THE CONVERSATION RECLAIMED

Speaking With Light brings extraordinary examples of Indigenous photographs to the Carter.

BY TERRI PROVENCAL

While the art community overall needs to do a better job of amplifying the work of Indigenous artists, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art is the exception. Speaking with Light: Contemporary Indigenous Photography, from October 30 to January 22, 2023, brings together an incomparable survey through the work of 30 Indigenous artists who use their lenses to forge identity, resistance, and belonging.

“Speaking with Light recognizes the wave of diverse and vibrant photographs created over recent decades and today by contemporary Indigenous artists,” says John Rohrbach, Carter Senior Curator of Photographs and co-curator of Speaking with Light: Contemporary Indigenous Photography.

Mining ancestral ties to the land, Cara Romero looks to strengthen visibility for contemporary Natives beyond the timeworn narrative through her photography practice. In Water Memory, corn dancers—beautiful and mystical—cause alarm. Do we need to save them? Water plays an important role in Romero’s investigation of tribal lands flooded to construct US dams, and the extraction of resources from Native soils. Her tribe was driven out of ancestral lands by the Army Corps of Engineers, which dragged people out of their deluged homes to create Lake Havasu in the ’30s. Deep beneath swimmers and boaters today lies a watery grave—the vestiges of the life and homes of the Chemehuevi.

Poverty assailed Romero’s youth. She grew up in the Chemehuevi Valley Indian Reservation, near Lake Havasu on the California shoreline The artist’s trajectory was shaped by Water Memory, and alongside the Carter’s holdings and those of the Smithsonian and LACMA, Romero’s work is currently on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of Water Memories, a nod to Romero’s title and extrapolated through protest fashion, handcarved children’s toys, glass lamps, oil paintings, photographs, and video.

Other exhibition highlights include Nicholas Galanin’s (Tlingit/Unangax) Get Comfortable, also from the Amon Carter’s collection, which reclaims Indian River as Indian Land through a single tag on a road sign; and Alan Michelson’s (Mohawk member of Six Nations of the Grand River) Mespat, 2001, comprised of turkey feathers, feathers, monofilament, and digital video with sound from the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution.

Through 70 photographs, videos, three-dimensional pieces, and digital activations, the Carter’s exhibition aims to reinstate representation and affirm existence, perspectives, and trauma. Notes Rohrbach, “These artists take back the conversation over how their cultures and lives are depicted. In sharing their anger, challenges, and joys, and in their embrace of responsibility to their communities, they suggest pathways to healthier relationships for humanity and the Earth,” P