Innehållsförteckning för Fall 2020 från Aperture

In an era when photographs of Native Americans were largely made by outsiders, here is a portrait that acknowledges the act of its making. The photograph of Albert and Mary Lincoln, from sometime in the early 1900s, depicts a man, whose Crow name was Thunder Iron, and his wife, Mary, seated beside him, both dressed magnificently. She wears an elk-tooth-studded dress. He wears a vest, gauntlets, and a belt with an intricately hand-beaded floral motif. They are posed against a white backdrop, but the framing reveals the improvised studio setup and exposes the patterned rug below their moccasins and a slice of wall. Thunder Iron’s veneer is tough, his gaze is direct, his stance is fiercely protective. Mary keeps her hands folded in her lap, her eyebrows raised expectantly in…

“No one was going to put me on the cover of a Paris fashion magazine, so I thought, I’m gonna make my own,” recounts Martine Gutierrez, speaking about her 2018 project Indigenous Woman, which takes the form of a 124-page magazine. In a series of spreads that encapsulates high-fashion glamour, as well as humor and the absurd, the artist is the project’s featured model, photographer, stylist, creative director, and editor in chief. However, Gutierrez is enacting not simply the “artist as muse” but rather the “artist as media mogul,” staging a guerrilla-style seizure and colonization of space in an image-based world to which she had previously been denied access. The concept of an artist’s book is not new. Since the nineteenth century, following the inception of the photographic medium, artists…

One of Jacqueline Cleveland’s photographs taken in the Alaskan Yup’ik coastal village of Toksook Bay shows a village elder in her home. Seated in an easy chair beneath a patchwork of family photographs, in a small space that seems to be both living room and kitchen, Lizzie Chimiugak Nenguryarr appears caught midsentence, her hands folded in her lap as she speaks. Her lavender calico qaspeq is trimmed in rose-colored rickrack; the purple and pink shades of her tunic recur in a nearby clipboard depicting Disney princesses, and in the bulk cases of Cup Noodles shrimp-flavored ramen stacked near her microwave. Survivance is a term that has been used to describe the perseverance and adaptation of Native traditions in the face of colonial brutality and attempted genocide. Survivance expresses the cultural…

In the Amerindian oral tradition, there exists a myth of a two-million-year-old woman, known today by various names including the Sky Woman, the Emerald Woman, and the Spider Woman, who fell from the empyrean and landed in the earth’s ocean. A turtle emerged from the waves and let the woman ride on its back. A muskrat raised the mud from the ocean floor to make mountains. The woman gave birth to sons, and after she died, one planted the first corn in her memory. Iterations of this story have been handed down through generations and were perhaps first recorded by Jesuit missionaries in the early eighteenth century, a gesture that proved both conservationist and confiscatory. The artist Karen Miranda Rivadeneira, who is descended from the Manta peoples on the Ecuadorian…

In ancient Indigenous mythologies, the coyote is a sacred trickster that shifts between being a predator and a protector, its fanged mouth poised between a threatening snarl and a playful grin. For the Aztecs, the coyote was a god that frolicked among humans, sometimes provoking mayhem and disarray, and sometimes providing protection against greater evils. For the artist Guadalupe Maravilla, the coyote has been an intimate companion, and a protagonist in many of his elaborate sculptures, drawings, and highly choreographed performances based on autobiographical and fictional narratives. “Our ancestors were about creating mythologies, and I connected with that,” he says. Maravilla anthropomorphizes the coyote into a canineheaded, larger-than-life being—somewhere between villain and superhero—that traverses great distances and crosses borders from El Salvador to New York. Maravilla operates on a vast…

It all started with a very simple request: I asked my mom, when she had time, could she look through old photos to see if there were any of pint-size me decked out for Halloween—primo Instagram content for my show Scream, Queen! (a podcast about scary movies from people not typically depicted in scary movies). Then came the pandemic and the shutdowns and the shelter in place. Suddenly, live from the (self-) quarantine, my mother had nothing but time. She went through shoebox after shoebox of old photographs, sending me iPhone snaps of pics from every era of my life, literally FLOODING me with the past. Time time time time time time time. Now it’s ninety-five degrees. I’m sweating the Kiehl’s tinted moisturizer off my face. I don’t think I…

