wolankeyutomon: Take Care of Everything

Abbe Museum • Bar Harbor, ME • abbemuseum.org • Through November, 2019

The opening display in wolankeyutomon: Take Care of Everything is an arrangement of pufferfish, alewives, rockweed and sand dollars made from brown ash, sweetgrass, commercial dyes and quahog shells. Passamaquoddy artist Frances Soctomah calls her grouping Kulankeyasine (Let’s Take Care of Each Other). The piece introduces the theme of the show: our interconnectedness with the natural world, in particular the water and sea life that sustain us, and how we respect—and disrespect—that communion.

The exhibition features work by nine indigenous artists living in New England and the Canadian Maritimes—from Connecticut to Labrador. Juried by co-curators Norma Jean Saulis and Allan (Duck) Saulis, the pieces—paintings, ceramicware, beadwork, fiber art—often deliver a potent message. In As Above So Below, for example, Maliseet artist Nicholas Paul depicts how whales are killed by humans—a ship’s propeller, garbage, netting—in three small acrylic and mixed-media canvases, titled Stricken, Trashed and Dragnet.

Frances Soctomah, Kulankeyasine (Let’s Take Care of Each Other), brown ash, sweetgrass, commercial dyes.
Photo: Frances Soctomah.

By contrast, First Nation Norma Jean Saulis’s Woli-Putep (Beautiful Whale) is a charming soft sculpture rendering of a leviathan made from black velvet, grey flannel and traditional Wabanaki floral beadwork. Lorne Julien, from Millbrook First Nation, Mi’kmaq First Nations, Nova Scotia, offers an equally endearing image in Right Whale Spirit, an acrylic painting of a cetacean with the world and a bright red heart painted on its body.

Along one wall of the exhibition space are glassed-in shelves holding objects from the museum’s collection—fishing creels, an Atlantic salmon, model canoes—crafted by Maine native artists from sweetgrass, birchbark and other natural materials. The shelves also hold whale bones borrowed from Allied Whale, the marine mammal research center at nearby College of the Atlantic. The bones and related wall texts about the North Atlantic right whale underscore the wonder—and plight—of this endangered species.

The exhibition is a collaboration between the Abbe Museum and Maritime Indigenous Artists, Inc., an organization dedicated to supporting “the creation, dissemination, knowledge and appreciation of authentic indigenous art of east coast tribes of North America.” Together, they have produced an exhibition at once engaging and enlightening.