(img via 4 Wheel War Pony)

from NMAI:

Ramp It Up: Skateboard Culture in Native America
June 12, 2009–September 13, 2009
NMAI on the National Mall, Washington, DC

Ramp it Up celebrates the vibrancy, creativity, and controversy of American Indian skate culture. Skateboarding combines demanding physical exertion with design, graphic art, filmmaking, and music to produce a unique and dynamic culture. One of the most popular sports on Indian reservations, skateboarding has inspired American Indian and Native Hawaiian communities to host skateboard competitions and build skate parks to encourage their youth. Native entrepreneurs own skateboard companies and sponsor community-based skate teams. Native artists and filmmakers, inspired by their skating experiences, credit the sport with teaching them a successful work ethic. The exhibition features rare and archival photographs and film of Native skaters as well as skatedecks from Native companies and contemporary artists.

The National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) celebrates one of the world’s most beloved foods—chocolate. To the Maya and Aztec peoples, Theobroma cacao, as its Latin name indicates,
was a “food of the gods.” These programs present a rare opportunity for museum visitors to explore chocolate’s culture, history, and place in contemporary society.

The 2009 Power of Chocolate festival explodes in a colorful celebration of culture, music, dance, art, science and, of course, food. The cultural program explores the rich history and ongoing story of
chocolate and includes a tasty assortment of presentations including the spectacular Peruvian scissor dancers; demonstrations by seldom-seen Guatemalan artists, who create the beautiful
gourd sets traditionally used for chocolate; food
demonstrations; a “chocolate talk” about the
healthy qualities of chocolate; and one-on-one
discussions with indigenous Bolivian cacao growers.

Visitors will learn about the healing, scientific, and
medicinal properties of chocolate, and deepen their
understanding of the cultures and communities that
have cultivated this valuable crop. Families and young visitors will also have an opportunity to learn hands-on as they investigate the Mayan glyph for “cacao,” see how to make Guatemalan chocolate cups, and try their hands at grinding cacao beans and frothing their own hot chocolate.

Comic Art Indigène
March 6, 2009–May 31, 2009
NMAI on the National Mall, Washington, DC

Storytelling has long been a part of Native American culture. Comic Art Indigène examines how storytelling has been used through comics and comic-inspired art to express the contemporary Native American experience. Under the larger definition of narrative art, comic art is more related to Native American art traditions than one might expect. The earliest surviving example of such narrative art is rock art. The historic examples used in the exhibition, such as photographs of rock art, ledger art, and ceramics, are meant to link Native American art traditions with contemporary voices.

Making comics and producing art inspired by them is a method of reclaiming the narrative art form of comics and Native American culture from those who would dismiss an art for the masses. Stories of humor, adventure and the fantastic depicted through pictures have always been an indigenous practice, and Native American scribes today grapple with the same topics emboldened with millennia-old cultural traditions, blended with new methods of expression and life in the 21st Century.

Comic Art Indigène is presented at the National Museum of the American Indian through the generous support of its National Council.

Comment by IndianComics

This exhibit is traveling to the Smithsonian, open in a week!

Museum website: http://www.nmai.si.edu/subpage.cfm?subpage=exhi…
PR information: http://media.newmexicoculture.org/press_release…

LONGVIEWS, the blog-cast » Blog Archive » Oh So Iroquois: an exhibition curated by Ryan Rice

Oh So Iroquois emphasizes the dynamism of both traditional and contemporary Iroquoian creative processes, presenting work that is deeply rooted in a cultural system of values and æsthetic qualities that
permeate the social, political, spiritual, and economic infrastructure of Haudenosuanee society. Together, as members of the Iroquois Confederacy, artists continue to affirm and re-examine this collective art history through symbolism, narrative, colour, and contemporary and traditional media.