The next BIG IDEA project: Unraveling: Reimagining Colonization in the Americas

What important elements have been omitted from our collective understanding of colonization in the Americas? What are the possibilities for reinterpreting colonial history from the indigenous point of view? The Sun Valley Center for the Arts explores these questions and more in its next BIG IDEA project, Unraveling: Reimagining Colonization in the Americas, opening Friday, March 8, 2019, at The Center’s museum in Ketchum. The opening celebration is free to the public and will begin at 5 p.m.

As traditionally taught in North American schools, the colonial history of the Americas is a fairly straightforward story of European conquest of indigenous cultures. It is a story of settlement and expansion by the Spanish, Portuguese, English, Dutch and French as these European powers competed for possession of American territory — lands already occupied for millennia by native peoples.

Umar Rashid (Frohawk Two Feathers), Study for portrait of Bonnie Prince Johnnie Sidney, Pharaoh of Novum Eboracum and co-leader of the Sidney and St. Marc Expedition to the Pacific Coast of North America, 1791, 2017, ink and pencil on paper, courtesy the artist

The real story, however, is anything but straightforward. It is fraught with conflict and negotiation; wars and treaties; and occupations, sales and transfers of enormous swaths of land, usually without input from the original occupants. Even today the theme of manifest destiny run through the commonly held view of American history, effectively obscuring the stories of those who were displaced or dispossessed by the colonial process.This BIG IDEA project re-examines the colonial history of the Americas and offers up alternative perspectives and stories based on both fact and fiction.

“History is never a fixed story; who tells it and how it is told, what parts are emphasized, what gets left out — these all shape how we digest our past,” said Kristin Poole, Artistic Director at the Sun Valley Center for the Arts. “This project offers a way for all of us to open a new door to the history of the Americas. The museum exhibition is imaginative and darkly funny, full of alternative histories, offering a reconsideration of colonization as a system of cultural exchange, subversion and resistance, and shifting borders. Other program offerings will unveil new perspectives on certain historic moments, some of which ask us to reconsider what we think we know and others that will flesh out fuller pictures of histories most people have only vague knowledge of. All of it promises to be compelling. We urge the community join us in query and conversation.”

The Center’s visual arts exhibition features five contemporary artists whose work explores themes that are central to the BIG IDEA:

• Based in Sitka, Alaska, Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit/Aleut) creates work that considers the intersection of native and non-native cultures in the U.S. The exhibition features an installation of two video pieces, Tsu Heidei Shugaxtutaan Part 1 and Tsu Heidei Shugaxtutaan Part 2, that invite viewers to reimagine colonization not as a one-way process, but as a dynamic system of exchange through which native cultures reassert themselves and subvert dominant cultures. The installation also includes monoprints from the series Let Them Enter Dancing.
• Several years ago, Marcos Ramírez ERRE and David Taylor resurveyed the U.S.-Mexico border as it existed in 1821. Running from the Gulf of Mexico to what is now the demarcation between Oregon and California, the border shifted radically following the 1846 war between Mexico and the U.S., which resulted in enormous areas of what had been Mexico being ceded to the U.S. Along their journey, Ramírez ERRE and Taylor placed obelisks similar to those that mark the miles of the current border and photographed them in the sites they would have occupied in 1821. The resulting installation, DeLIMITations, features one of these monuments, a video piece documenting the artists’ journey, and an installation of 48 photographs of monuments sited along their route. Underlying the project is the idea that the history of this shifting border is one that ignores the rights of the native peoples whose land it delimited.
• Umar Rashid (also known as Frohawk Two Feathers) creates paintings and works on paper in large series that reimagine the history of colonization in the Americas. His elaborate and often funny narratives, which feature invented nations and recurring characters, offer viewers alternative visions of the struggle for land and power on American soil. For this exhibition, Rashid has created new works that illustrate his own imagined narrative of clashes and cultural collisions between native peoples and European colonizers in this part of the American West.
• The work of Marie Watt (Seneca) draws on ideas from history, indigenous principles, feminism and her desire to use her practice to build community. Many of her projects incorporate the woolen blanket, which for Watt is an object loaded with both history and symbolism that exists at the cultural intersection between indigenous peoples and colonizers. Much of Watt’s artwork uses blankets to build narratives around Native American resistance to and persistence in the face of a colonizing European culture.

The exhibition for Unraveling: Reimagining Colonization in the Americas also includes hands-on activities for learners of all ages in The Center’s Maker Space.

To further illuminate this BIG IDEA, The Center will present a series of lectures, workshops and films and to encourage community participation and discussion:

• FREE Museum Exhibition  March 8–May 22
• FREE Opening Celebration and Gallery Walk  March 8, 5 p.m.
• Lecture: “The Killers of the Flower Moon: The Arc of Justice” with David Grann  March 14, 6:30 p.m.
• FREE Lecture: “The Consequences of Colonialism” with Gay Bawa Odmark  March 19, 6 p.m.
• FREE Evening Exhibition Tour  March 21, 5:30 p.m.
• Film: Dawson City: Frozen TIme  March 21, 4:30 and 7 p.m.
• FREE Family Day: “How I Remember It: A Chance to Consider Another Version of a Story”  April 13, 3–5 p.m.
• Teen Workshop: “Conquering New Landscapes” Watercolor Workshop  April 13 & 14, 10 a.m.–3 p.m.
• Art History Lecture: “The World Turned Upside Down: Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s The First New Chronicle and Good Government” with Dr. Courtney Gilbert  April 16, 5:30 p.m.
• FREE Evening Exhibition Tour  April 18, 5:30 p.m.
• Film: Dakota 38  April 18, 4:30 and 7 p.m.
• FREE Lecture: “This Land Is Home” with Leo Ariwite  April 25, 6 p.m.
• FREE Evening Exhibition Tour  May 16, 5:30 p.m.

The visual arts exhibition for Unraveling: Reimagining Colonization in the Americas will be on view through March 22, 2019. Admission to The Center’s museum is always free, and the public is invited to visit the exhibition during The Center’s open hours, Monday–Friday, 9 a.m.–5 p.m. For more information, please visit www.sunvalleycenter.org or call 208.726.9491.