In fall 2021, the museum mounted the exhibition “Collective Impressions: Modern Native American Printmakers.” The show offered an opportunity to place Indigenous artists firmly within the museum’s mission to preserve, exhibit and interpret the history of American art and to highlight Native artists with ancestral ties to our region. The project has revitalized the museum’s commitment to Indigenous artists, expanding representation of their work in our permanent collection. As part of this effort, we were thrilled to acquire two prints featured in “Collective Impressions”: “Stomp Dance” by America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) and “Emigrant Indians #1” by Bobby C. Martin (Muscogee [Creek]).
In “Stomp Dance,” Meredith shows the rhythmic movements of an Eastern Woodlands stomp dance. “At stomps,” Meredith writes, “we dance counterclockwise so our hearts are always closest to the fires. Men sing and women produce the percussion with our leg shackles.” The print is rich with cultural allusions and ritual symbolism. In this cropped view, the artist captures the tightly laced leg shackles and puckered-toe Cherokee moccasins mid-motion. Meredith surrounds the central image with border designs based on Cherokee incised pottery designs, their four sides alluding to the four-square ceremonial dance grounds of the Muscogee. “At the right is a sun circle,” the artist notes, “a widespread symbol of the ceremonial fire lifting prayers to the heavens beyond the sun.” Meredith’s work often emphasizes the enduring impact of women’s work in preserving Indigenous culture amid communal displacement.
Martin’s “Emigrant Indians #1” likewise examines dispossession, exile and memory through the subject matter of mapping. Here, he layers two separate maps of Kansas atop one another: a 1950s Rand McNally roadmap and an 1836 map of tribal peoples removed to the region. The historical map includes the phrase “Emigrant Indians.” Martin underscores the irony of a U.S. government document that describes Native peoples as “emigrés,” as if they had any choice in their dispossession. He also includes figures from a photograph his mother took in the early 1950s while a student at Haskell Technical Institute (now Indian Nations University) in Lawrence, Kansas. At center, that year’s homecoming king and queen appear in full regalia. With his references to land, surveying, “homecoming” and emigration, Martin uses humor and irony to address Indigenous histories of forced removal.
By Kathryn Hill
