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Epoch Times
04-07-2025
- Epoch Times
The Hudson River School: Kindred Spirits in Life and Art
New York State's Hudson River Valley is one of America's most picturesque areas, with dramatic vistas of hills, mountains, crags, and water features. In the 19th century, its natural beauty inspired an artistic movement known as the Hudson River School. Practitioners painted landscapes, creating the first significant works in this genre in American art history. The British-born Thomas Cole (1801–1848), considered the school's 'founder,' inspired contemporaneous artists as well as successive generations to take up their brush to capture America's unique landscape. He encouraged the elevation of this genre through the incorporation of biblical, historical, and literary subjects and symbolism.
Boston Globe
20-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
‘Native Prospects,' a contemporary view of the American landscape through an Indigenous lens
Kay WalkingStick's 'Thom, Where Are the Pocumtucks (The Oxbow),' 2020. It's her take on Thomas Cole's famous work "View From Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, After a Thunderstorm – the Oxbow,' from 1836. Image courtesy of Kay WalkingStick/JSP Art Photography/Hales, London and New York It's hard to even write those words, true though they may be. American art history offers a broader reading of American history writ large, if you read between the lines; and in the realm of landscape painting, what's left from the frame is often as significant as what's not. 'Native Prospects,' curated by Scott Manning Stevens, who is Akwesasne Mohawk and the director of Native American and Indigenous studies at Syracuse University, is an exercise in history much in need of revision. Importantly, and uniquely, the exhibition is not a simple point/counterpoint in the depiction of the American landscape — though there is that, and we're getting there — but a consideration of entirely different points of view: One colonial, one Indigenous, and the gulf, pictorially and historically, that exists between them. Advertisement The counterpoint is bluntly provided by the Cherokee painter Kay WalkingStick, who can be relied on for such things; her lifetime project has been one of revision at its most provocative. Earlier this year at Thomas Cole's 'Landscape Scene from 'The Last of the Mohicans,' 1827. Thomas Cole/Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, NY, Gift of Stephen C. Clark/Richard Walker Over decades, WalkingStick, now in her late 80s, has painted American vistas much as Cole and his peers did: as grand visions of an untamed wild. Often, she coopts their exact framing, a blunt reclamation of lost land from their gaze. But WalkingStick overlays her paintings with the specific patterning of the Indigenous people who live there, invoking a kind of seance for the land's rightful stewards, most often excised from the frame. In 'Native Prospects,' her one painting is a compositional replica of one of Cole's most famous works, 'View From Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, After a Thunderstorm — the Oxbow,' from 1836. In her version, she softens the contours of land and sky and abandons the hand-of-God maelstrom of unearthly mist looming in the heavens, wraithlike and coal-gray. The title of the 2020 piece says much: 'Thom, Where Are the Pocumtucks,' the tribe native to the region, conspicuously absent in his frame. WalkingStick calls them forth with a bright floral pattern tracking the bottom of the frame, an ancestral motif that stamps their presence on the land. Absence, meet presence. Enough said. Advertisement Kay WalkingStick's 'Thom, Where Are the Pocumtucks (The Oxbow),' 2020. Image courtesy of Kay WalkingStick/JSP Art Photography/Hales, London and New York But 'Native Prospects' is less about confrontation than it is assertion of difference, persistence, and a line drawn from past to present. That part matters: Indigenous artists here are contemporary, a declaration of a thriving culture that survived colonial deprivations of the land to flourish. Colonial artists in this exhibition are anchored in the past, often an ugly one, and tied to those deprivations: Cole's 'Solitary Lake in New Hampshire,' of a lone Indigenous man minimized against a glorious alpine scene, was painted in 1830, the same year as the federal Indian Removal Act went into effect, requiring all tribes east of the Mississippi to uproot and move west. His 'Landscape Scene from The Last of the Mohicans,' 1827, is the visual embodiment of James Fenimore Cooper's 'vanishing race' epic (the two were neighbors, and fellow aesthetic travelers). 