Museum curators are in a tricky position these days. All of them are smart and have great taste, which used to be the main requirements for the job, but now they feel they must demonstrate the politics that some visitors have come to expect of them. That problem could be solved by showing nothing but contemporary artists who probe these politics, but there is still the thorny question of what to do with existing collections, which almost always have the misfortune of having been accumulated before 2017.
A new show in the rotunda at the Baltimore Museum of Art presents a solution tried by other institutions to various degrees. “Bodies of
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White Hawk’s sculptures lend themselves to this kind of treatment. Each titled Carry from a series of the same name, there are several homages to familiar parts of Native American design.
The predominant look is buckskin, beads and sinew, but these materials stretch down long below a bucket shape so that together they resemble a friendly creature with long tentacles, perhaps the Yip-Yip Martians from Sesame Street. On the plinth, this extra long fringe tangles like spaghetti, meant to emulate tree roots and waterways, though the real action is at the top because these are, in fact, copper buckets, complete with ladles. We’ve been going through a “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” moment in art lately, and this is about as Carrier Bag-y as it gets.
“‘Bodies of
The functional objects in question are moccasins and tobacco bags, from the Lakota tribe and around the turn of the last century. The effect works well. One can see where White Hawk imitates her forebears and where she moves past them.
They are excellent to behold, too. Beads were a relatively new invention for plains tribes at the time these were made, but those skilled with porcupine quillwork took to the medium quickly. You can feel them pushing their boundaries here, matching deep teal against blood red. The design on the moccasins is particularly intricate: triangles that devour each other.
White Hawk manages to achieve some powerful effects with her own beading, particularly in Carry IV (2024), which does much with the expected turquoise color palette, turning it into rays of light falling on a body of
“Dyani White Hawk: Bodies of
One Fine Show is where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum outside of New York City—a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.
