Visitors to Rhode Island will have the chance until June 29th to view the first annual State Native American Art Exhibit. The show, which features work from Eastern Woodland artists, is currently on display in the Atrium Gallery, One Capitol Hill in Providence. Painter and educator Deborah Spears Moorehead, the show’s curator, was kind enough to tell Tribe about the show and how she became involved in the first event of its kind in the state’s history.
“The Rhode Island State Council on the Arts (RISCA) has been around since 1967 and this is the first time they’ve had a Native American art show,” Moorehead said and added considerately, “that I know of.”
The first annual State Native American Art Exhibit showcases seventy-five pieces from twenty artists, including Moorehead, representing eight different tribes: Abenaki, Maliseet, Mohegan, Nipmuc, Passamaquoddy, Pequot, Narragansett and Wampanoag. Moorehead, a Wampanoag Narragansett who grew up in Warwick, Rhode Island, explained how she ended up assuming the role of curator for this historic occurrence.
“RISCA chose me because some Native American friends of mine, including [Pocasset Wampanoag Vice Chairman] Daryl Black Eagle Jamieson, saw that I wasn’t represented in a multicultural show in Warwick,” Moorehead said. “So they asked [RISCA Community Arts Program Director] Elena [Calderón Patiño], ‘Why haven’t you invited Debbie?’ Then Daryl introduced me to Elena.” Moorehead said, “RISCA tried to organize a Native American art show in 2011 but it fell through.” The reason for the absence of Moorehead’s work at the show in Warwick was the simple fact that RISCA had never heard of her.
“In the meantime,” Moorehead continued, “I was taking a course at Goucher College in cultural policy, part of my master’s degree in cultural sustainability. My professor was Robert Baron who is the director of Folk Arts at the New York State Council on the Arts.”
For an assignment on the subject of cultural democracy, Baron asked Moorehead to interview RISCA Executive Director Randall Rosenbaum. Among other things, Moorhead asked Rosenbaum why she wasn’t invited to participate in the ill-fated show in 2011—the show never got off the ground, but it’s always nice to be asked. Rosenbaum asked Moorehead if she’d like to help organize the show currently on display in the Atrium Gallery. Moorehead obviously impressed upon Rosenbaum the very same notion she effortlessly explained to Tribe.
“The idea of cultural democracy is that all people—every culture, every nationality, every ethnicity, everyone—should be equally able to participate in the arts,” Moorehead said. “There should be cultural equity and inclusiveness. That means everyone is equal and everyone has the opportunity to participate in art,” an idea that seems to fit right into RISCA’s recent efforts to promote culturally diverse exhibitions at the Atrium and throughout Rhode Island.
RISCA Community Arts Program Director Elena Calderón Patiño told Tribe, “I oversee the Atrium Gallery and the RISCA Folk and Traditional Arts programs.” Since 2009, according to Patiño, RISCA has added five new exhibits to the Atrium Gallery schedule including the Asian Art Exhibit, the Youth Art Exhibit, the Diversity Exhibit and the current Native American show. Patiño added, “We also started the New Visions/New Curator Series, traveling Atrium Gallery exhibits, partnering with the Warwick Art Museum and the Attleboro Art Museum in an effort to showcase the work of artists in other parts of the region.” Both women—Patiño and Moorehead—have dedicated their professional lives to cultural democracy.
Moorehead considers herself to be a “traditional Native American,” living a life and practicing as many time-honored customs as she realistically is able to. “But,” she added humorously, “I still live in a house.” Much of her work—like a lot of the work hanging in the Atrium Gallery—depicts Eastern Woodland Native Americans, “portraits of the past, present and future of Native people.” Moorehead also sings and teaches traditional Eastern Woodland women’s songs.
Moorehead told Tribe about two of her paintings that appear in the show. The first is an oil-on-canvas portrait of the Native scholar Anthony Pollard Nanapashemet, who died in 1995 of complications from diabetes and dialysis right after he won the Calamet (Peace Pipe) dance contest at the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation’s Green Corn Powwow. “He was a traditional Wampanoag and he did a lot of the research for Plimoth Plantation. He became a scholar without going to school. He was self-taught.”
The Great Sachem (leader) of the Pawtucket Confederation of Indian Tribes, Nanapashemet worked with archaeologists to locate and identify evidence of the presence of provisions, particularly prominent in Pilgrim stories, that predated Native Americans’ presumed first contact with Europeans during the seventeenth century—in what would later become Plymouth, Massachusetts. “They found mounds that contained corn,” explained Moorehead, “that predated contact with Europeans.” Public school curriculums at that time, according to Moorehead, contained inaccurate stories of Pilgrims teaching Wampanoags to plant corn. “That really outraged Nanapashemet,” Moorehead laughed. “But he worked with archeologists to prove that it was wrong and that’s what he was known for.”
The inspiration for another portrait, an oil-on-wood panel painting of a fox, seems to run slightly contrary to Moorehead’s maternal Wampanoag ancestry. “They’re wolf people so I have a lot of wolf paintings,” Moorehead said. “But sometimes the fox in me comes out.” Of her preference for wood, some of it hundreds of years old, over more traditional materials like canvas or paper, Moorehead explained, “A lot of people give me wood or I find wood and I look at it and it kind of tells me what to paint on it.”
Before beginning a piece, Moorehead often lets the wood simply rest outside, weather and age. When she brings it indoors, she lets it dry, as she told Tribe, “to see what pictures come out of it. That piece of wood already had a fox on it so I just painted the fox out of the wood.”
Patiño said of Moorehead, “Her participation has been incredible. She’s a wonderful artist but she’s also is an inspiring person who has achieved so much in her life. Her dedication to curating this show and her connections with other artists were instrumental in putting this exhibit together.”
Besides Moorehead, Patiño made sure to point out contributions from many others. “We also had the participation of many Native American community leaders and artists. We would like to specially thank Loren Spears of the Tomaquag Indian Museum for her help reaching out to Native American artists. We also want to acknowledge Daryl Black Eagle Jamieson, vice chairman of the Pocasset Wampanoag Tribe, and Dawn Spears of the New England Foundation for the Arts.”
Deborah Spears Moorehead concluded in Algonquin, “Ke keen nee ash wunnegin,” which translates to, “It’s beautiful, come and see.”
