Native American Art Tells Ongoing Story at Museum
Starting in January 2025, visitors to the McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture will see new representations of Native Nations that use contemporary art to tell the stories of people who are still alive now and not relics of the past.
Homelands: Connecting to Mounds through Native Art involved co-curators from four Native Nations with traditional and historic ties to Knox County. The exhibition also is informed by a decade of scholarship on representing Indigenous people through museums by Associate Professor Lisa King in the Department of English and ongoing efforts by the McClung Museum to engage with Native Nations at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
One of the most powerful sites for storytelling is the museum, and that’s how I came to focus on Indigenous museums and cultural centers during my PhD work,” said King. “Museums are sites where Indigenous peoples, nations, and communities can tell their stories in the face of erasure.”
The Homelands exhibition, which will run through December 2027, was an opportunity for King as a co-curator to apply what she learned while writing about other exhibitions in Legible Sovereignties: Rhetoric, Representations, and Native American Museums. Relationship-building is paramount, she said, in supporting Native voices while making their stories accessible to people with little knowledge about topics such as the Trail of Tears.
“The work is hard, messy, and complex, and we are always going to make mistakes, but if you keep community at the center and work with humility, you can still have a good result,” King said.
The Cherokee Nation, Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana, Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, and Muscogee (Creek) Nation all appointed two to three co-curators to the exhibition. “They wanted an exhibition that would teach visitors about who Native Nations are today and how they are still very much connected to the land here, despite removal and despite the ‘vanishing Indian’ tropes,” King said.
Instead of archaeological displays, Homelands features works by 17 Native artists that tell about their connections to land and place today, with a focus on Indigenous mounds. The exhibition originated when King proposed highlighting the Indigenous Mound on the UT agriculture campus to the museum, sparking a collaborative effort to develop the project further.
“I hope that what visitors see is how important mounds still are today to Native Nations with ties to the Knoxville area,” King said.
“We aren’t going to talk about excavation, and we aren’t going to talk about the details of ceremonial life,” she said. “A lot of that is knowledge that needs to be protected and held by the Native Nations themselves. Instead, what we are doing is supporting these four Native Nations in telling the story of connection to place and how we all can do better to honor, respect, and protect these sites on Native Nations’ terms.”
King received a digital humanities fellowship through the Denbo Center for Humanities and the Arts that supported her work on the exhibition and an accompanying website during a sabbatical.
Interdisciplinary Team
King is one of several curators from the university working on the exhibition. Sadie Counts, the McClung’s curator of Indigenous collections and assistant curator of exhibitions, and Catherine Shteynberg, assistant director and curator of exhibitions at McClung, have led the project on the museum’s side.
UT’s Director of Repatriation, Ellen Lofaro, has been an invaluable resource, said King. She also cited the support of Claudio Gómez, the McClung Museum Jefferson Chapman Executive Director, and museum staff, as well as affiliated faculty such as Kandi Hollenbach, who is an associate professor in UT’s Department of Anthropology and associate curator of paleoethnobotany at the museum.
“Academic museums, like the McClung Museum, are uniquely positioned to connect faculty, staff, and students with external partners. Homelands demonstrates the power of that kind of collaboration,” said Gómez. “The exhibition brings together Native Nations and the university community to share stories of enduring connections to land and culture. We’re proud to work with the co-curators of this exhibition to bring it to life.”
Beyond the Museum
Homelands is part of a larger effort to better care for the Indigenous mounds in Knoxville.
“The ripple effect of the Homelands project has been amazing,” King said, citing several efforts to improve care for the Indigenous Mound on campus. She encourages people who visit the mound to treat the space with respect, staying on the garden pathways around it and not taking photographs.
Several student research assistants have supported King’s work over the past decade, including Peter Cates, , Maggie Diedrich, Pilar Garcia, Michael Moran, and Stella Takvoryan.
She also serves as a faculty co-sponsor of the UT Native American Student Association with Associate Professor Brooke Bauer in the Department of History. King encourages student allies to also become involved in making Native American studies more visible on campus.
“There is no history without Native American history, and that history is threaded through my family, the places where I’ve grown up and lived, and in every story we tell—or erase—on this continent,” King said.
Homelands: Connecting to Mounds through Native Art is made possible by lead support from the Henry Luce Foundation and the Terra Foundation for American Art. Support is also provided by the Tennessee Valley Authority, Phil Lawson, the Office of the Provost, and the Division of Access and Engagement.
By Amy Beth Miller