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Reviews
Lewis and Clark Territory: Contemporary Artists Revisit Place, Race, and Memory
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By Rock Hushka and Thomas Red Owl Haukaas
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University of Washington Press, Seattle, and Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, Wash., 2004. Photographs, bibliography, 80 pages. $21.95 paper.
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Reviewed by Jeffry Uecker
Hillsboro, Oregon
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| Contemplating the legacy of the Lewisand Clark Expedition, Thomas Jefferson wrote that the endeavor's purpose was to "delineate with correctness the great arteries of this great country: those who come after us will ... fill up the canvas we begin" (Jefferson to Lawrence Dunbar, May 25, 1805). The art metaphor employed by America's Enlightenment president cleverly implies two important components of exploration: learning and imagining. Actually, to record experience and to visualize import are tasks common to both explorers and artists. Rock Hushka, associate curator of the Tacoma Art Museum, phrases it well when he writes: "artists and explorers share a willingness to be society's avant-garde" (p. 23). |
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Navigating the frontier between the Lewis and Clark Expedition's journal accounts and American beliefs about the Corps of Discovery, the Tacoma Art Museum's brilliant exhibit publication Lewis and Clark Territory: Contemporary Artists Revisit Place, Race, and Memory features stimulating discussions and captivating recent works of art that shed light on contemporary understandings and experiences of the region through which Lewis and Clark traversed two hundred years ago. Effectively describing the museum's 2004 exhibition of the same name, the book focuses on the title themes of place, race, and memory, exploring "current conditions that shape our perceptions of the American West and ourselves as a people" (p. 21). |
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Brief enough to be read in one or two sittings, this handsomely designed book is mainly composed of two major essays, full and detail photographs of artworks featured in the exhibition, and a sizable, well-researched bibliography. Written in the first person, Thomas Haukaas's "We Are All Related" is the more personal of the two essays, making reference to his own creations and those of selected other artists in the show and providing a Native American perspective on the exhibit's three themes. Emphasizing that the ideas of place, race, and memory are overlapping, interrelated concepts, the artist and psychiatrist outlines changes in how Americans have looked at Native American art over the past two centuries and places Native American art in the context of a larger American art history. |
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Punctuated with sidebar quotes from the Lewis and Clark journals, Rock Hushka's essay, "Traces of the Legacy of Lewis and Clark in Contemporary Art," more deeply explores the three exhibit themes and alludes that the journals are metaphors for contemporary artists' responses to those themes. Stressing that the exhibit does not specifically deal with the Lewis and Clark Expedition nor its legacy, Hushka demonstrates that recent artists' interpretations of place, race, and memory nevertheless fit within the same two-hundred-year-old tradition of illuminating the American experience. |
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Hushka's most intriguing discussion is that dealing with memory, in which he grapples with the relative nature of history and its reliance on subjective experiences, stating that "the effort to separate fact from fiction, regarding Lewis and Clark ... often resembles psychoanalysis at a cultural level" (p. 59). He likens today's artists to philosophers and historians — he could easily add psychoanalysts — in their attempts to explore ideas, providing a fresh point of view on the workings of communal memory. |
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Despite its attractive presentation and myriad images, this publication does not make for a casually read coffee-table book. The diverse media and topics encountered in a quick skim will make it hard to resist further exploration of the volume's profound subject matter and provocative ideas. From modern adaptations of the Native American ledger art tradition to enigmatic landscapes to mixed-media sculptures and collages composed of industrial, commercial, and natural organic materials, the works of art and related discussions featured in this important book provide challenging new perspectives on the interpretation of the American experience for both scholars and enthusiasts of American culture. |
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