Director’s Foreword Museums frequently compete for the honor to organize and host exhibitions by leading contemporary artists. Often, when demand is high, such glittering prizes go to those institutions located in the dominant metropolitan areas. But on rare and noteworthy occasions, market interests bow to greater forces and the spiritual, symbolic, and historically significant prevail. Shan Goshorn’s exhibition Resisting the Mission is just such an exhibition. It brings together a concentrated, profoundly moving collection of the artist’s work that addresses the Carlisle Indian School (1879–1918), the nation’s first and most influential off-reservation boarding school. Because of the exhibition’s content, the artist’s deep connection to a number of the institutions, scholars, archivists, and materials in Carlisle, and the fact that two of her great-grandparents attended the Carlisle Indian School—Resisting the Mission had to be in Carlisle. In light of The Trout Gallery’s proximity to the former grounds of the Carlisle Indian School and the museum’s reputation for organizing important exhibitions on this subject, it was the museum to organize and host Resisting the Mission. Indeed, the title of Goshorn’s exhibition—Resisting the Mission—addresses issues also explored in Visualizing a Mission: Images and Artifacts of the Carlisle Indian School, 1879–1918, an exhibition that I previously organized for the museum. This earlier exhibition, organized as part of a senior curatorial seminar at Dickinson College, considered ways in which photographs, drawings, and artifacts from the Carlisle Indian School could help one visualize the institution’s assimilationist mission. In essence, the exhibition sought to analyze the visual counterparts of the often repeated words of Richard Henry Pratt, the school's founding superintendent—“Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” Important scholarly findings presented in this exhibition led to A Kiowas Odyssey: A Sketchbook from Fort Marion, organized in conjunction with the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, and which drew interest from a range of prominent museums who wanted to host it. In a manner that curiously anticipated Resisting the Mission, however, A Kiowa’s Odyssey traveled only to venues in areas that were spiritually, symbolically, and historically meaningful to the Indians associated with Fort Marion, the “prequel” to the Carlisle Indian School. Location notwithstanding, the timing of Resisting the Mission is of particular significance as well. The opening of this exhibition coincides with the Carlisle Indian School Centennial Commemoration, a national, multiday program of lectures, events, exhibitions, and panels that mark the closing of the Carlisle Indian School in 1918. As part of this program, The Trout Galley is also hosting Re-Riding History: From the Southern Plains to Matanzas Bay, a traveling exhibition of contemporary responses to Indian incarceration at Fort Marion, curated by Emily Arthur, Marwin Begaye, and John Hitchcock. Incidentally, Shan Goshorn is among the artists represented in Re-Riding History. The Trout Gallery is honored and privileged to host Resisting the Mission and to share this important exhibition with the Carlisle community—particularly the descendants of students who attended the Carlisle Indian School a century ago. Phillip Earenfight Director The Trout Gallery / The Art Museum of Dickinson College
OPPOSITE
Shan Goshorn, Unexpected Gift (detail), 2015, cat. 6.
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