“We’re seeing things now, we’re telling powerful stories now, and you would benefit by engaging with them.”

—Mali Obomsawin, from a 2022 interview with Vermont Public Radio

New meaning and understanding emerge everywhere in Exploding Native Inevitable: An Exhibition of Contemporary Indigenous Art from the Land We Now Call America at the Bates College Museum of Art. Cocurated by the renowned multimedia artist Brad Kahlhamer and Dan Mills, Bates Museum’s director and chief curator, the collective vision of the exhibition is to engage and excite viewers through multiple access points and layered experiences of contemporary Indigenous music, film, performance, ceramics, sculpture, installation, fiber arts, painting, and drawing. Most of the exhibiting artists are under 40 years old, like the Native artists’ collective New Red Order, whose work The World’s Unfair in Queens, New York, last fall gained international attention. These young artists are emerging in the contemporary art conscience and conversation, and reaching beyond it, with their powerful, provocative work.

At the exhibition’s entrance is the six-minute video Wawasint8da (2022). It opens in a Catholic church, where the musician, composer, and bandleader Mali Obomsawin (who uses they/them pronouns) is at the altar, singing a Jesuit hymn that was translated from Latin into the Abenaki language by a colonizing seventeenth-century priest. Obomsawin sings and conducts the unseen horns and percussion at first with convincing reverence, then with increasingly painful, forced insistence. At the same time, Obomsawin is also in the pews, praying and singing, their gaze traveling tensely and uneasily over towering Christian iconography. After several minutes, the hymn loses form as it begins to compete for the central melody with an ancient Wabanaki mourning song, which Obomsawin learned from a Passamaquoddy citizen. Gradually and then all at once, the hymn, the drums and horns, and the ancient mourning song collide. The setting merges into a sacred Indigenous space and then weaves and spins between the two places as vocals and instrumentals disassemble and explode into a jazz improvisation. Obomsawin created the video in collaboration with Lokotah Sanborn, an artist and community organizer whose work is centered on empowering and advocating for the Wabanaki people. The clip is a mesmerizing, heartbreakingly gorgeous visual and sound journey.

The setting of Norman Akers’s stunning large-scale oil painting Watchful Eye (2023) is a landscape with evidence of human destruction and violent disregard, layered with translucent tree forms of some other time and space. Watchful Eye might represent the intersection or coexistence of physical place and mythological place—the latter of which the artist defines as “transcending physical place to describe the timeless spiritual or mythic origin, where stories begin, and civilizations emerge.” 

Artworks exuding a lightness of being and humor abound in Exploding Native Inevitable, like Elisa Harkins’s collaborative video Rodeo during Pandemic (2020) and works by Alison O. Bremner (the first Tlingit woman to carve and raise a totem pole) including a painted yellow cedar paddle titled Burt Reynolds (2017). Other traditional media such as ceramics and fiber arts also find fresh energy here, notably Raven Halfmoon’s wondrous hand-built Caddo female head titled Dush toh Dancing (2022) and Tyrell Tapaha’s handspun vegetal-dyed weavings, Áshkii Gáamalii: The Boy Who Lives in Two Worlds (2021) and Corrizo Mountain Dance (2021). The exhibition’s design provides contemplative spaces within the open, high-ceilinged space of the gallery—videos are subtitled, and accompanying speakers isolate sound to a pocket of space for one or two viewers. Post (2022–2023), an interactive installation by Sarah Rowe, provides a treehouse-like enclosure, an “inclusive and accessible space for dreaming and celebrating life” with beautiful painted interior and exterior walls animated with video projections. 

Brad Kahlhamer: Nomadic Studio, Maine Camp, a concurrent solo exhibition curated by Mills, highlights Kahlhamer’s long-term ongoing project of documenting, in Moleskine sketchbooks, observed and imagined worlds and journeys. Spreads from 35 sketchbooks are exhibited in the Bates Museum’s downstairs gallery along with the museum’s significant collection of Kahlhamer’s paintings and works on paper. Kahlhamer’s heritage is Native American, his adoptive parents are German American, and he says his foundational coming into being as a musician and visual artist happened in New York City. In the early years Kahlhamer worked as an illustrator at Topps Comics alongside Art Spiegelman, and he later encountered “America’s first graphic novels” in the form of the Native American ledger drawings on display at the Drawing Center. Mills, who has known Kahlhamer for over 20 years, observes that he “connects myths, marks, figures, fantastic creatures, Indigenous iconography, skulls, underground comix, cultural mash-ups, travel observations, and his take on the American landscape.”

Exploding Native Inevitable: An Exhibition of Contemporary Indigenous Art from the Land We Now Call America and Brad Kahlhamer: Nomadic Studio, Maine Camp will be on view through March 4, 2024, at the Bates College Museum of Art, 75 Russell Street, Lewiston.