THE NOTION of an unchanging perspective on life, history, or art is counterintuitive. To have the opportunity to reexamine the stories and events that shape our ideas about cultural legacies encourages us to appreciate how museum exhibitions reveal new truths and benefit humankind.
The exhibition “Painted: Our Bodies, Hearts, and Village” at the Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine, through July 28, 2024, presents an incisive reassessment of the relationships between Native American cultures and the Anglo-American artists for whom New Mexico was both a homeland and cultural wellspring of artistic inspiration. The exhibition encompasses new research that guided a reinstallation of The Lunder Collection—one of the most important private collections of American art in the world. The museum’s curatorial staff members, working with an advisory council made up of Pueblo and Wabanaki cultural leaders, have centered Pueblo perspectives on the social and cultural
