The mythology of the American Western landscape is deeply troubled with its continued romanticization. Consider the popularity of Taylor Sheridan’s successful Yellowstone franchise (spoiler alert ahead); viewers root for the morally gray Dutton family who fight the contemporary colonizers of the urbanized city-dwellers. Yet the patriarch, John Dutton (played by Kevin Costner), refused to acknowledge the previous land ownership to the local Native American tribe, loosely based on the Crow Reservation in south Montana. Costner’s exit from the show, and thus John’s death, is the pivotal event that leads to his son Kayce (played by Luke Grimes) offering it back to the Broken Rock Reservation. I feared the Briscoe’s Storytellers exhibit would follow the tendency to share Western landscape’s history from an exclusively 19th century, Eurocentric perspective. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised at the plurality in the visual narratives presented.
Ed Natiya’s Stories of Our People (2023), is a monumental bronze sculpture of a Blackfoot elder greeting visitors into the gallery space. The elder reaches for the sky as he shares the “living stories,” the dynamic movement of his hands talking loud enough to fill the silent room. Natiya uses Stories of Our People to visualize the long-standing tradition of oral history and wisdom being shared. Humorously, the elder sits cross-legged on a stage. He sets the stage for the exploration of the various perspectives of the Western landscape.
An art exhibit about the American West isn't complete without an Edward Curtis photograph. A Zuni Governor (1900) is a portrait of Sa We Ta Fina, an important leader from Northern New Mexico. The work is iconic for exemplifies Curtis’ controversial practice as he uses traditional European portrait techniques and lighting as a way to highlight the features of his sitter, but presents the work to be read as a visual ethnographic study. The curators could have taken the easy route by presenting this work with other early problematic ethnographic studies. Instead, they expanded the discussion by hanging William Acheff’s Zuni Past (1984) to the right.
Acheff uses a trompe l’oeil effect that recalls 17th century Dutch still life paintings that served as a vanitas. He challenges viewers to reimagine a vanitas in the context of the American Southwest. His meticulous attention to detail recreates Curtis’ Zuni Governor hanging from a white, potentially adobe, wall with other indigenous goods placed in front of it to create space: a Zuni ceramic olla (water jar), a thick tassel of horse hair, and a turquoise necklace on a silver beaded chain, all resting on a burlap bag close to the edge of a table. Acheff, whose ancestry can be traced to Alaskan Athabascan, challenges the notion of the “vanishing race” (Curtis’ titular for his photograph series) and death of the indigenous population. The painting could be read as historical artifacts of a dwindling culture or as objects that still hold value to be passed down and used with each passing generation.
What makes this exhibit dynamic is its generational perspectives - some of the earliest work was made in the late 1800’s, while its more contemporary works were made within the past ten years. There are four contemporary works in the back right of the room that take uniquely distinctive perspectives of the American West.
Martin Grelle’s Wolves in Blue (2020) and Mark Maggiori’s Once Upon a Time (2020) reveal a reverence for history through research and imagining untold stories of diverse populations. Grelle’s Wolves in Blue visually explores the relationship between Native American scouts for the U.S. Army (known as wolves), the land, other indigenous tribes, and the U.S. government. Three scouts, accurately depicted in uniform and hair style, are depicted at the top of a hill with their horses, and a mountainous terrain behind them. One of the men leads his horse by the reins, a rifle in his other hand, as he peers down at the trail to see an arrow protruding from the ground. The weapons indicate the potential for conflict, which is hard to imagine on the lush, rolling landscape the trio travels across.
Popular culture glamorizes and simplifies the inhabitants of the Wild West into two cultural groups: European-descent white cowboys and the indigenous Native American tribes. In south Texas, the hispanic vaquero is recognized as an important group that attempted to tame the Wild West, represented in this corner of the exhibit with Frederic Remmington’s A Mexican Buccaro - In Texas (1890). Maggiori’s Once Upon a Time expands the narrative. He acknowledges the diversity of the American West by depicting African American cowboys. Two Black men dressed in western attire ride horses on a lush plain, elevated plateaus miles behind them on the horizon line. The upper third of the composition is a luminous blue sky with a large cumulonimbus cloud growing in size, but visually disrupted by the upper bodies of the men. On the placard beside the artwork, Dr. Dolf Briscoe acknowledges how the development of the American West was presented as a place of opportunity, and thousands of the workers immigrating here were those of color. Maggiori’s painting presents the black cowboys as monumental, and thus integral, to the Western landscape.
The exhibit acknowledged the various ethnic groups that live in the Western landscape: the various indigenous groups, the Hispanic vaquero, the Black cowboy, and the European colonizers. There is an abundance of more artworks in this exhibit that continue to build a robust narrative of the American Southwest. Each share a nuanced perspective and function in dialogue with each other, allowing viewers to be immersed into the story.
Storytellers closes on January 19, 2025. The Briscoe is open Thursday through Monday from 10AM to 5PM and located in the heart of downtown San Antonio, garage parking available across the street. Please be sure to also check their website for holiday hours.
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