The Heard Museum welcomes the fall season this year by showcasing two new exhibits dedicated to American Indian Art. A partnership with The McMichael Canadian Art Collection will bring Meryl McMaster: Bloodline to the Valley on October 4. Just over a month later on November 8, Space Makers: Indigenous Expression and a New American Art will be shown.
Bloodline to the Valley comes from a partnership with Remai Modern (part of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection) to display the photographic accomplishments of Canadian artist Meryl McMaster. Her large-scale collection reflects her Mixed Plains Cree, Dutch and British ancestry.
“I am excited for the Heard Museum to be the first stop in the U.S. for my solo exhibition nikihci-âniskotâpân | Bloodline, which takes the viewer on a journey of exploring our past and present, family histories, and ones ties to ancestral stories,” McMaster said. “I look through the complex lens of belonging to two distinct heritages, nêhiyaw and Euro-Canadian, and those complexities around identity drive my work, which I strive to celebrate and hold space for inviting deeper reflection on our collective identity through self-portrait photography and film.”
McMaster’s collection will include past work from 2008 to 2019 and some of her most recent pieces from 2022 and 2023. The more recent collection has themes of family history.
“In particular those of her Plains Cree female forebears from the Red Pheasant Cree Nation in present-day Saskatchewan, Canada,” a Heard representative said.
McMaster’s display of 48 photographs will be available for viewing until January 2025.
The Space Makers: Indigenous Expression and a New American Art showcase will delve into the midcentury American art movement known as the Indian Space Painters. The collection will seek to understand the “relationship between non-Native painters, the Indigenous visual and material culture that inspired them, and the artists from the modern Native art movement who expanded upon such creative explorations through their visual heritage.”
This first-ever collection of its kind will reveal ways American pieces are founded from Indigenous space “aesthetically, geographically, and socio-politically.” The exhibit will be open until March 2025.
Since 1929, the Heard Museum has committed to uplifting Indigenous works. Now internationally recognized for the quality of its collections, world-class exhibitions, and more, Heard continues to advance American Indian art.
The museum is open daily from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. with adult tickets for $22.50 online and $25 in person, senior tickets for $18 online and $20 at the door, and children and student tickets for $9 online and $10 at the door. Museum entrance is free for children under 5, American Indians with Tribal ID or CIB, and Heard Museum members.
For more information, visit heard.org.
