Arts & Entertainment

Review: Thought-provoking Native artists in 'Shapeshifting'

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

"The paradigm-shifting "Shapeshifting: Transformations in Native American Art," at the Peabody Essex Museum, begins with a rude surprise: The first wall text that visitors encounter is a parental warning—breaking the mold of customarily child-friendly displays of totem poles and headdresses.

The eye-popping introductory work that "may not be suitable for young children" is Cree artist Kent Monkman's fiercely satirical, homoerotic "Théâtre de Cristal" (2007), occupying the entire first gallery. It features a 14-foot-high "tipi," fashioned from delicate strands of crystal beads, accompanied by an artist-written wall text parodying Caucasian ethnographers' condescending descriptions of "noble savages." Visitors entering the glitzy enclosure will be confronted by a fleetingly full-frontal silent movie in which the artist's drag-queen alter ego, "Miss Chief Eagle Testickle" (sic), has "her" way with two white men—drunken hunks clothed (and unclothed) in loincloths. This heavy-handed, jejune exercise in score-settling, which resonates with the literal meaning of "shapeshifting" in Indian cultures (the ability to transform into other beings), is a jarring start to a thought-provoking show.

No newcomer to major exhibitions of Indian art, the PEM owns one of the most venerable (since 1799) and largest (15,000 objects) such collections, and is particularly strong in Northwest Coast art. Displaying 73 works from an international group of lenders, "Shapeshifting" drew many of its most important historical pieces from the PEM's own trove. Two of its great treasures are a boldly patterned, finely woven fringed Chilkat blanket (c. 1832) and a subtly modeled, vibrantly painted Kaigani Haida female wooden mask, c. 1827, which the PEM received that same year from a seafaring captain."

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Artifacts to Artworks (The Wall Street Journal 1/18)