The full moon is our indication to create, meet, transition, and go into ceremony,” writes Juan Lucero (Isleta Pueblo) in the wall text that accompanies August Moon (2022), an acrylic on canvas landscape by Dan Namingha, great-great-grandson of Hopi potter Nampeyo. Within Painted: Our Bodies, Hearts, and Village, which spans six galleries of the Colby College Museum of Art, August Moon is arresting and meditative. It’s also in brilliant concert with its surroundings. All together, the artworks—including Lucero’s narrative along with an ambient soundscape composed in 2023 by Robert Mirabal (Taos Pueblo); a painted mural designed by Virgil Ortiz (Cochiti Pueblo) to contain the space like a vessel; In His Garden, a 1922 oil portrait by Taos Society of Artists founding member Walter Ufer; and Altered Landscape 15 (2022), a chromogenic print of a fire cloud on shaped acrylic by Namingha’s son Michael—offer a layered viewing experience like no other.

Lunder Institute of American Art research fellows Juan Lucero and Jill Ahlberg Yohe worked in collaboration with assistant curator Siera Hyte, artist and exhibition designer Virgil Ortiz, and an advisory council of Pueblo and Wabanaki artists and thought leaders to reinstall the museum’s important collection of Taos Society of Artists (TSA) artworks in the historical and contemporary framework of Indigenous experience. Foundational to Painted is the deeply researched presentation of works of art with their oft-complex histories laid bare. In 1906, under President Theodore Roosevelt’s direction, the federal government dispossessed 50,000 acres of land inhabited and cared for by the Pueblo for generations in the area known today as Taos and Taos Pueblo, New Mexico. The land seizure canceled hunting rights for Pueblo people, disrupted and exploited systems of intertribal trade, and restricted access to sacred ground and practices. Within 15 years of the seizure, in the face of irrecoverable losses across body, heart, and village—the whole way of life of the Pueblo—the Taos Society of Artists (TSA) emerged and flourished as an art colony. TSA artists—mostly Anglo-American painters working figuratively and often en plein air—sought to represent a quality of light and color palette they identified as unique to the U.S. Southwest landscape; more broadly, they sought to “capture what they wrongly assumed was a vanishing way of life,” says museum head curator Beth Finch. “Out of ignorance or for effect, they created idealized representations of Native people that failed to reflect their subjects’ lived experiences.” Painted centers Pueblo perspectives, allowing viewers to contemplate the complex power dynamics and cultural factors inherent to Southwest art. “The museum commissioned works for the exhibition,” Finch explains, “and in the art-making process, Native artists created a dialogue with the TSA. An underlying theme of this exhibition is resilience, and the resilience of Native communities is powerfully present here.”

In the same gallery where Acoma earthenware vessels are arranged on a high shelf of honor with baskets by four recently deceased masters of Wabanaki basket making, two portraits of young Native women hang side by side. One is Ernest Blumenschein’s oil painting Girl in Rose (1926), and the other is Crickett (2014), a photographic portrait by Cara Romero (Chemehuevi) of her stepdaughter, who Romero encouraged to “look fierce” for the camera. In the name of Native agency, resistance, ownership of narrative, and artistic expression—and affirming the power of Painted—we can divine an act of resistance and a quiet integrity in the averted gaze of the Girl in Rose. The exhibition succeeds in making us take another look at art made by Anglo-American painters of the Native people in the Southwest and see it in a new light. 

Painted: Our Bodies, Hearts, and Village will be on view at the Colby College Museum of Art through July 28, 2024.