My name is Scott Manning Stevens, I am a citizen of the Akwesasne Mohawk nation, which is on the US-Canadian border in northern New York state. In fact, the border runs through our reservation, so we are in both countries. I am a professor of Native American and Indigenous Studies at Syracuse University, where I am also the director of the program. I teach in both English and Art History there as well, my degree is in English though Native Studies has become the more accurate definition of what it is that I actually do, since I haven't taught a Literature class in few years. I am much more interested in material culture and Native visual expression, so that's what I have been doing up there. I am going to be working with the Nasher on an exhibition catalog for Roy Lichtenstein exhibition next year, which focuses uniquely on his early work, much less familiar than the cartoon works that people are used to. In that exhibit, one of the things that people will see is that he drew on classic works of Western American art, so Remington and John Mix Stanley and figures like this who created the iconic image of the American Old West, Wild West. That's just not a thing we say with Roy Lichtenstein generally, but in that he is reinterpreting these things, both stylistically he is heavily influenced by painters of his own day like Picasso in the 50s, by some of the surrealists etc., and you will see all of that in his works on exhibit. One of the things you asked me was about other American artists, mainstream figures I suppose, that drew on Native American traditions. In my mind that happens in two different ways: one is in the earlier period, in the 19th century, you have a lot of artists become famous for depicting Native people and depicting not only our image or portraiture but rather carefully depicting the material culture and aesthetics of Native America, so one of the things that people admire about an artist like Karl Bodmer or George Catlin are the amount of ethnographic detail, as it often gets called. In the regalia of the people, the people are wearing the clothing and war bonnets and so on, others like Remington are very good at picking up on what is beautiful in Native aesthetics. So that is one way of depicting without appropriating directly, meaning not claiming that is one's own aesthetic, practice and so on. That is being influenced and inspired by Native traditions, whether be in geometric patterns, you could see that in a variety of artists who often experience Native people and their arts in the first in the South West. So, certainly the palette of someone like Georgia O'Keefe is drawn a lot from the Native American works that she would have seen in markets, in pottery, basketry, blankets etc. But also, people like Marsden Hartley, who we don't necessarily think of as having much to do with Native Americans, does a series of paintings inspired by geometric design from Native America. Of course, Lichtenstein and his interest in those early depicters of Native America, and also later on when he is in his more stylized cartoon-like form, he does return to Native American design motives in his art in the late 70s. Jackson Pollock, known to have been influenced and interested in Navajo sand painting and techniques of that, you can see it in the drip- being of his brush, somewhat similar to the running-line of Sam, out of the hand of the artist in the Navajo community. Of course, there it has a sacred function, and for Pollock it's mostly an aesthetic or a technique. It runs throughout American art I would say. Some of them are just being drawn to beauty of Indigenous aesthetics. There is always a tinge of nationalism, because it's something decidedly American. Native American, we would say, as opposed to settler American. It's a way of distinguishing American artwork from European artwork is simply by the subject matter. That tradition goes right through where there is this desire to find something truly American. The cultural chip on their shoulder that settler Americans carry when they look at Europe, and they want to distinguish themselves. One of the interesting facets is in Modernism art movement, there is of course in Europe, strong interest in primitivism, that whole line of thinking around the influence of African bronzes and masks on people like Picasso. There is an equivalent of that here, with the turn toward Indigenous arts of an earlier time and how that can become a part of the modern North American artistic vocabulary. If I consider the title of this exhibition, Art for a New Understanding, it is a challenge in a way to what the viewers understand, certainly of Native American Art. I have to say regrettably in some cases people don't really think of Native American art as a term that comes readily to mind with a variety of artists behind it. Native people's material and visual culture tended it to be put in the category of craft, or applied arts. To be sure, in Indigenous communities in time immemorial, there wasn't a stand-alone category for art the way there is in Western Europe. Beautiful things were also useful things whether they be a quilt, or a bead, or a basket, or a piece of pottery, there weren't made to simply stand in a wealthy person's home or in a museum. That category is a category shift that Native Americans have come to understand and adapt their aesthetic interests to. It goes back much further than people think, I think they imagine that, sure there are contemporary 2020 Native American artists, but there have been artists all along. Whether it's a gifted potter like Maria Martinez at the beginning of the 20th century, or someone like Oscar Howe, whose images at the beginning of the exhibit. If people do know about art history, he was criticized as a Native artist for not painting 'Indian enough' style paintings. There is the real problem, is that a lot of non-Native people come with the preconceived notion and a pretty prescriptive notion of what constitutes Indian art in their mind. If it's not beadwork and feathers, it's somehow not native. Just picking up a brush and painting on a canvas is too play with the new material, I like to remind my students, glass beads in Native beadwork in the 19th century are non-Native material that are adapted to and made wonderful in hands of creative people who before worked in quill work, but now they have the new material. Similar story with the ledger book as a medium for representational art, coming out of the 19th century. We have adapted to new materials all along, it's why you will find Pacific Coast shells deep in the heart of North America in ancient sites. Because there was trade, and there was an interest in the beautiful, the exotic, the different coming from some other place, and putting it to use in our own media. I think what's great about the show - the ability to restore part of art history to the larger cannon of Native American aesthetics and arts; make people aware that Native art is by Native artists drawing on their own traditions, drawing on personal histories which are embedded in these traditions and reworking materials that have come to us (some quite modern). There was a piece there was made of mylar, I don't think that is traditional to any culture. Yet, it becomes indigenized by the service itÕs put to. I think that just having that sense of a deeper notion, a new understanding, or a deeper understanding of Native American Art History, which is long overdue and welcome.