where. Our presence-making exposed the fiction that only those “in the middle of things” have access to global representation. Questioning the very notions of margin and center and asserting alternate frames of reference besides simple inclusion, this is a story that asserts that the world belongs to Native people. As Canadian First Nations arts professional Jim Logan stated, “We are a part of this world; we are a part of the human story. We are worth it.”
Nancy Marie Mithlo (Fort Sill Chiricahua Apache) is a professor of Gender Studies and American Indian Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Mithlo’s curatorial work has resulted in nine exhibits at the Venice Biennale. A life-long educator, Mithlo has taught at the University of New Mexico, the Institute of American Indian Arts, the Santa Fe Community College, Smith College, California Institute of the Arts, Occidental College and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her co-edited book Visualizing Genocide: Indigenous Interventions in Art, Archives and Museums was published by the University of Arizona Press in 2022. Mithlo’s research addresses the pressing need for accurate and sensitive information for and about American Indian communities using institutional critique, curatorial strategies and arts analysis. She is concerned with the unequal application of resources in the arts and culture field and the outmoded theoretical frames of analysis that tend to describe, but fail to analyze the wealth of knowledge inherent in Native arts production and circulation.
Elisabetta Frasca is a specialist in Anthropology of Cultural Heritage and Museums and an independent scholar. From 1998 to 2017, following her field research in Santa Fe, NM, she worked with a non-profit association of Native American artists in exhibiting their artworks at the Venice Biennale, Italy, which in the late 1990s hosted indigenous artists for the first time. From 2003 to 2007, she worked for the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C and New York in the realization of the exhibit “New Tribe: New York”, and two Venice Biennale shows (James Luna and Edgar Heap of Birds). She did research on popular culture and theatre for the University of Florence, in Tuscany, Italy, thanks to a grant by the British Library Endangered Archive Programme (EAP). From 2010 to 2013 she worked as research assistant at the ethnographic museum "L. Pigorini" in Rome (now part of the Museum of Civilizations) for the European project 'RIME - Ethnography Museum and World Cultures’, and co-edited the volume “Beyond Modernity. Do Ethnographic Museums Need Ethnography? (Espera, Rome, 2013). She taught museum anthropology at the 'Siena School for Liberal Arts' in 2013, and held seminars and acted as thesis advisor at Marist College, Florence, Italy, from 2013 to 2019. She has recently completed a national anthropological survey on historical reenactments in the north of Italy for the Italian Ministry of Culture.
IMAGE CREDIT: Shelley Niro, The Show Off, from the series Toys Are Not Us, 2017