Staff Reports | Happenings & Events
The Heard Museum is announcing the opening of two new exhibitions: Meryl McMaster: Bloodline, in partnership with The McMicheal Canadian Art Collection, on Friday, Oct. 4, and Space Makers: Indigenous Expression and a New American Art on Friday, Nov. 8.
The McMichael Canadian Art Collection in partnership with Remai Modern organized this survey exhibition of a Canadian artist whose pioneering large-scale photographic works reflect her mixed Plains Cree, Dutch and British ancestry.
Meryl McMaster: Bloodline looks to Ms. McMaster’s past accomplishments (2008-19) and brings us up to date (2022-23) on her current explorations of family histories, in particular those of her Plains Cree female forebears from the Red Pheasant Cree Nation in present day Saskatchewan, Canada.
The exhibition features 48 photographs across six bodies of work, evoking themes of memory, containment, erasure, and self-determination. Her most recent series “Stories of My Grandmothers” (2022-23) highlights Ms. McMaster’s deep reckoning with her family’s history focusing on the lives and experiences of her great-great-grandmother Mathilda “Tilly” Schmidt, great-grandmother Isabella “Bella” Wuttunee, and grandmother Lena McMaster.
In dialogue with Ms. McMaster’s large-scale photographs, the exhibition includes two new video-based works titled Niwaniskân isi Kiya | I Awake to You (2023) and Nipēhtēnān Kiteh | We Can Hear Your Heartbeat (2023).
Fall 2024: Heard Museum announces two new exhibitions
Space Makers: Indigenous Expression and a New American Art examines the mid-century American art movement known as the Indian Space Painters and the relationship between those non-Native painters.
Also, to be examined are the indigenous visual and material culture that inspired them, and the artists from the modern Native art movement who expanded upon such creative explorations through their own visual heritage.
Investigating these relationships for the first time, Space Makers reconfigures the history of American art and reveals its foundations in Indigenous space – aesthetically, geographically, and socio-politically.
The exhibition features loans from the Charles and Valerie Diker collection, one of the nation’s preeminent collections of the underrecognized Indian Space Painting movement, and is guest curated by Christopher T. Green, PhD, Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History at Swarthmore College.
Space Makers: Indigenous Expression and a New American Art, organized by Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, will be on display at the Heard Museum from Nov. 8 to March 2, 2025.
