Exhibition Review: NMAI's Hide & Ramp It Up

(Apologies for the poor quality of the images. My camera battery died on me, so I was forced to use my phone.)

NMAI has "Ramp It Up," an exhibition of native skate culture, including skate decks, wheels, and photographs. Beginning with the evolution of the skateboard from Hawaiian surf culture, the exhibition looks at the appropriation of skateboarding on the reservation and its role in creating an artistic space for young Natives. The exhibition highlighted several native enterprises that have developed, such as Wounded Knee Skateboards
and Native Skates. The exhibition documents how native people have used skateboarding as an artistic venue, styling skate decks. Skate wheels in four distinct colors echo the medicine wheel, a symbol from the Great Plains traditions, that represent the four directions. Native skaters like Bunky Echo-Hawk serve as role models for younger generations, and participate in events like the All Nations Skate Jam. Ramp It Up, as an exhibition, showcases the achievements of young native skateboarders and their processes of identity- and self-creation.





"Hide" concerns skin as metaphor and material, and the first part of the exhibition currently on display has works by Sonya Kelliher-Combs (both images above) and Nadia Myre (now through August 1, 2010). Kelliher-Combs' works are created from diverse animal hides, and embellished with quills, hairs, and grommets. They are distinctly fragile and luminous, transparent but still present. Myre's works are a collection entitled "Scarscapes," wherein individuals created personal scar stories on small stretched linen canvases. The result is a room full of scar stories that demand to be individually witnessed, seen, and heard. Myre also has several large close-up photographs of black and white beading, again echoing the fragmented stitched nature of scars - how they are different from the skin around them. "Hide" also includes two short videos, one by Nadia Myre entitled "Inkanatatation," and Terrance Houle's "Metrosexual Indian." "Inkanatatation" shows Myre being tattooed with a Canadian flag with feathers in place of the maple leaf, an act of appropriating an indigenous and national identity simultaneously. Houle's grainy Super8 video shows an urban indigenous man walking around a city, dressed in everyday clothes and performing everyday acts, that aren't incongruous at all with his native identity but can appear so to others.

This exhibition also made me reflect on the nature of skin, what we carry around on us, protecting us from what is outside of us but also portraying ourselves to the outside world.

Taken together, both "Hide" and "Ramp It Up" demonstrate the myriad and creative ways that people create their identities and live in their own skins. They fulfill the NMAI's mission of showing native people as rooted in tradition but also living, existing, urban, present.