ATHENS, GA (PNAN) – First embraced by Native American artists in the mid-20th century, printmaking offered them a means of modernist experimentation, communal engagement and social commentary. “Collective Impressions: Modern Native American Printmakers” goes on view Saturday, October 16, 2021 at the Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia and remains on view through January 30, 2022.
The exhibition provides a chronological overview of Native American printmaking, grouping objects around concepts of ritual, gender, humor, memory, power, dispossession and exile. Choctaw/Chickasaw art historian heather ahtone notes that Native printmakers took up paper to sustain Native stories and renounce narratives of domination or tragedy, the material that Western legal culture used to strip tribes of rights, lands and languages.
The exhibit highlights a large number of Cherokee, Muscogee (Creek) and Yuchi artists, including Yatika Starr Fields, Bobby C. Martin, America Meredith, Kay WalkingStick and Richard Ray Whitman, whose works address history, memory and belonging.
As part of the exhibition, the University of Georgia’s creative writing program invited graduate students, Chelsea L. Cobb, Nathan Dixon, Nathan Gehoski, Aviva Kasowski, Mike McClelland and Hannah V. Warren, all poets and writers, to record poems from the landmark Norton anthology of Native literature, “When the Light of the World Was Subdued Our Songs Came Through” published in 2020.
For more information on related programming to this exhibit see: www.georgiamuseum.org.