Reframing American Art

This week, SAAM rolls out a new web series that offers viewers a unique framework for thinking about art. Created by the museum’s interpretation team, Re:Frame aims to make American art accessible and engaging by exploring the unexpected connections between artworks in the collection and other disciplines across the Smithsonian. In doing so, the series not only showcases the breadth of research and collecting that happens at the Smithsonian, but also the wealth of associations and possible interpretations within a single work of art.

Joanna Marsh and Anne Showalter sat down with Re:Frame host and co-creator Melissa Hendrickson, to talk about museums and making a web series.

Melissa, you seem like a natural on camera. Have you ever done anything like this before?

Not quite like this but I was a drummer in a band for many years, so I performed on stage a lot. However, this is the first time that I’ve been on screen or done anything as professional or polished as Re:Frame .

How did you go from playing in a band to working at the Smithsonian?

Well, it was kind of circuitous, but I ended up going to graduate school to learn how to make museums more accessible and inclusive places for the public. Before coming to SAAM, I worked at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago with local Filipinx community members who were helping the museum curate a collection of objects. I also worked at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, which was my first job in the field of interpretation. That’s when I really fell in love with the type of work our team does here at SAAM. We develop creative ways to help deepen engagement and reach people who may not think art is for them. Re:Frame does that so beautifully because it provides totally different entry points for learning about art.

What do you want viewers to take away from Re:Frame ?

Art museums can be really intimidating. People have this perception that there’s a certain way you’re supposed to behave in an art museum and a “right way” to look at art. I think what’s really cool about Re:Frame is that it presents the museum as a place of discovery and shows that there are many ways to approach and understand art. It’s all about your own experience and finding something within the work that feels relevant and authentic to you personally.

Did you grow up going to museums?

Yes, I did. I grew up in an immigrant neighborhood on the deep south side of Chicago and museums were a big deal in my family. We all got really excited about going to museums and they were very aspirational places for me when I was a kid. It felt like something really special was going to happen there. I have the best memories of being in museums when I was young. I got to see a world that was bigger than the place I lived. I would love if Re:Frame inspires viewers to go to art museums, either in their own hometown or here in Washington, DC at the Smithsonian, but I also think the series is an incredible resource for people who don’t live close to a museum. Re:Frame brings American art and the Smithsonian directly to you.

What was the most surprising thing you learned while doing the series?

I think the biggest surprise for me was learning what an incredible array of experts work at the Smithsonian! Who knew that we had a Curator of Space History, or a Curator of Beer? It was amazing to get to meet so many interesting people and share their stories.

Check out the trailer below, then watch all six episodes of Re:frame here .

Reversing the Erasure of Native Contributions to Muralism

Being an art historian is a little like being a detective. It sometimes takes me to unlikely places—including, recently, a basement outside St. Louis, where the relatives of an artist I was researching for my dissertation generously allowed me to review documents from his life. The artist, Eduard “Buk” Ulreich, had designed a number of publicly funded murals throughout his career; studies for many of them can be found in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Renwick Gallery (SAAM). My interest in Ulreich was related to two 88-foot wooden panels inspired by Native American symbols that he conceived for the United States Pavilion at the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris. [1] One document in particular has occupied my thoughts in the months since my visit: a newspaper clipping showing two men shaking hands. The men stand in front of what appears to be Ulreich’s mural Indians Watching Stagecoach in the Distance (1937), which he painted for the post office in Columbia, MO. The man on the left is named in the caption as the 1937 U.S. pavilion’s “chief designer,” Paul Lester Wiener, while the one on the right, appearing in a feathered headdress, is identified simply as, “a Navajo Indian who gave his advice on the vast murals depicting Indian life and thought which are being painted by Buck [sic.] Ulreich for the outside of the skyscraper tower.” [2] My goal, ultimately, is to identify this man. Yet even without declaring this man’s identity, the photograph highlights an oft-overlooked aspect of twentieth-century American art: the essential contributions of Native Americans to the mural movement that overtook the United States in the years between World War I and World War II.

Ulreich was one of the many U.S. artists who received funds to install murals in public buildings in the United States during the 1930s and early 1940s through programs such as the Public Works of Art Project, the Treasury Section of Fine Arts, and the Works Progress Administration. He styled himself as a “Cowboy-Painter,” a claim that lay in part in his avowed knowledge of Native American cultures. [3] The artist was vocal about time he had spent around Native Americans, including as an actual cowboy on a ranch on an Apache reservation in Arizona. He posited that it was this type of exposure that resulted in his selection to paint the exposition murals. [4] Yet as the newspaper clipping indicates, Ulreich required the input of at least one Native advisor to accurately convey the mural’s symbols. A different clipping in Ulreich’s family’s archive identifies a number of the symbols that appear, stacked on top of one another, in the pavilion’s murals. These include a “Kachina” [5] figure popular in Pueblo cultures, a Crow thunderbird, and an adaptation of a deity used in Navajo [6] sand painting. [7] This same clipping indicates that, although Ulreich designed the murals, a “member of the Navajo tribe” actually painted them. This individual, like the man in the photograph, is unnamed in the clippings. Neither appears to be mentioned at all in fair-sponsored publications and they are absent altogether from what limited secondary literature exists about the U.S. pavilion at the 1937 exposition.

