Review: 'IndiVisible' sidesteps Indian / African identity issues

Wednesday, November 16, 2011  

"African-Americans and Native Americans have interacted with one another for centuries in the Americas: through intermarriage and alliance in some cases, through enslavement and subjugation in others. Yet despite this shared history, it’s a link that is not much discussed in the public sphere. The Reginald F. Lewis Museum’s new exhibition, IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas, is an attempt to get the conversation going.

IndiVisible is a traveling show, produced by the National Museum of the American Indian in collaboration with the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Smithsonian Institute. An exhibition in the same gallery, Beyond Baseball: The Life of Roberto Clemente, is also a Smithsonian product, though the two are not usually shown together. IndiVisible is by far the more ambitious show—the Clemente exhibit consists solely of word-heavy panels describing the ball-player’s life and one lone artifact, the “type of bat” he used. Fans would be better served by reading his biography. IndiVisible, however, has the potential to be a fascinating exhibition, touching as it does on questions of identity going back generations. Unfortunately, it is light on context and prone to moralizing."

Get the Story:
IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas (The Baltimore City Paper 11/16)