Nov 4, 2021
Nativescape presents multi-disciplinary artist, Nathan Young (Delaware/Kiowa/Pawnee), who researched the Wheelwright Museum collection and through exploration and selection created a site-specific installation utilizing his findings. The installation, Activation/Transformation will be on display from November 6, 2021, through April 3, 2022. Nativescape host and chief curator Andrea Hanley invited Nathan Young to utilize objects in the Wheelwright Museum to create his own interpretation of the collection. The installation includes objects drawn from the museum’s extensive collection of silver jewelry and metalwork. Young’s visual selection of items and arrangement create a single abstract composition. The objects speak for themselves, allowing both Young and the public to find new ways to contemplate and understand the objects. Young states, “I engage in the re-imagined. Using the Wheelwright collection as a point of departure is exciting and looks to the very experimental way of my practice. I am telling a complicated story of the Southwest mystic and looking for different narratives in contemporary Native art.” The Wheelwright Museum acts as a creative catalyst for the installation and Young is creating a space that reflects the museum’s history, celebrates current artistic endeavors, and experiments with future methodologies of emerging Native art. The installation explores how contemporary artists can employ existing art and materials as a tool in making new work, and how activating a museum collection in this way, can give it new meaning and interpretation.