Visual Legacies and the American West: Resilience and Reckoning

FAIN: GE-285365-22

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, AR 72712-4947)
Mindy Besaw (Project Director: August 2021 to present)

Planning of a traveling exhibition that reckons with visual and historical legacies of the American West by placing art by Native American and non-Native American artists in conversation.

The large-scale traveling exhibition, Visual Legacies and the American West: Resilience and Reckoning will feature approximately 100 artworks made by Native American artists of the Plains and Southwest as well as European-American artists from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This exhibition resituates the visual legacies of the American West by prioritizing Native American self-representation and elevating overlooked art by Native American artists, while, at the same time reckoning with the visual legacies of European-American artworks. This is the first major art exhibition to focus deeply on the coexistence of art by diverse Native American peoples and non-Native-American artists. The exhibition themes and checklist will be shaped through a collaborative and interdisciplinary curatorial process. Visual Legacies and the American West seeks a “More Perfect Union” between Native and non-Native art in American art, history, and culture writ large.