Elizabeth “Betsy” S. Hawley is an art historian, writer, and curator specializing in modern and contemporary art and art of the Americas.
Santa Clara University Art and Art History Gallery
September 18 – October 27, 2023
An exhibition featuring the work of five contemporary U.S.-based Indigenous artists. The pieces on view underscore the survivance (survival + resistance) of the artists’ cultural systems of knowledge, particularly as related to place. Each artist imbues their works with meaning specific to their own community and experience, while at the same time revealing the place-based significance of landscape in many Native worldviews.
Artists: Katie Dorame, Catherine Herrera, Patrick Dean Hubbell, Terran Last Gun, Angelica Trimble-Yanu
An exhibition that draws inspiration from the entwined histories of women’s rights movements and Native rights movements, presenting the works of contemporary Native North American artists who identify as feminist and whose practices address urgent intersectional issues regarding decolonization efforts, feminine aesthetic traditions, Indigenous ecocriticism, customs of gender fluidity, violence against Native women and Two-Spirit peoples, and Indigenous Futurisms. The breadth of these topics and their historical and contemporary relevance suggest the discursive potential of Native feminisms, taken up by the participating artists in ways that visually vary but uniformly insist on Native survivance.
Artists: Demian DinéYazhi’ with R.I.S.E.: Radical Indigenous Survivance & Empowerment, Marcella Ernest, Maria Hupfield, Elizabeth LaPensée, Natani Notah, Sheldon Raymore, Dyani White Hawk, Jolene Nenibah Yazzie
African American Artists of the Great Migration
Philadelphia Museum of Art
August 24 – December 2, 2018
An exhibition showcasing works from the PMA permanent collection produced by African American artists during the Great Migration. From the late 1910s through the 1960s, some six million African Americans left the American South and headed north, seeking better economic opportunities and an escape from Jim Crow racism. The artists represented in the show captured imagery related to their lives in the urban North and memories of life in the rural South; expressed the social tensions stemming from segregation and other forms of system racism; and addressed the two World Wars fought during this time, when African Americans served in a segregated U.S. military.
Artists: Elizabeth Catlett, Claude Clarke, William Henry Johnson, Jacob Lawrence, Norman Lewis, Horace Pippin, John Woodrow Wilson, Hale Woodruff
Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archive
Section: Nakoma Country Club
An exhibition marking the 150th anniversary of the American architect’s birth. The show comprises approximately 450 works made from the 1890s through the 1950s, including architectural drawings, models, building fragments, films, television broadcasts, print media, furniture, tableware, textiles, paintings, photographs, and scrapbooks. Structured as an anthology rather than a comprehensive, monographic presentation of Wright’s work, the exhibition is divided into 12 sections, each curated by a scholar who investigates a key object or cluster of objects from the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives, interpreting and contextualizing it, and juxtaposing it with other works from the Archives, from MoMA, or from outside collections. The exhibition seeks to open up Wright’s work to critical inquiry and debate, and to introduce experts and general audiences alike to new angles and interpretations of this extraordinary architect.
Hawley explores Wright’s appropriation of Native North American cultures and stereotypes thereof in the preparatory drawings for his “Nakoma Country Club,” an ultimately unrealized commission for a golf resort in Madison, WI.