'Native Prospects' connects Indigenous art on a continuum, from a faraway past to the here and now. How far? One image is a photo recreation of a Powhatan's Mantle, four deerhides sewn together and studded with shell and sinew to depict a human figure flanked by animals. Given to English colonists by Wahunsenacawh, the chief of the Powhatan Confederacy 400 years ago in modern-day Virginia, it's believed to be a kind of map — a depiction of land, and an expression of sovereignty. Jeremy Frey's 'First Light,' 2023. Jeremy Frey / Photography by Jared Lank Nearby, the immediate present: Teresa Baker's 2019 'Forest‚' an abstraction of green and gray — yarn and, poetically, astroturf — mimics the deerhide's scale. With strands of willow dangling from its surface, 'Forest' rebukes abstraction's central tenet of being unmoored in the physcial world; instead Baker, who is Mandan and Hidatsa, anchors her piece in the northern plains, where she grew up. Advertisement Just to the left of Powhatan's Mantle is Alan Michelson (Mohawk member of the Six Nations of the Grand River), "Third Bank of the River (Panorama)," detail, 2024. Courtesy of the artist. Alan Michelson And Alan Michelson, who Boston audiences might know best from 'The Knowledge Keepers,' Next to it, Michelson's 'Third Bank of the River (Panorama),' from 2024, adopts the colored bands of the wampum belt in a broad photo collage, infusing its linear color scheme with the landscape of the riverbank of the Mohawk reservation strung along its crest. From the distant past to the here and now, land has meant sovereignty, and survival. In the eerie vista of Michelson's panorama, you can start to imagine the future. Advertisement NATIVE PROSPECTS: INDIGENEITY AND LANDSCAPE Through July 6 . Farnsworth Art Museum , 16 Museum St., Rockland, Maine . 207-596-6457, Murray Whyte can be reached at
New York Times
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
In an Exhibition of Native Artists, Clichés Give Way to Charged Memories
In the Hudson River Museum, landscape is usually a celebration: grand, idealized and comfortably distant. The river bends picturesquely; the skies flush with sunset pinks; the forests remain untamed. It's an aesthetic shorthand that still shapes how we mostly see the land: as backdrop, as bounty, as beauty. Along with this view is another, where the terrain is splintered and rust-streaked, its scars reworked into irony. Not Thomas Cole's wilderness or the Hudson River School's frontier, it reflects a messier America, where landscape is both home and battleground. An America where Sacagawea graces coins as a unity symbol — while settlers keep the deeds. 'Smoke in Our Hair: Native Memory and Unsettled Time,' on view through August, boldly corrects the romanticism usually lining these museum galleries. The exhibition was curated by Sháńdíín Brown, a graduate student at Yale, and features 22 Native artists who rewrite the land as contested, communal and charged with memory. Brown is part of a new wave of curators including Amber-Dawn Bear Robe, Darienne Turner and Kalyn Fay Barnoski, who reframe Native art not as artifact but as argument. The title, from a poem by the Tohono O'odham linguist Ofelia Zepeda, clings like juniper on skin. Smoke, she writes, travels deep into memory, lingering in hair and clothing — a scent you carry with you. In the American fable, Indigenous people are cast as side characters to innocent explorers fulfilling Manifest Destiny. In museums, art by Indigenous people has been seen as artifact, not intervention or complex storytelling — reduced to dream catchers, headdresses and pottery, repackaged for nostalgia and sale. Meanwhile, the land that once held the homes of Indigenous people is rendered scenic, lush and anonymous. The Native scholar Vine Deloria Jr. in his seminal book 'Custer Died for Your Sins' put it this way: 'To be an Indian in modern American society is in a very real sense to be unreal and ahistorical.' On a frigid February night, I found myself in the presence of something undeniably real. At the Hudson River Museum, a group gathered to pay homage to an exhibition articulated through the Native curatorial gaze: 22 place-based artists working from landscapes both geographic and conceptual. James Luna's 'High Tech Peace Pipe' (1992), a ceremonial pipe fused with a push-button phone base — two bygone communication devices — makes for a surreal, hat-on-a-hat gag. 'You have to laugh, or else you'll cry,' Brown, the curator, joked at the opening, verbally tossing the 'Western gaze' out with the Indian blanket. 'White Flag' (2022) by Nicholas Galanin also recasts a recognizable trope. His pole-dancing polar bear — a legless white beast posed like a defeated stripper — disarms the familiar. In 'America Spirit' (2021), the clever mocking of the commodification of Arctic identity continues. The artist Matthew Kirk shows us a slouching log, winking at settler corporate romanticization and using a tobacco brand as proxy. Where Galanin's satire stings, Luna's 'The History of the Luiseño People" (1993) slips into banality: an armchair draped in Pendleton fabric — produced by a non-Native-owned company, with references to Native patternmaking — a half-lit tree, a staged holiday scene that in its inertia, produces a sense of anhedonia, a stark contrast to the many percussive works in the exhibition. If Luna's work speaks to stagnation, Marie Watt's 'Companion Species (Resemblance)' from 2021 counters it with movement and multiplicity. Where colonial quilt traditions can veer into nostalgia or myth, colonial quilting becomes kinship here, stitched with words like 'missing and murdered,' 'future generations' and 'pollinators.' The work has the same barbed narration as much of the show but also evokes the Lakota phrase 'mitákuye oyásiŋ' — we are all related. 