Alan Michelson
August 6, 2025
Your MFA Huntington Avenue Entrance project, The Knowledge Keepers, responds quite poignantly to Cyrus Dallin’s Appeal to the Great Spirit. How did you conceptualize your project within that site’s context?
Site-specificity and context are extremely important to me. The MFA’s façade is a very familiar area for me, as it was the first encyclopedic museum that I got to know as a child. So I was, of course, familiar with Cyrus Dallin’s Appeal to the Great Spirit. Recontextualizing that space came as a challenge. I wanted to make an accessible work that the public could truly understand. The Bostonian public knows how to read bronze figurative sculptures, but their subjects over the years have been mostly limited to dead white males. I had the idea of doing statues, but with Indigenous folk as the subjects.
As compelling as Dallin’s statue is, it’s a stereotype that was popular during the time that he made it. There was nothing tying that image of Indigeneity to Massachusetts. It completely overlooked the fact that Massachusetts has its own Native population. That was something that I wanted to try to correct with my project.
Research is always part of my practice. As I was preparing this project, I found two great examples of community-minded Indigenous folks from Massachusetts Natives, Aquinnah Wampanoag member Julia Marden and Nipmuc descendant Andre StrongBearHeart Gaines Jr., both of whom are distinguished for their art and their activism. I invited them to be sitters, although our process was digital and not the traditional type.
We were able to work out a budget that included cast bronze in these sculptures. Bronze demands a certain amount of respect, or it traditionally has been a medium that states, This is something to look at, this is important. It was also important to me that the subjects of these sculptures are still alive—you rarely see that in a monument. When it came to the question of how we would finish them, I wanted them to glow, and I wanted a silver look to it, because I was also referencing, in passing, the fact that the silver trade was widespread and significant between Native tribes and nations and the colonizers. Apparently, silver nitrate tarnishes immediately in outdoor situations, so instead, I opted for platinum, which looks like silver. Initially, I didn't realize this, but platinum was mined in South America and used by South American Natives. So there is a hemispheric link as well. Of course, it's associated with wealth and rarity, but it's also associated with things like space technology. So it has a futuristic feel to it as well.
Can you explain the process that went into digitally scanning the subjects of The Knowledge Keepers?
It was a fascinating process. It's called photogrammetry, and we did it in a studio in Brooklyn. There is a dome-shaped structure you walk into that is gridded frame by frame, and then there are something like 270 high-def cameras mounted on various parts of this dome that are synced to go off together. Everything flashes red for a second, and then you get these enormous files that are joined into a 3D model of a person by a digital sculptor. It's incredible.
The platinum really sparkles in the sunlight. It’s as though The Knowledge Keepers demand your attention as you approach the MFA from Huntington Avenue. As you said earlier, site-specificity is important to you as you conceptualize your work within the context it will inhabit. How has the significance of site-specificity shown up throughout your practice?
I'm interested in land. There’s a lot of terminology that is somewhat alienating when it comes to land. When you're Indigenous, the land is not a distant proposition. It's not a commodity. It's a living thing. The land provides for us, although often we don't provide in return.
I'm interested in sites and curious about how pieces of land have arrived at their present incarnations. I've been curious about history since I was a child. Growing up in Boston, I was exposed to the Freedom Trail and all those other Revolutionary War memorials. One thing that really stuck with me on the Freedom Trail when I was nine or ten was probably the least visually impressive of all the monuments I saw. It wasn't a church or a statue; it was a circle of cobblestones with a star in the center that was the monument to the Boston Massacre. It was just pavement, maybe a dozen feet wide in diameter. I remember standing on that and just thinking, People were shot here 200 years ago. It really electrified me. It went right up through the soles of my feet to some place in me that was even thinking then, The land somehow remembers, or, The land is an archive.
Some of my work is commemorative of places or situations that have been marginalized or buried. I did my first real solo public art piece for Public Art Fund in 1990. In that project, I identified an area that had become a small park surrounded by courthouses and the Manhattan House of Detention, which was once a large, spring-fed, freshwater pond. The buried pond represented a buried history, literally but figuratively too. I’ve been trying to surface things I understand about a place that could inject some Indigenous sovereignty into Indigenous history. Even though I borrow or work in different media that are associated with the dominant culture, I also work with things like the formats of wampum belts that are derived from our cultural material.
There is something very compelling about experiencing the connection between histories within physical spaces.
My work is usually very layered. It's got a lot of history in it, but also many references to the present and the future. Indigenous history, which is our larger history, needs to be known, confronted, and dealt with. The United States has a very limited appetite when it comes to dealing with its own sins. It's great that Boston is having a Triennial, and I'm honored to be, you know, associated with the first one.
My tribal background is Mohawk. We all moved around, and so my ancestors were certainly aware of the Massachusetts nations and the geography here. I had a conversation with my cousin Rick Hill, a Tuscarora and cultural expert of the Haudenosaunee. We were talking about the Grand River and rivers in general, and how they facilitated travel as our highways or roads. They facilitated sociability and connection, but then, during colonization, they became fences and boundaries. That's how it is at Six Nations of the Grand River, which is supposed to be ours for six miles on either side, from mouth to source. In 2005, I did a work called TwoRow II where I sailed up and down that river and shot panoramic video of both sides of it and then had them moving in opposite directions in a purple and white, you know, wampum palette. I recorded the Canadian tour boat captains’ narrative. And then I invited our elders to come to the radio station and record anything they wanted to say about the river. It was a four-channel work, so when you changed position, you literally changed perspective, including your sonic perspective.
Given Boston’s colonial history, it’s certainly significant that you have created sculptures that monumentalize figures who have not traditionally been represented in monumental form, at least not accurately, as we know from Appeal to the Great Spirit.
When you ask people to challenge themselves about received understandings that need to be modified or updated, it's good to anchor them in something familiar. That's what art can do: it can jump over all these resistances. Art monumentalizes. It stops time in a way and gives you a chance to think and feel.
Your earlier point about platinum as an element used in space technology reminds me of some of the works of other Indigenous artists creating Triennial projects, in particular Cannupa Hanska Luger, who creates works that represent an idea of Indigenous futurism, often employing visuals reminiscent of sci-fi aesthetics.
The Knowledge Keepers is pointed toward a better future. Appeal to the Great Spirit is really the paradigm of the dying race, or the dying Indian. I think that if Dallin had asked the Lakota, or whoever he was trying to sort of generically represent there, How would you like to be represented?, it would not have been like that. Even if people were struggling, I don't think the image they would have wanted would have looked like that. I want to put something out there that is much more positive, much more alive. That comes through not only in their poses but in their whole beings.
There’s something modern about the sculptures, from the digital process I used to produce them to the look of the platinum. They indicate a vibrant present and, hopefully, an even more vibrant future for Native people.