In Celebration of “Indian Theater”

A new exhibition at Bard College’s Hessel Museum of Art takes its title from a concept by Lloyd Kiva New, co-founder of the Institute of American Indian Arts, and its dance and drama instructor, Rolland R. Meinholtz. The pair proposed an “American Indian Theatre,” writes the New York Times’s Holland Carter, “basing it on the premise that much traditional Indigenous art was fundamentally theatrical in nature, incorporating movement, sound, masking, storytelling, communal action, and that these elements could be marshaled to create distinctive new forms.”

Curated by Candice Hopkins and on view through November, Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination Since 1969 is “a frisky intergenerational group show,” as Cotter puts it, featuring works by 40 Native artists who use or reference theatricality in their work, from Jeffrey Gibson and the late James Luna to Sky Hopinka, Dyani White Hawk, and Eric-Paul Riege, the exhibition’s youngest participant.

Read “On the Hudson, Visions for a New Native American Art.”