The 1937 fair was not the first world’s fair to feature murals indebted to Native American labor and knowledge. The 1933 Century of Progress exposition in Chicago had included a series of murals executed by a group of artists associated with the Santa Fe Indian School. Changing perceptions of Native culture, reflected in the work of both Native and non-Native artists alike, were in fact a hallmark of the mural movement in the United States. In addition, one of the movement’s most revolutionary aspects was an increased access to the role of “artist.” Not only men of European descent, but also many women, Native Americans, and other people of color became muralists. Still, artists from these marginalized groups did not receive the same treatment as their white male counterparts. Like the Native participants in the 1937 exposition, the artists who developed the Century of Progress murals are anonymous in fair literature. One administrative document refers to them simply as the “Santa Fe Indians,” while it refers to white artists such as George Biddle and John Norton by name. [8] Thanks to the work of art historians such as Jennifer McLerran, we know the identities of many of the mural artists involved with the Santa Fe Indian School. Several of these are represented in SAAM’s collection, including Julian “Pocano” Martinez , Tse Ye Mu (known alternately as Romando Vigil), Awa Tsireh (known alternately as Alfonso Roybal), Oqwa Pi (known alternately as Abel Sanchez), and Ma Pe Wi (known alternately as Velino Shije Herrera), whose murals can also be found in the Department of the Interior building in Washington, D.C. [9]

To identify the Native individuals who helped create the panels at the 1937 fair would ensure that they are given credit, if belated, for their work. Beyond this, it would be a means of celebrating Native contributions to the mural movement. Native participation in the painting of such monumental, public works of art during this period is little known and seldom discussed, a problem that is compounded when we do not know the names of the individuals who took part. The erasure of nonwhite groups from public life is particularly dangerous, as it has a pernicious history in this country. From attacks on Black communities to anti-immigrant rhetoric, the claim that only white Americans “create,” while others sponge off their productivity, has been one of the most insidious myths shoring up the ideology of white supremacy over the last several centuries. [10]

Searching for the identity of the man in the 1937 photograph is a small way of combatting this myth. It is a way of ensuring that white artists do not receive the only credit for their collaborations with communities of color. I am therefore hoping that anyone who might have information about the man in the photograph or other Native participants in the 1937 exposition will get in touch! With such interventions, perhaps art history can help to make the inclusiveness promised by muralism a reality.

Meet the Master Muralist Who Inspired Today’s Generation of Paleoartists

When the new fossil hall at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History opens June 8, after a five-year, $110 million renovation, the spotlight will naturally be on the spectacular assemblages of specimens including the Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton so popular it’s called “The Nation’s T-Rex.”

But behind them will be an array of intricate and spectacularly-detailed murals from a team of top international paleoartists, many of whom were inspired by the memorable works by the renowned American painter and naturalist Jay Matternes and that have stood in the same hall for decades.

Two of the six wall-sized murals that Matternes completed for the hall more than four decades ago will be represented by life-size digital reproductions that preserve the kind of fly-on-a-mammoth detail that sparked the artists that followed in his footsteps.

The originals, painted between 1960 and 1975 and seen by millions over the generations, were carefully cut from the walls when the hall was closed for renovation in 2014. They were preserved in the Smithsonian's archives because they had become too fragile to mount again, says Siobhan Starrs , exhibition developer for the extensive “Deep Time” exhibition.

Still, they provided inspiration for the artists who did their own murals and artwork, as well as those who rearticulated the fossil skeletons. “The pose of the sloth is the same as the pose of the sloth in the mural,” says Starrs pointing out the digitized reproduction of a Matternes work on the wall behind the sloth fossil.

“He’s very influential for me and extremely inspiring,” says Julius Csotonyi , 45, the in-demand paleoartist from Vancouver who completed 59 separate works for the new hall. “Matternes does such an amazing job of realism in his artwork. What he does is make a prehistoric world and prehistoric creatures and not make them look like monsters, as some artwork might portray, but as real animals. His command of lighting is spectacular, the amount of detail that he puts into these pieces is just astounding.”

Matternes’ work is even known as far as Siberia, where Andrey Atuchin , another paleoartist hired for the project, works.

“I had always thought of myself as an artist/naturalist,” says the now 86-year-old Matternes, from his home in Fairfax, Virginia. Back when he was on ladders and scaffolds doing the original murals, there wasn’t such a term as “paleoart.” But the tenets of the practice are the same, he says. “In order to interpret the past, you have to have a pretty good working knowledge of conditions in the present.”

