Artists Space

We the People was organized by Native American artist Jimmie Durham and art critic Jean Fisher. The Video Program was organized by Emelia Seubert, Assistant Curator, Film and Video Center, Museum of the American Indian, and Artists Space Film/Video Curator Dan Walworth.

The exhibition will be accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with essays by Jimmie Durham, Jean Fisher, Emelia Seubert and Native American writer Paul Smith.

Of the show Fisher writes: “The title, We the People, was chosen as a gentle but ironic reminder that this phrase, and the sociopolitical organization of the Northeaster peoples, were appropriated by the United States Constitution as the foundation of American democracy. The exhibition involves the problems of presenting Native American art in a social climate that has little competence to see beyond its field of vision. The aim of the exhibition is not to provide white audiences with revelations about who the people ‘really’ are, but to “address how white culture perceives, and is perceived by, ‘Indians’. And as we look at them looking at us looking at them we might be just a little uncomfortable that our gaze, so long concealed behind a dissembling rhetoric or a monocular lens, is capable of being turned back on us.”

Jimmie Durham is an artist who was a founder and former Executive Director of the Indian Treaty Council, establishing a special committee on indigenous affairs at the United Nations, He has served on the Executive Committee of the American Indian Movement as well as Editor of Art and Artists newspaper and as Executive Director of the Foundation for the Community of Artists. In addition to his sculpture, his work has included performance and poetry. A book of his poems, Columbus Day, was published in 1983 by West End Press, Minnesota.

Jean Fisher is an art critic and freelance curator who writes for Artforum. Fisher has taught at the Museum Studies Program, Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as at SUNY at Old Westbury. She has also organized a traveling group exhibition of Native American artists and has written essays on the work of Jack Goldstein, James Coleman, Anselm Kiefer and Frank Stella among others.

Paul Smith is a freelance writer and editor who has worked for City Limits magazine, Art and Artists, as well as Treaty Council News. He was Press Coordinator for the Wounded Knee Legal Defense Committee, Sioux Falls, in 1974-75.

Emelia Seubert is Assistant Curator of the Film and Video Center at the Museum of the American Indian, New York.

We the People Catalogue

Artists Space activities have been made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts, a Federal Agency; New York State Council on the Arts; New York City Department of Cultural Affairs; Arts Matters, Inc., Cowles Family Charitable Trust Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, Inc., Jerome Foundation, W. Alton Jones Foundation, Charlottesville, Va, the Kaplan Fund, Leonhardt Foundation, Betty Parsons Foundation, The Reed Foundation, Inc., Mark Rothko Foundation, the American Express Company, Consolidated Edison, Equitable Real Estate Group, Inc., General Atlantic Corporation, R.H. Macy Company, Mobil Foundation, Inc., Morgan Guaranty Trust of New York ad Philip Morris Companies, Inc., as well as numerous Friends.