River Routes Recommendation

Susan Tallman's essay in The Atlantic's March 2026 issue expands the conversation we started last month when reviewing the Amazonie: Futurs Autochtones exhibition at the Musée du Quai Branly. Moving beyond Amazonia to Indigenous art from the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand, Tallman offers essential reading for anyone interested in how Indigenous contemporary art is finally escaping the museum's ethnographic past.

Tallman reviews three major exhibitions that mark what she calls Indigenous art's "moment": Jeffrey Gibson's "An Indigenous Present" (traveling from Boston's ICA to Nashville and Seattle), "The Stars We Do Not See: Australian Indigenous Art" (touring North America from the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.), and Emily Kam Kngwarray's retrospective at London's Tate Modern. The last one originated from Australia's National Gallery of Victoria. Together, these shows demonstrate how institutions have been more open to present Indigenous art not merely as artifacts frozen in time, but as dynamic contemporary practice.

Reading and checking these links about these exhibitions might be a good solution for you, if, like me, you imposed a travel ban on yourself to this bizarre place that has become the United States of North America.

One of the things that makes Tallman's piece invaluable is her excavation of a century-old double standard: when Picasso borrowed from African masks or Pollock learned from Navajo sand painters, art history celebrated their "originality." But when Indigenous artists adapted European materials and techniques, they were seen as losing "authenticity." The essay traces how this logic—that Western art points to the future while Indigenous art repeats the past—has begun to collapse.

Although focused on three contemporary Indigenous art exhibitions, Tallman's piece weaves through significant recent scholarship, from Philip Deloria's 2019 Becoming Mary Sully to Ngarino Ellis's Toi Te Mana: An Indigenous History of Māori Art. She engages with Gibson's 2023 compendium and the deep curatorial thinking behind these exhibitions, showing how a growing body of work insists on what Gibson calls "an Indigenous present"—a phrase designed to disrupt the equation of Indigeneity with cultural stasis.

I don't want to give you a spoiler, but Tallman's essay's strength is that it grapples with fundamental questions about what can be shared and what must be protected, how artists navigate between inherited cultures and contemporary opportunities, and what Western audiences miss when they view Indigenous work only through the lens of their own art-historical categories.

The author's observation that "modernists missed the point by adopting the look of Indigenous objects while doing away with any social role of that cultural belonging" resonates deeply with the curatorial methodologies Andrea Scholz and I describe in our chapter for the open-access book Collections as Relations.

In this piece, called "Curating and Creating Relations Between Lived Worlds,” we draw from many collaborative projects we've taken part in to argue that the role of the curator in ethnographic museums should shift from representing objects to engaging with the relational networks they embody. As we write: "That meant incorporating practices such as mutuality and reciprocity as guides for developing curatorial methodological approaches”. In this line, curating would become the act of creating and caring for relations between people and things, inside and outside museum settings.

The Atlantic allows one free article for non-subscribers. This is the one to use this month.

Read the full article: The Secrets of Indigenous Art

For centuries, Amazonia has been misread as a vast wilderness awaiting extraction. Here, we share the stories that challenge this narrative.

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