Oklahoma’s Gilcrease Museum houses one of the best and most comprehensive collections of Native American art in the country, largely built by a collector who was himself a member of the Muscogee Nation. This unprecedented traveling exhibition emphasizes Indigenous art from the heartland from the late nineteenth century to the present day, supplemented by ancient stone carvings and by a handful of contrasting Euro-American works. Arranged into four stimulating sections exploring transhistorical themes of ceremony, sovereignty, visual abstraction, and identity, Past Forward amplifies Indigenous voices and affirms the centrality of Native American art to American art history.

Expand your engagement by visiting Ackland Upstairs, which will feature a selection from our own collection of Native American art, ranging from an eighteenth-century Cherokee jackal pipe to contemporary editions. Also, The North Carolina Museum of Art will present To Take Shape and Meaning: Form and Design in Contemporary American Indian Art, opening on March 2, 2024.

The exhibition is co-organized by the American Federation of Arts and Gilcrease Museum.

The Ackland’s presentation of this exhibition has been made possible by the William R. Kenan, Jr. Charitable Trust, the Arthur F. and Alice E. Adams Charitable Foundation, and Jeff and Liesl Wilke ’92 (JD).

Additional support for the Ackland’s presentation of Past Forward: Native American Art from Gilcrease Museum is provided by Kerry D. Bird & Ken Gahagan.

Though Netherlandish artist Jan van der Straet, better known as Johannes Stradanus, spent the majority of his career in Italy, a high percentage of his artistic output was made for print publishers in the northern European city of Antwerp. In addition to making designs for religious, historical, and allegorical scenes, Stradanus also made images of the hunt. With his long-time collaborator, the prolific print publisher Philips Galle (Dutch, 1537-1612), Stradanus created a series of 104 compositions illustrating the various hunting methods of specific animals, which were then published as engravings. This Focus on the Peck Collection installation presents one drawing of a fox hunt from the Peck Collection and two engravings of boar hunts after Stradanus’s designs. The drawing, though not preparatory for the accompanying engravings, demonstrates how the artist’s distinctive and highly descriptive compositions were translated by northern European engravers into extremely successful prints for the market.

Since 2018, the Ackland has exhibited five long-term installations of works from Rhonda Wilkerson’s distinguished collection of African art. These have focused on an individual artist, on types of objects, and on specific functions. This presentation takes a different approach by highlighting a variety of materials, ones that differ from the wood of masks and figurative sculptures, more conventional works of art that have long been favored in museum displays of the arts of Africa. In contrast, the objects in Beyond Wood are made with materials associated more with utilitarian uses: glass, metal, and clay. They include a diviner’s beaded necklace of the Yoruba culture (present-day Nigeria), an ornamental knife of the Konda culture (present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo) and two terracotta portrait heads from the Akan culture (present-day Ghana).

This installation has been organized by Michael Baird, 2022 Joan and Robert Huntley Scholar at the Ackland, and PhD student in art history

pARC is designed as an open-ended spatial gesture that comes to life when people engage with it. The spatial intervention serves as an extension of the conversations, activities, teaching, and programming offered inside the Ackland. The Urban Conga designed pARC to inspire a variety of ways to play; from constructive play to fantasy play, the installation is a transformative communal platform for all users to engage with the space, the Museum, and the University in new ways.

The interactive installation is made up of a series of archways that mimic the archway of the Ackland’s front door. These interconnected arcs appear to grow up from the ground and frame a variety of social spaces that allow people to put their own identities onto the work, the Museum, and the surrounding space. Each of these archways frames or reflects its surroundings, allowing users to look at the area through a different lens. As they pass by the work, they begin to notice that their movement changes the colors of the panels, which spark different filtered views of what is around them.

The installation responds both to the user and to the environment, reflecting and refracting the surrounding context through its colorful dichroic lenses while casting shadows onto the ground and the panels themselves. During the day, as the sun passes over, visitors can see their shadows thrown onto the framed panels creating a shadow play interaction that makes people literally part of the work itself. At night this same effect is created through the use of red, green, and blue lights that allow people to mix the colors of their shadows behind the panels. At each end of the installation sits a platform that serves as a social seating space but also a stage for people to perform shadow plays on the work.

pARC becomes a flexible communal space evoking endless ways to play, gather, perform, teach, converse, or even take a nap. The spatial gesture takes on the identity of the user and utilizes its playable design to break down social barriers and spark communal connection within the space.