I met Emily Moazami in October of 2018 during my Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship in Washington, D.C. It was my first time in the capital and my first experience working with the Smithsonian museums. My initial goal was to research Apsáalooke (Crow) delegations using the photography archives and material objects at the National Museum of the American Indian, the National Anthropological Archives, and the National Museum of Natural History. Emily, assistant head archivist at the National Museum of the American Indian’s Archive Center, not only produced material pertaining to my research topic but led me to discover a personal connection—a direct link to my ancestors whose images and artifacts are housed in the museum. In this conversation, Emily and I discuss the photography collections of the National Museum of the…

When Wendy Red Star asked Duane Linklater to contribute to this issue, he remembered Aperture 139, “Strong Hearts: Native American Visions and Voices,” from 1995. He cannot recollect how he acquired that issue, but it was among his first exposures to contemporary art by Indigenous people and has remained in his mind these many years. When Linklater received a copy of that same edition earlier this year, he was happy to recall his original interaction with the magazine and consider the continued relevance of the works represented within. He reread Paul Chaat Smith’s sagacious essay with new understanding, lingered on the sensitivity of James Luna’s photo-text work about his community, and was reinvigorated by Zig Jackson’s stunning self-portraiture in San Francisco. Taking cues from the conceptual work of Sol LeWitt…

For the 2002 installation Without Ground, the Cree artist Kimowan Metchewais transferred dozens of small photographic self-portraits to the white walls of the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) at the University of Pennsylvania. The full-length likenesses were posed in the ICA’s Ramp Space as if they were searching the empty expanse for something hidden from both artist and viewer. By cleverly using scale and gently fading some of the photo transfers, Metchewais, who at the time went by his stepfather’s surname, McLain, created the illusion of figures receding into space. Treating the walls of the museum as the “ribcage of a living animal,” he felt that his photographs were like “tattoos etched onto the bones of the beast,” anticipating their burial within the institution’s architectural memory, covered by future layers…

Here are the Indianer bodies: braid-framed German faces and shirtless, toned torsos. And here are the material goods, products of a curious labor of desire: bright canvas tipis, brain-tanned deerskin, perfectly crafted feathers, quilled and beaded clothing that mimics Karl Bodmer paintings from the 1830s. Bodies and goods join together in performances, as drums pound, legs step, and voices sing—or sometimes just yell. Document these things and you have archives—a museum stuffed with mannequins, a wall hung with moccasins, a computer full of images. For German hobbyists who participate in the Indianer subculture, which revolves around Native Americans, their devotion culminates in annual summer camps where they show off their skills and live the Indianer life for a week. Their scene (for it is truly that) originated with the late…

“My work is very much grounded in the local, in place, and place can be fraught when you’re Indigenous,” says the New York–based artist Alan Michelson. Michelson, a Mohawk member of the Six Nations of the Grand River, has, for more than thirty years, produced evocative, influential works that excavate colonial histories of invasion and eviction. After an early engagement with photography and painting, he gradually shifted to an expanded approach. Video and installation allowed him to abandon a single perspective in favor of unfixed points of view, creating dynamic spaces of visual and auditory immersion. For Alan Michelson: Wolf Nation, his solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2019, he deployed the panoramic form, which he likens to wampum belts—beaded sashes used by Native nations in…

As a multidisciplinary artist working in performance and lens-based media, Rebecca Belmore creates scenes of aching endurance and forceful grace. Since the 1990s, Belmore’s images have probed the politics of First Nations representation in Canada, often melding the photographic with the tactile, as with her very first portraits, in which the Anishinaabe artist’s face is decoupaged onto cut wood, in sly subversion of the wooden “Indian” heads that dot many rural landscapes and settler imaginations. Whether placing subjects—often her sister, Florene—in strange architectural contortions of the body, or featuring materials as organic as a wash of clay or a strip of cloth to parse through the pain of state violence against Indigenous people, Belmore’s work definitively expands the field of conceptual photography to which artists such as Cindy Sherman, Suzy…