The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts proudly shares its 2022–23 exhibition Words Matter & Untold History with Piedmont Arts. Featuring works by contemporary Native American artists, this exhibition underscores the richness and diversity of the contemporary Indigenous experience told through the medium of printmaking. The works on view are linked by the belief that words have immeasurable power, particularly when reckoning with how written language has been weaponized against Indigenous people throughout the history of the Americas.
The exhibition includes works by artists such as Rick Bartow (Wiyot), Demian Diné Yazhi (Diné/Navajo), Marie Watt (Seneca), Larry McNeil (Tlingit), and others. All artists represented in the exhibition have chosen to incorporate text into their images, using the language of the colonizers of their land to tell their own stories. In this way, words play a powerful role in reclaiming a lost history and adding to the incomplete American narrative. In doing so, they also offer messages of hope, humor, and resilience.
Words Matter & Untold History was organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and curated by Dr. Johanna Minich, VMFA’s former Assistant Curator of Native American Art.
My Winter Count, 1999, Lynne Allen (Sioux/Euro-American, born 1948), silkscreen and lithograph. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, National Endowment for the Arts Fund for American Art, 2021.205