He would dissect zoo animals and cadavers to understand the animal's physiology, “working from the inside out,” according to Richard Milner , an associate in anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. He would sketch skeletons and add muscle, skin and fur to bring a full picture of what the prehistoric must have looked like.

Animals in past eons, Matternes says, “had the same problems and the same adaptations to the environment as is true of the animals today.”

Many of his preliminary sketches and drawings appear in the upcoming Visions of Lost Worlds: The Paleoart of Jay Matternes , from Smithsonian Books; “so much of which is beautiful in its own right,” says Matthew T. Carrano , the National Museum of Natural History’s dinosaur curator and the book’s co-author with museum director Kirk Johnson .

“Especially where he would do something like he would draw the skeleton, and then he’d draw multiple layers of muscles, and then he would toy with different textures of fur,” Carrano says. “You almost feel like it’s a shame you only got to see that last version.”

Carrano is one of the many whose link to dinosaurs came directly from Matternes—specifically his illustrations in a popular 1972 National Geographic book. “That was the first dinosaur book I’d ever seen. And I remember the day I saw that,” he says. “I found it totally fascinating. I could not get it out of my head. So I got to be one of these obsessed dinosaur kids, and it really all came from seeing his pictures.”

Working on the original murals, Matternes says he had to sometimes work behind a temporary wall when the museum was open. “I could be isolated from the public by a wall as I worked behind a barricade, but I could hear the comments of the public as they passed on the other side of that wall, which was very interesting.”

He was on a tight deadline, even then. “My thing is I’d arrive at the museum about mid-morning, and then I would work all day, and then I’d take a very brief dinner break, and come back and work until they kicked me out at 10 o’clock,” Matternes says. “I would do that on a daily basis.”

The work captivated visitors for generations and subsequently provided a basis for the artists hired for additional murals and artwork in the permanent “Deep Time” exhibition, from Csotonyi and fine artist and designer Alexandra Lefort in Vancouver and Atuchin in Russia to Davide Bonadonna of Italy, Dwayne Harty , a Canadian wildlife artist working in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and Michael Novak, an artist and fabricator in Sterling, Virginia, who along with Lefort created the 24-foot-metal trees that frame the entrance way of the 31,000-square-foot fossil hall as it traces a timeline that recedes through 3.7 billion years of life on Earth.

“They’re massive things,” Novak says. Working with scientists and exhibit creators, “We were tasked with creating implied three-dimensional view of these ancient trees in groupings, each tree different from the other, representing a nice blend of the science and a nice aesthetically-pleasing presentation.”

To do that, there had to be a continuity between the various artists. Because Csotonyi had done so much work, and gotten it in early, it set the tone—and the palette—for the rest, Novak says. “It’s really important when you walk into the gallery everything unifies. You get that sense when you’re walking though that front door.”

The artists know that their art work is not just the colorful background for the dinosaur bones, but the context and setting that further brings a prehistoric time to life.

“The bones allow us to see the overall shape of the animal—in 3D no less,” Csotonyi says. “But one of the purposes of the murals is trying to show what this would look like in an ecological content, putting the animal or the plant, in the proper ecological context, to see what else would have been alive at the time.”

He likened the circular edges to many of the new murals as port holes into the Mesozoic or Paleozoic periods, allowing viewers “to look through a telescope through deep time to see what its vistas were like.”

Atuchin compares it to “a virtual bridge between science, fossils and ordinary people. Seeing a skeleton with a visual reconstruction of it, one is more likely to recognize it was a real living creature.”

Inspired by “Jurassic Park,” Atuchin, 38, says he began studying fossils and biology as he drew more scientifically-based dinosaur drawings. “I started to work using traditional techniques: pencils, gouache, watercolors. Some time ago, I shifted to computer graphics, digital painting. It gives, as for me, more possibilities and freedom.” Like most paleoartists, he can also work from anywhere—“from Antarctica or even the Moon”—thanks to the internet.

That was never available to Matternes, who put brush to canvas directly at the museums he enhanced with his art. “No, I am of the old school,” he says. “As a matter of fact, I’m still struggling with learning about computers.” But, he adds, “If I were starting my career today, I would certainly go with digital art. That’s the wave of the future.”

Atuchin, who has only been to the U.S. once, for a visit to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, where he participated in a paleontological excavation in Utah, has never had a chance to visit the Smithsonian. Political red tape prevents his appearance at the opening of the “Deep Time” exhibit.

For his part, Matternes will be digging out his old tux for the opening and Csotonyi for one will be looking forward to seeing him, as well as the art.

“He’s one of my artistic heroes,” Csotonyi says. “Just spectacular stuff. I’m very happy they’re able to keep some of his artwork displayed in the exhibition, because I really think people need to see it. It’s just fantastic.”

The Hall of Fossils—Deep Time, opens June 8 at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.

Editor’s Note, June 5, 2019: A previous version of this article did not include the work of artist Alexandra Lefort. We regret the omission.