The show prominently featured works by Nokkoist (Bear’s Heart) of the Cheyenne Nation and Ohettoint of the Kiowa Tribe, two of 72 Indigenous warriors who were imprisoned without trial at Fort Marion in Florida between 1875 and 1878 after the Red River War.
The United States military campaign “aimed at the forced displacement and migration of Southern Plains tribes onto reservations,” according to a press release.
Art critics called the show “plaintive, pathos-filled” and “heartbreaking,” and Hyperallergic’s John Yau remarked that “the drawings of Nokkoist and Ohettoit … belong in an art museum.”
However, the exhibition featured several drawings from ledger books that were auctioned off by Bonhams in Los Angeles in 2022 and that representatives for the Kiowa and Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes attempted unsuccessfully to halt the sale, based on the arguments that the ledger books represented “significant cultural patrimony” and were created by incarcerated artists…
