Via Boston.com, 9 June 2024, By Emily Spatz
For more than a century, visitors to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) have been greeted by a statue of a Native man on a horse, looking up to the sky with his arms outstretched and palms up.
The statue — titled “Appeal to the Great Spirit” — encapsulates freedom and power for some. For others, it’s a false portrayal of a Native American man who, as one visitor to the museum wrote, is “welcoming visitors onto land that was stolen.”
The museum announced last week a major effort to fight against the image created by the exhibit. As part of an ongoing series, the museum will invite artists to create work that will stand near “Appeal” and seek to recontextualize and “respond” to the statue.
Artist Alan Michelson, a Mohawk member of Six Nations of the Grand River, will be the first to create a temporary exhibit in response to “Appeal.” Michelson’s project, titled “The Knowledge Keepers,” will be unveiled in November, the museum said.
The exhibit is part of a larger MFA initiative called The Huntington Avenue Entrance Commission, which will invite artists each year to create “site-specific” artworks for the Huntington Avenue entrance.
“I’m honored to be the artist chosen to inaugurate the Huntington Avenue Entrance Commission. In 1909, when Cyrus Dallin cast ‘Appeal to the Great Spirit’ in Paris, the image of the noble but defeated Plains warrior as an exemplar of the ‘vanishing race’ was popular worldwide,” Michelson said in a statement. “In 2024, I hope my site-specific installation will challenge ingrained stereotypes and racial myths by presenting a story of survival and agency, not defeat or appeal, and I thank the museum for supporting this work.”
