Clearly Indigenous Audio Exhibition
Introduction
Hello, I’m Amy Dehan, the Cincinnati Art Museum’s curator of Decorative Arts and Design. I am the on-site curator for this presentation of Clearly Indigenous: Native Visions Reimagined in Glass and will be sharing the exhibition’s introduction.
This exhibition presents glass art made by 29 Native artists from 26 Nations from the United States and
Canada, as well as artworks by non-Native artist Dale Chihuly. A few Indigenous American glass artists have also collaborated with Indigenous artists from Pacific Rim countries; represented here are glass creations by two Māori artists from New Zealand and two Aboriginal Australian artists.
The stunning pieces of glass art in this exhibition document the fusion of the Contemporary Native Arts Movement and the Studio Glass Movement. The result is an extraordinary new genre, characterized by the intellectual content of Native traditions and expressed using the properties that can be achieved by working with glass.
Solid in color or layered, glass can be transparent or translucent. It can be worked hot, warm, or cold; it can be blown, cast, slumped, sandblasted, melted over a flame or kiln-fired; it can be ground, etched, engraved, painted, polished, or fused.
Regardless of the methods used, the glass art created is a personal expression of the artist. For Native glass artists, inspiration may stem from tribal utilitarian items—such as pots or baskets—or from mythology or oral history. Their art is often an interpretation of cultural heritage, a way of honoring and giving voice to Ancestors, or an expression of contemporary issues affecting Native Peoples and/or society at large.
The flowering of glass art in Indian Country is the result of the coming together of two movements, both of which began in the 1960s: the Contemporary Native Arts Movement, championed by Lloyd Kiva New, a founder of the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA); and the Studio Glass Movement, founded by American artists including Dale Chihuly, who has become its most famous practitioner.
IAIA led the way to viewing Indigenous art as the continuing expression of living, dynamic societies. These two movements intersected in the early 1970s, when Chihuly started a glass teaching program at IAIA and founded the Pilchuck Glass School in Washington State, which led to a new dimension of cultural and artistic expression. Most Native artists working in glass are from either the Pacific Northwest or the Southwest, due to the influence of these two programs and the opportunities they provided.