New Exhibit at the Heard Museum sheds light on Navajo history

With Native American Heritage Month, came a new exhibit that showcases Navajo pictorial textiles and creates a space for education on Native American art and history.

The exhibit, titled “Toward the Morning Sun: Navajo Pictorial Textiles from the Jean-Paul and Rebecca Valette Collection,” opened November 5 at the Heard Museum and will remain open until February 13.

The Heard Museum holds more than 3,600 pieces of American Indian Art and is dedicated to sharing the stories of American Indian people, as well as advancing their art, says the museum website.

Their “Toward the Morning Sun” exhibition aims to do just that. It features 30 textiles that were given to the Heard Museum as a gift from collectors Jean-Paul and Rebecca Valette, said Velma Craig, an assistant curator at the museum.

The textiles each have a rich history, which the Valettes and the Heard Museum made sure to showcase through the exhibit.

“The Valettes spent nearly 40 years collecting and researching the origins and history of these textiles, including developing important biographical information on some of the weavers and tracing early collectors,” said Craig.

Each of the textiles have a unique label that was written with the intention of educating patrons about Native American history through the art pieces. While it can be easy to view these pictorials as just decorative weaving, Craig makes it a point to detail the scenes that the Navajo people experienced and that the textiles depict.

“Beginning in the 1870s, Native children were often forcibly removed from their families and placed for the remainder of their childhood at government-operated boarding schools far from their homelands, where the aim was to strip them of all signs of “Indian-ness,” says the label of one of the textiles.

Exhibits like this one were considered rare until recently, according to an Encyclopedia Britannica article on Native American art.

“Until the last few decades, the only strong effort to exhibit this art in galleries or museums was made by those few institutions specializing in ethnological, exotic, or art history subjects,” said the article.

But, for Melanie Yazzie, an assistant professor of Native American studies at The University of New Mexico, the importance of these exhibits is unparalleled.

“I think they’re so important because so much of our history as Native Americans is just not known and a lot of it throughout time has been incorrect,” said Yazzie.

She believes that Native American people can use art to share their stories with the communities around them.

“If there’s more coverage of it, it just helps people see where we’re coming from and where we’ve been,” said Yazzie.

While she appreciates Native American history being told, she wants to see more artists sharing their contemporary stories and exposing the problems that are currently affecting the Native American community.

“When you’re speaking about contemporary Native art and contemporary Native issues in the artwork, there hasn’t been enough of that and more needs to happen,” said Yazzie.

Visit “Toward the Morning Sun: Navajo Pictorial Textiles from the Jean-Paul and Rebecca Valette Collection” by purchasing a general admission ticket to the Heard Museum, open Tuesday through Sunday.