August 2007 | RESUME

While the factor of commercialization continues to vex the reception of Native American arts as fine arts in America and Canada, the variable of prestige informs the equation in international contexts. The Biennale circuit (Venice, SÃo Paulo, Sidney, Johannesburg, Kassel, Dakar) is all about presence – who can manage to exhibit, who can manage to attend. As the Native American arts presence in sites like Venice continues to grow, attendance and therefore prestige alone does not suffice – an analysis is called for. No longer can simply showing up ccount for much if a contemporary Native American presence at international arts contexts is not conceptualized in light of other frameworks, whether adhering to or rejecting those standards.

My scholarship looks at the shift in conversation from one of colonial control and commercialization to that of indigenous competition over resources and varying internal methodologies and value systems at play. I am interested in what happens when the equation is less about powerful elite non-Natives censoring Native people to one where Native elites can (and do...) censor non-Natives and even each other. In the broadest sense, I'm asking what it means when minorities enter the mainstream. Tracking a model of indigenous arts curation born of the tribal cultural center movement in the 1970s and tested at the Venice Biennale over the past ten years, I suggest that indigenous curation, like indigenous arts, is less about a product and more about a process- less about content and more about intent.

I believe the exposure of key conceptual differences in Native American exhibition practices, particularly aspects of audience and institutionalization, will lead ultimately to an increased legitimacy of contemporary Native American art theories, in all their complexities. Until these segmentations, these unspoken boundaries are communicated; the field will remain forever caught in the celebratory mode of Indians as showcases of exoticism alone. Recognition of our internal differences is a necessary pre-cursor to the movement beyond objectified and colonized victims to empowered post-colonial subjects.