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When the United States government sent the painter Albert Bierstadt west to help promote national expansion, he encountered native populations along the way. They didn’t always find their way into his works.
Instead, he’s mostly known as one of the preeminent landscape painters of the great American West. But all the while, art by lesser-known artists, particularly women and Indigenous artists, was being made in the same locations and on the same timeline.
In the new exhibit “Knowing the West,” which opened to the public on Sept. 14 at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, the viewer cannot look at his “Sierra Nevada Morning” without also seeing baskets and bowls made by Indigenous artists. Baskets by Elizabeth Hickox and her daughter Louise Hickox (both of the Karuk nation) are positioned directly in front of Bierstadt’s idyllic view of the mountain range. The native plants, like wild grape roots that provided fibers for the baskets, would have surrounded Bierstadt at his every footstep.
Without thinking about the broader context of his work, “there is this erasure that happens,” said Jami Powell (Osage), a member of the curatorial team that helped assemble “Knowing the West.”
“These women were contemporaries of his, working in his timeline, and they were passing down indigenous ways of knowing,” Powell said.
The exhibit’s team, which also includes Mindy Besaw, Crystal Bridges’ curator of American art and director of fellowships and research, seeks to challenge both exhibit attendees and fellow curators to ponder what they really know about the West.
As it does with the Bierstadt painting and the native baskets, the exhibit pairs work by lesser-known artists against works by some of the Western art world’s most recognizable names. Included in the exhibit are works by Frederic Remington and Charles Marion Russell.
Albert Bierstadt (American, born Germany, 1830-1902) Sierra Nevada Morning, 1870. Oil on canvas. 55 1/4 in. x 85 1/2 in. Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma.
“From the very beginning, we decided to include some of [the biggest names in Western art],” Powell said. “We’re not trying to replace anyone. We want to bring along these favorites and help people recognize there’s more to see.”
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