FORT MARION AND BEYOND

David Nolan Gallery is pleased to present Fort Marion and Beyond: Native American Ledger Drawings, 1865 - 1900, a major survey of Plains pictographic art, on view from January 25-March 2 to coincide with Master Drawings New York.

This exhibition features the most important group of Plains Ledger Drawings created by Arapaho, Cheyenne, Hidatsa, Kiowa, and Lakota warrior artists since the 1996 exhibition organized by the Drawing Center, New York, and The American Federation of Arts, Plains Indian Drawings, 1865-1935: Pages from a Visual History, which in 1997 traveled to the Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin; Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska; and Frick Art Museum, Pittsburg, Pennsylvania.

Fort Marion and Beyond will showcase over 100 works on paper that collectively demonstrate the preeminent importance of Plains pictographic art to the documentation, preservation and dissemination of the rich and diverse cultural heritage of the Native Americans of the Great Plains, and their essential but underrecognized contributions to the art history of the United States.

Over 75% of the drawings in this exhibition have never been shown in North America before.

At the core of the exhibition are works by two artists: Nokkoist (Bear’s Heart), of the Cheyenne Nation, and Ohettoint, of the Kiowa Tribe, who were among 72 Indigenous warriors imprisoned without trial at Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida for their alleged connection to the Red River War, a U.S. military campaign aimed at the forced displacement and migration of Southern Plains tribes onto reservations. During their incarceration (May 1875 - April 1878), fort commander Captain Richard Henry Pratt attempted to assimilate the nomadic warriors into white Protestant culture: altering their physical appearance (cutting their hair, dressing them in uniforms); educating them in subjects such as English and arithmetic (Harriet Beecher Stowe was a teacher); and providing them with sketchbooks and art supplies for drawing. As Pratt encouraged the prisoners to sell their drawings and retain all the income from the sales, many sold their work to an interested middle class. Other drawings were gifted to high-ranking politicians in an attempt to promote Pratt’s assimilation policies.

In the face of the deliberate erasure of Native American cultures, the drawings offered an avenue for resistance and a means of documenting a threatened way of life and bringing it to the attention of the colonizers. The artworks created at Fort Marion are rooted in a long-standing Plains pictographic tradition of recording both personal and communal histories, as well as expressing the power and prestige of particular warriors. The Indigenous peoples painted on rock surface, hide, and later on muslin and paper, a medium that was introduced to them when Euro-Americans began moving into the Great Plains region in the 1830s. The Native Americans acquired ledger books, along with tools like pens and colored pencils, through trade or by taking them from dead soldiers on the battlefield, and then, in a palimpsestic gesture, covered previous owners’ inventory records with their own colorful figurations.

(Simultaneous with their incursion into the land, the Euro-Americans initiated the systemic and nearly successful extinction of the buffalo as a means of starving the Indigenous peoples into submission and moving them off their land. Buffalo had provided the nomadic warriors with not only their livelihood, but also the hides that had previously served as canvases for their pictographic paintings.)

The exhibition also includes exceptional examples of ledger drawings created from the pre-reservation to the reservation periods. Though stylistic differences naturally exist among the artists, the drawings all share a kind of visual vernacular, a directness and immediacy born out of a reverence for storytelling. The Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains can claim a long tradition of oral storytelling and the tropes of the art — rhythm, repetition, narration — are made manifest in the artists’ patterning of garments, the processions of tribes, and the banners unfurled; in the dazzling pictorial accounts of dances and ceremonies, of warriors on horseback, and of the rituals of camp life that were disappearing as tribes were increasingly forced onto reservations. Remembrance resides in a visual clarity: an economy of line, a simplicity of form, and an enthusiasm for color that together create an emphatic call to be seen.