Many Wests: Artists Shape an American Idea

On View

Smithsonian American Art Museum
Many Wests: Artists Shape an American Idea
July 28, 2023–January 14, 2024
Washington, DC

Many Wests is an exhibition focused on what gets left out of stories traditionally told about the American West. Visions of Anglo-Americans bravely settling the landscape originate, as we learn from the exhibition’s didactic material, with the US government’s policy of unhalted territorial expansion beginning at the end of the seventeenth century. Organized by a team of curators—Amy Chaloupka at the Whatcom Museum, Meanie Fales at the Boise Art Museum, Anne Hyland at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Danielle Knapp at the University of Oregon’s Jordan Schniter Museum of Art, E. Carmen Ramos, currently Chief Curator at the National Gallery of Art, and Whitney Tassie at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts—Many Wests showcases forty-eight modern and contemporary (mostly Indigenous, Latinx, Black, or Asian American) artists. These diverse curatorial and artistic voices work together to show, as the Utah Museum of Fine Arts put it in the promotional materials for their version of the show earlier this year, “how the West wasn’t one.”

Visitors to Many Wests are greeted by a monumental detail of Apsálooke/Crow artist Wendy Red Star’s photographic series “Four Seasons: Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer”(2006). Red Star is one of a number of artists in the exhibition who dissect and examine distorted narratives about Native Americans. Seated in ceremonial dress among plastic flowers and inflatable animals and set against panoramic photographs of Western landscapes, Red Star conjures the deadpan satire of Cindy Sherman’s “Film Stills” to skewer treatment of Indigenous peoples in ethnographic displays. Nuyorican artist Raphael Montañez Ortiz, meanwhile, takes on Hollywood’s stereotyping of Native Americans in Cowboy and “Indian” Film (1957–58). Ortiz chopped up copies of Anthony Mann’s Western Winchester ’73 (1950) with a tomahawk (a tribute to his Yaqui heritage) and ritualistically jumbled and reassembled them, mounting a literal attack on the genre. The violence with which Ortiz meets Mann’s film feels both just and hopeless—the film may be destroyed, but the damage is already done.

The exhibition awards considerable space to Latinx experiences. Among the most compelling works is photographer Christina Fernández’s María’s Great Expedition (1995–96), in which Fernández embodies the character of her grandmother in order to narrate Chicanx stories through photographs and explanatory text. Ken Gonzales-Day’s devastating Erased Lynchings (2006), part of a larger series the artist developed between 2002 and 2017, features a grid of fifteen appropriated souvenir cards from extrajudicial murders in California between 1850 and 1935, the brutalized bodies of the victims removed from the images. Gonzalez-Day’s series focuses on violence perpetrated against Latinx, Native American, and Asian American individuals through a mode of racial terrorism most Americans associate only with African American targets. Asian American trauma receives direct attention in the works of Japanese American artists Wendy Maruyama and Roger Shimomura, who both pay homage to the 13,000 people unjustly interned at Minidoka Relocation Center between 1942 and 1945. Maruyama’s work functions as a kind of anti-monument, fashioned from the reconstructed identification tags of incarcerated people, while Shimomura contributes a painting of the camp in the style of a fourteenth- or fifteenth-century Japanese byobu screen. These works bear haunting witness to lives previously rendered forgettable.

The vast majority of the artworks in Many Wests are readily identified with ethno-racial categories: Native American, Latinx, African American, Japanese American—notable exceptions include Angela Ellsworth’s breathtaking Seer Bonnet XI and XII. These crafted caps were painstakingly constructed by the self-identified Mormon artist out of pearls and needles in tribute to prophet Joseph Smith’s thirty-five wives. The curators’ apparent discomfort with the show’s readymade classifications is indicated by the fact that they demarcate the works not by ethnicity or culture, but rather through the categories of “Caretakers,” “Memory Makers,” and “Boundary Breakers”—labels so abstract as to be ornamental. The problem of organization raises a more fundamental question about exhibitions in 2023: namely, is “all-but-white-artists on x topic” a sustainable model for an exhibition theme? Certainly, opportunities to show complex, interesting works by Indigenous, Latinx, Asian American, and African American artists are both exciting and long overdue. Yet to place such works in one bucket, simply distinguished from those of Anglo artists, also holds the danger of homogenizing and devaluing unique experiences. Many Wests is strongest when focused specifically on the question of narrative—which stories are being told, how, and for what purpose? The exhibition’s arguments might even be strengthened by the inclusion of an artist such as (the white, straight, male) Richard Prince, for example, whose works dismembering the figure of the American cowboy have much to discuss with those of artists such as Ortiz, Red Star, and Fernández. As museums rightly expand and diversify their holdings and exhibitions, they should be mindful not to let this task overshadow their primary responsibility: to offer visually stunning, intellectually rigorous exhibitions that inspire visitors of all backgrounds.