Art of the American Indians Exhibition

EXHIBITIONS 
Exhibition: Art of the American Indians: The Thaw Collection
Dates: 24 April to 4 September 2011 

Opening times: Tuesday and Wednesday: 11:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m. 

Thursday: 11:00 a.m.–9:00 p.m.

Friday*, Saturday, and Sunday: 11:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.

Closed Mondays

Place: Chilton Gallery, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas (USA)

Entrance fee: $10

Webpage: www.dallasmuseumofart.org

 About the exhibition:

In the Dallas Museum of Art’s first Native American exhibition in nearly twenty years, 111 works of art from the renowned Eugene and Clare Thaw Collection of American Indian Art at the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, New York, will be on view beginning in April 2011 in the Museum’s Chilton Gallery I. Art of the American Indians: The Thaw Collection explores the extraordinarily diverse forms of visual expression in Native North America. Organized by geographic culture areas, the works of art in this exhibition date from well before first European contact to the present, and celebrate the continuing vitality of American Indian art.

This four-venue national exhibition reveals the exceptional variety of Native artistic production, ranging from the ancient ivories and ingenious modern masks of the Arctic to the dramatic sculptural arts of the Pacific Northwest, the millennia-long tradition of abstract art in the Southwest, the refined basketry of California and the Great Basin, the famous beaded and painted works of the Plains, and the luminous styles of the Eastern Woodlands, including the Great Lakes.

Organized by the Fenimore Art Museum, Art of the American Indians: The Thaw Collection opened at the Cleveland Museum of Art in March 2010. Carol Robbins, The Ellen and Harry S. Parker III Curator of the Arts of the Americas and the Pacific, is the curator of the Dallas presentation. Other venues on the national tour include the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, Minnesota (October 24, 2010–January 9, 2011) and, after Dallas, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, Indiana (December 4, 2011–February 12, 2012). A 120-page full-color catalogue will accompany the exhibition, which has been made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts as part of American Masterpieces: Three Centuries of Artistic Genius.

© Text and image: Dallas Museum of Art