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As Peter B. Jones stood in front of dozens of people in the Syracuse University Art Museum on Thursday, he recognized familiar faces of people who had supported him throughout his career. He went on to praise the work of the curation team made up of students and professors.

“It’s not typical for what you think Native American art can be,” Jones said. “It’s my own creation, and I’m very proud to show it here.”

At the beginning of the semester, “Continuity, Innovation, and Resistance: The Art of Peter B. Jones” opened in the SU Art Museum. Jones’s work focuses on revitalizing traditional Haudenosaunee pottery techniques that were lost, Charlotte Dupree said, a junior art history major who worked on the exhibit. Dupree, along with other students and under the guidance of two professors, curated a series of Jones’ works.

Art history professor Sascha Scott and director of Native American and Indigenous studies Scott Manning Stevens worked as the co-directors of the project. The pair created a team of four graduate students and two undergraduates, Dupree and senior Eiza Capton, to help with the exhibit. Each student is from an Indigenous background.

“They were freshmen when they started this. They had never done anything like this,” Scott said. “We just invited them, and they were the ones who were super eager about it and got back to us right away. And they have learned how to curate an exhibition, and they have learned how to do this very quickly.”

After choosing both of the undergraduates, along with the graduate mentors, they began researching Jones during the summer of 2022. Once they worked on their individual sections, the whole group came together to discuss the direction of the exhibit and Jones’ work.

Using traditional methods, Jones focuses on long-term indigenous issues of colonization all the way to contemporary issues of gambling, the co-director said.

“I think partly wanting to make clear to people that there’s, what might be called a through line in the culture, drawing from the very ancient practices of pottery from the pre-contact period with Europeans until the present day,” Stevens said. “A big part of survival for Native cultures is our ability to adapt but adapt and not lose a sense of self, still.”

After researching the artist, the group created a wishlist of what pieces they wanted to display, Stevens said. From there, the curation team reached out to different museums about lending different works. Once they narrowed it down to 30 pieces, the team attempted to either borrow or buy them from places like Colgate University and Everson Museum of Art.

However, acquiring and moving the pieces is an expensive task, Stevens said. To get the bulk of their funding, the group received a state grant from Humanities New York. The project also utilized funding from The SOURCE to help pay the undergraduate students working on it.

“Only people that can afford to give their time unpaid ended up doing (internships) so you get the same basically, the same class of people is always going to go into the arts because it was the ones whose parents could float them while they did this internship,” Stevens said.

The group got all but two pieces they requested, Scott said, so their next focus was writing the wall texts that accompany and contextualize Jones’ pieces. Capton and Dupree wrote two-thirds of the wall texts. To write them, they utilized their research and spoke with Jones, who acted as a resource for the team, Capton said.

“It was scary at first because it’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s the artists that we’re making an exhibition on,’” Capton said. “The chance to talk to him is kind of nerve-wracking for me because it’s nerve-wracking to talk to him, but he was also very knowledgeable.”

Working on the exhibit, Capton was ready to explore new opportunities she hadn’t thought of before. While she is an illustration major, she can now see a career for herself working in museums. Capton was also able to reflect on her own identity as a member of the Haudenosaunee nation through the project, seeing her own experiences in Jones’ work.

“It’s really funny because a lot of the issues that he’s addressing in his work pertains to my life, my family’s, my nation’s life as a Haudenosaunee person,” Capton said. “Of course, it’s going be meaningful to me when some of his pieces he’s made addresses what have impacted my family and just impact a lot of Haudenosaunee people.”

The exhibit is the first step at incorporating contemporary Indigenous art into the art museum’s collection. Before the project, it mostly had more Western European pieces, Stevens said. Since then, they have bought some of Jones’ work for the permanent collection, Scott said.

“It’s inherited from the community. It’s an art exhibit that is really historically rich, so it has a lot to bring in,” Scott said. “Some of the work is very whimsical, some of it is very but it’s all visually really appealing. Somebody could just walk in the space and be like, ‘This is really cool.’ But then if you read it, it can be educational.”

Published on September 18, 2023 at 10:48 pm

Contact Rosina: rlboehm@syr.edu