Collective Impressions: Modern Native American Printmakers

This exhibition examines the individuals, communities and institutions central to elevating printmaking as a medium among Native American artists during the second half of the 20th century. As a nontraditional art form among Indigenous artists, printmaking has continually offered a dynamic means of modernist experimentation, communal engagement and social commentary. The exhibition provides an overview of this history, while also considering concepts like ritual, gender, humor, power, memory and dispossession and exile. Such themes are especially well suited to this paper-based medium. As Choctaw/Chickasaw art historian heather ahtone notes, Native printmakers took up paper — the material that Western legal culture used to dispossess tribes of rights, lands and languages — as a means of survivance, sustaining native stories and renouncing narratives of domination or tragedy.

“Collective Impressions” features an influential group of Indigenous artists, from some of the earliest to engage with the medium, like Awa Tsireh and Gerald Nailor, to a group of more humorous and satirical artists, like Fritz Scholder, T.C. Cannon and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith. The exhibition also highlights a large number of Cherokee, Muscogee (Creek) and Yuchi artists, including Bobby C. Martin, America Meredith, Kay WalkingStick and Richard Ray Whitman, whose works address history, memory and belonging. These are crucial questions for the Georgia Museum of Art, given that our university and museum stand on the ancestral homelands of these tribes.

Collective Impressions: Modern Native American Printmakers