Lowell Lecture
Curated Conversations: Indigenous Art and the Artist’s Eye: Dislocation and Appropriation
Date & Time
June 23, 2019 at 2 p.m. - 3 p.m.
Location
Museum of Fine Arts
465 Huntington Avenue Boston, MA 02115
Driving Directions
Speaker(s)
Jenn Swope, Textile and Fashion Arts assistant curator
Presenting Organization
Topics
Explore with Textile and Fashion Arts assistant curator Jenn Swope several of the MFA’s best examples of Ancient Peruvian textiles and Native American beadwork to understand how two American artists have shaped the collection. Design theorist and painter Denman Waldo Ross (1853–1935) sourced the globe for textiles and other decorative arts used to instruct his students at Harvard’s Department of Architecture in design theory. While Ross’s interest in indigenous art was purely visual, painter Joseph Henry Sharp (1859-1953) acquired beadwork and other objects from the cultures of the Great Plains and the Southwest, to use in his portraits of Native Americans. A founding member of the Taos Society of Artists, Sharp is known for his portraits of Native American veterans of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, or the Battle of the Greasy Grass, which he painted while living on the Crow Reservation in Montana, near the battle site.