About the Exhibition:
Red coral represents the connections forged between ancient worlds and still living communities, relationships between lands and waterways, where Mediterranean red coral is sacred to Navajos, Zunis, Hopis, and other Natives of the American Southwest. This also evokes a Red Ancient Mediterranean, in which adoption and adaptation of “classical” myth, imagery, and other forms of storytelling by Native Americans serves as a way of de-centering the classical (that is, a constructed “Greco-Roman”) antiquity as a form of white, “Western” heritage. By engaging with Native creatives’ uses of classical imagery, mythology, and other reference points, this digital exhibition challenges one-sided narratives of conquest against the dominance of classical antiquity as emblematic of Eurocentric Western civilization in colonial settings.
This exhibition shifts Ancient Greek/Roman/Mediterranean culture as a Western ancient heritage toward creating a borderlands space of cross-cultural exchanges, past and present. In undermining the assumptions that align classical antiquity with whiteness, able-bodiedness, gender binaries, and civilizational progress, this project works to advance more complex relationships with pasts and futures for Indigenous people.
About the curator:
Kendall Lovely (she/her) is an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation and a PhD candidate in History at the University of California Santa Barbara (unceded Chumash lands). She grew up in Albuquerque, NM (Tiwa territory), where she earned a double-major B.A. in Comparative Literature and Anthropology and second Master’s in Museum Studies. Her dissertation research considers the intersecting history of museums, anthropological collecting, and impositions of classical (i.e. “Greco-Roman”/Western civilization constructs of) antiquity as part of material dispossession of Native peoples in the U.S. Southwest, of which this exhibition is a part. In curating Native creative works as responding to anthropological and comparative classical frameworks, this exhibition serves as a counter-narrative to established museum frameworks.
Kendall Lovely is also available for curatorial research, drafting exhibition label text, exhibition reviews, and other museum curatorial consulting work by request. See her CV here for more information on qualifications.
