Indian Theater at Hessel Museum Is a New York Times Critic’s Pick

The art world has been “pitifully slow” to acknowledge “even the existence of contemporary Native American art,” writes Holland Cotter, cochief art critic at the New York Times. But with Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination Since 1969, on view now through November 26 at the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, “Native American art has a presence in the art world it hasn’t had before.” Candice Hopkins CCS ’03 “has organized a frisky intergenerational group show of some 30 Native American artists,” Cotter writes, including Bard Artist in Residence Jeffrey Gibson and Bard alumni Adam Khalil ’11 and Zack Khalil ’14, members of the “public secret society” New Red Order. Drawing on a treatise written by the late Native American fashion designer Lloyd Kiva New, Indian Theater was created in part “on the premise that much traditional Indigenous art was fundamentally theatrical in nature, incorporating movement, sound, masking, storytelling, communal action, and that these elements could be marshaled to create distinctive new forms.”

Post Date: 08-15-2023