Location: Esther B. O’Keeffe Building, 102 Four Arts Plaza, Palm Beach.
Hours: Sunday – 1 to 5 p.m.; Monday – 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Tuesday – 1 to 5 p.m. (Four Arts members only on Tuesdays in January); Wednesday through Saturday – 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Closed on major holidays.
Tickets: $10, no charge for Four Arts members. Are available at the door or may be reserved in advance. Walk-ins are welcome.
Oklahoma’s Gilcrease Museum (Tulsa) houses one of the best and most comprehensive collections of Native American art in the country, largely built by American oilman Thomas Gilcrease (1890–1962). An arts patron, Gilcrease was a citizen of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and his unprecedented efforts and devotion to Indigenous traditions—continued today by Gilcrease Museum—affirmed Native American art as vital to the canon of American art history.
Past Forward is an unprecedented traveling exhibition surveying more than 3,000 years of Indigenous art from Gilcrease Museum and encompasses fine art along with archaeological and archival materials. Ranging from ancient stone carvings and nineteenth century pottery to contemporary oil paintings and a handful of contrasting Euro-American works, the exhibition showcases 76 works whose visual motifs and shared systems of knowledge connect disparate ancestries, time, and space. It is arranged into four stimulating sections exploring the transhistorical themes of ceremony, sovereignty, visual abstraction, and identity. These groupings amplify Indigenous voices and tell the story of the United States through art that emphasizes Native cultures and the history of the American West.
Past Forward is accompanied by a free 20-page illustrated exhibition guide, which features a list of the works on display and a short essay by the exhibition’s co-curators, Chelsea M. Herr, PhD, (Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma), Jack & Maxine Zarrow Curator for Indigenous Art & Culture, Gilcrease Museum, and Janet Catherine Berlo, PhD, Professor of Art History (Ermerita), University of Rochester.
This exhibition has been co-organized by the American Federation of Arts and Gilcrease Museum.
