Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum is a wide-reaching project that proposes Indigenizing interventions to address and refuse the oppressive hierarchies of coloniality that pervade the realm of culture and serve as the underpinning of museums. The project encompasses community engagement, a series of nine monographic and thematic exhibitions, institutional interventions, public programs, and an untraditional catalog.
In Nicholas Galanin’s exhibition, Exist in the Width of a Knife’s Edge, existing works appear alongside new work inspired by his continued critical examination of cultural appropriation, colonization, and the complexities of Indigenous identity in the contemporary world. His work in Baltimore finds root in his conversations with the local Native community, which sparked directions for his sculptural installations and interventions.
A particularly arresting work in this exhibition is Infinite Weight.
About this work, Galanin says:
In Infinite Weight, a taxidermied wolf remains perfectly still, trapped in a short looping video showing the ocean and clouds moving behind it. Above, the wolf hangs from the ceiling. For the suspended wolf, the world is upside down. The animal inhabits a position so marginal that it must defy gravity to exist. Wolves exist as a paradox in the minds of settlers, who admire them for their strength and intelligence but kill them off to assert control over Land.
Here, the absence of the living wolf is mirrored between image and object. The wolf’s placement on the ceiling—the outer limits of the gallery—minimizes its physical existence while its inability to move is confirmed by time-lapse. The work itself is also a mirror, reflecting the extent to which colonization and settlement of my homeland has sought to capture and control what is determined valuable and to destroy or marginalize what is not.
This work and others by Nicholas Galanin are on view at the Baltimore Museum of Art through February 16, 2025.
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Preoccupied is curated by Leila Grothe, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art, and Dare Turner (Yurok Tribe), Curator of Indigenous Art at the Brooklyn Museum, with support from Curatorial Research Assistant Elise Boulanger (Citizen of the Osage Nation).
Nicholas Galanin: Exist in the Width of a Knife’s Edge is generously supported by the Ford Foundation, the Terra Foundation for American Art, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Eileen Harris Norton Foundation, the Estate of Carolyn Lee Smith, The Dorman/Mazaroff Art Exhibition Fund, the Hardiman Family Endowment Fund, the Sigmund M. and Mary B. Hyman Fund for American Art, The Clair Zamoiski Segal and Thomas H. Segal Contemporary Art Endowment Fund, and the Robert Lehman Foundation.
