Review of Art Quantum: The Eiteljorg Fellowship for Native American Fine Art, 2009 edited by James H. Nottage with Jennifer Complo McNutt and Ashley Holland

Authors

Jo Ortel, Beloit College

Date of this Version

Summer 2011

Citation

Great Plains Quarterly 31:3 (Summer 2011).

Comments

Copyright © 2011 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska.

Abstract

This catalogue, published on the occasion of the sixth biennial exhibition honoring the 2009 winners of the prestigious Eiteljorg Fellowship, follows the format established in earlier iterations: a lead essay by a noted critic or scholar of contemporary Native American art (who also served as a jurist on the Fellowship's independent selection panel), accompanied by five interpretive essays on each of the award recipients written by different artists or scholars and amply illustrated with high-quality reproductions of the artists' work.

Paul Chaat Smith (Associate Curator, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian) contributes the lead essay, a characteristically highly stylized and oblique piece. His diversionary tactics are frustrating (if understandable) here, because they completely overwhelm the important challenge he sets out in his final paragraphs, where he calls on Native artists to relinquish "easy targets and tiresome rhetoric."