"You know there’s trouble when the first object you encounter in a museum exhibition looks as if it had been misplaced from the gift shop. That problem runs deep in “Tipi: Heritage of the Great Plains,” at the Brooklyn Museum. The exhibition mixes kitschy pieces by contemporary American Indian artists into an otherwise outstanding selection of mostly 19th-century works of art and craft by members of Blackfoot, Crow, Arapaho, Lakota and other tribes that once nomadically roamed the prairies from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains. Most of the historic material is from the museum’s collection of about 700 Plains objects.
The introductory item in question, commissioned for the show and created by the contemporary Kiowa artist Teri Greeves, is a miniature tepee, less than four feet high, whose white, deer-hide shell has cartoonish figures of modern Indians and traditional symbols rendered in colored beads. As a cheerfully saccharine expression of Indian culture today, the object has a relationship to the historic material that is perplexing at best.
Beyond some basic historical context, the exhibition offers no revelatory perspective on its contents. That might be partly because, as the organizers, Nancy B. Rosoff and Susan Kennedy Zeller (both Brooklyn Museum curators) point out in their catalog preface, part of the planning process involved focus groups and visitor surveys “to determine the level of visitor interest in and knowledge of the tepee and Plains culture.” They also invited a team of American Indian scholars, artists and tribal members to vet their plans. The result is an exhibition that speaks down to its audience, assuming a low level of sophistication, and that does as little as possible to offend or stir controversy.
The second and most imposing work a visitor confronts is a full-size, 27-foot-high tepee painted in bold colors on white canvas that looks as if it had been borrowed from a roadside souvenir stand. Produced for the exhibition by Lyle Heavy Runner, a member of the Blackfoot tribe, it bears a painted sacred design of abstracted mountains and the symbol of a bleeding buffalo skull that has been handed down for generations. Two smaller tepees, also of recent manufacture, are in the show, and they contain various artifacts, new and old, to show how tepees were typically furnished."
Get the Story:Plains Indian Culture, as Seen Through the Ingenuity of the Tepee
Join the Conversation