'Vestige' (2022) by Tania Willard is both tree and monument. 'This is a monument,' etched into the central panel, is flanked by pristine rings, making time's imprint visible. Her tree rings become record and relic — proof that land was always the first archive. Andrea Carlson uses similar language in her 'Never-Ending Monument' (2021). Its 27 driftwood-like columns topped with spheres and sea gulls critique monumentality but lack Willard's gravitas. It left me asking, What is a monument? Carlson's answer — the land itself — felt overly literal. Art today, Native included, sometimes clubs us with its clarity. But her earlier work, like 'Portage' (2008), brims with conceptual rigor. Carlson, an Ojibwe artist, depicts a Rocky Mountain cliffside enrobed in a backstrap chevron weave — a V-shaped pattern symbolizing the passage of time. Past, present and future coexist, with the Native presence recentralized in human-land relationships. An untitled oil painting by George Morrison from 1965 charts two-dimensional topographies dissected by grid lines. It's a nod to the 1887 Dawes Act's carving of tribal lands, and the blank title echoes the era's bureaucratic erasure. Sonya Kelliher-Combs's 'Natural Idiot Strings' (2022), made of bowed wire and floating wooden moccasin inserts, plays with expectations of authenticity. Her surreal forms conjure a line by the writer Tommy Orange: 'You can't trust the authenticity of a thing by the way it looks.' Here, Indigeneity — a.k.a. a deeply rooted connection to ancestral lands, distinct cultures, self-determined sovereignty, and historical continuity as original peoples resisting colonization — is not static but provisional, where identity slips between performance, perception and the demand to prove one's Native-ness. In the exhibition as a whole, Native artists focus not on nostalgia but on nerve; not cliché, but confrontation. We can only hope these works become widely recognized as metaphors for Native America, replacing glowing-wolf posters and Edward Curtis's staged black-and-white photos. If sentimentality remains, it's for the land itself: a site of survival and possibility, not just scenery.
The National
30-04-2025
- Politics
- The National
Iraqi 'tortured' by PUK wins right to stay in the UK
An opponent of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), who alleged he was detained and tortured by authorities, has been granted asylum in the UK. A judge ruled that the Kudrish man, who has been granted anonymity, would face persecution for his political views if he was forced to return to Iraq, and could even be killed. The PUK is one of the two main political parties in the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq, along with its rival the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP). An immigration tribunal was told the man from Sulaymaniyah was arrested and held for four days in 2020, in connection with protests against the PUK during which time he was tortured. The Sulaymaniyah area was hit by a wave of protests that year against the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) over unemployment, a lack of public services and falling wages. Demonstrators targeted PUK offices and the government, with security forces aligned with the PUK clamping down on the protests. After being released, the man held anti-PUK meetings in a billiard hall run by his family in which he urged people not to vote for the party in upcoming elections, but shots were fired at the premises and he was threatened on the phone. He left Iraq for London in September 2021, but continued to post social media content and take part in demonstrations critical of the authorities in Iraqi Kurdistan. An initial claim for asylum was, however, rejected by a judge on the grounds that he would not be at risk because he was not regarded as a well-known critic of the PUK. But he appealed on the grounds the judge had incorrectly interpreted the UK government's guidance about the political situation in Iraqi Kurdistan, known as Country Policy and Application Notes (CPIN). This states that individuals who are at 'higher risk of arrest, detention, assault, excessive use of force and extrajudicial killing by the KRG authorities' include those who 'have previous history of organising or participating in protests and demonstrations'. Judge Thomas Cole ruled that his colleague 'materially erred in law in his application of the CPIN' and 'fails to adequately assess the risk' to the man if he was returned to Iraq. The facts of the case and the man's experience put 'squarely within the risk profile' of those opposed to the Kurdish authorities, he said. The Kurdish region won self-rule in 1991, when the US imposed a no-fly zone over it in response to Saddam Hussein's brutal repression of Kurdish uprisings. The KDP, the largest party in the Kurdistan, controls Erbil and Duhok province, while Sulaymaniyah province is controlled by its rival Patriotic Union of Kurdistan PUK.
