As Homecoming enters its third and final year, we continue to refresh the installations with under-exhibited objects from the collection, recent acquisitions, promised gifts, and strategic loans that convey the fullness of cultural production. Thanks to the Gochman Family Collection, three loans by prominent contemporary artists are now on view in Generations. 

Nicholas Galanin’s Static Broadcast, American Prayer Rug (2020) hangs in a gallery that includes paintings by Joan Mitchell, Jackson Pollock, and Sam Gilliam, as well as ceramics by Toshiko Takaezu and Peter Voulkos. Galanin, who lives in Alaska and is Lingít and Unangax̂, responds to the Euro-American modernism exemplified by these artists, and the presence of Static Broadcast, American Prayer Rug changes the atmosphere in this room. If these movements romanticized the immediacy of touch and redefined the field of vision, Galanin responds with a work about mediation. 

Wall-mounted and unsettlingly adorned with fringe on its long edges, Galanin’s prayer rug raises questions about the transmission and instrumentalization of belief systems. He asks us to consider histories of spirituality and media, both of which can be used as tools of oppression. The static at the center of the rug—shaped to evoke a vintage television set—implies a lost signal or lapsed broadcast, but perhaps also surveillance technologies. Galanin draws an analogy between the monotonous assault of static and the unseeing and flattening operations of settler colonialist ideologies. 

The wide-ranging references, materials, and techniques found in Jeffrey Gibson’s artwork serve a symbolic function: they claim intersectionality for Indigenous peoples too often pigeonholed.

Gibson, who currently represents the United States at the Venice Biennale, has developed a prismatic, semaphoric alphabet that shifts in and out of focus. ANOTHER SIDE INSIDE OF YOU (2020) borrows a line from the 1980 song “Behind the Groove” by Teena Marie. Gibson’s oeuvre fuses marginalized forms of expression: street art, queer club aesthetics, and Indigenous traditions. Like Keith Haring, whose artwork is the subject of a concurrent exhibition, he mobilizes joy as a strategy for resistance and survival.

Next to a recently acquired oil by the nineteenth-century landscape painter George Inness hangs a diptych by Kay WalkingStick. WalkingStick’s early work was forged amidst the emergence of the American Indian Movement (AIM) and second-wave feminism. She often combines naturalistic renderings of the landscape with nonfigurative compositions or overlaid geometric elements drawn from Indigenous cultures. According to WalkingStick, her paintings are “about a slow gaze and experiencing the quiet and solitude of a place.” Her pictorial choices reassert the presence of Indigenous Peoples who were excluded from many nineteenth-century landscape representations of their homelands. 

One throughline of WalkingStick’s work is an emphasis on duality, and this can be seen with respect to both form and content. Following Polaris (2008) is an oil on two panels, a format that has long appealed to WalkingStick for its resonance: “Primarily, the diptych is an especially powerful metaphor to express the beauty and power of uniting the disparate and this makes it particularly attractive to those of us who are biracial. But it is also a useful construct to express the conflicts and bivalence of everyone’s life. ”

Thanks to the generosity of the Gochman Family Collection, visitors to the Stanley Museum of Art can enjoy these loans and experience the permanent collection in a new light.