AT A GLANCE

Visualizing History,
Then and Now:
Recent Acquisitions

WHEN: June 25-Aug. 17

WHERE: C.N. Gorman Museum, 1316 Hart Hall

SUMMER HOURS: noon-5 p.m. Monday-Friday

COMING IN FALL 2013:
More Andrew Tsinajinnie art in an exhibition of works by Navajo studio artists.

More Exhibitions.

By Dateline staff

The C.N. Gorman Museum announced a summer exhibition titled Visualizing History, Then and Now: Recent Acquisitions, featuring works that reflect and respond to Native American experiences in the social and political realm.

For example, the exhibition will include posters and illustrations addressing the identification and prevention of trachoma (a bacterial infection of the eye) on the Navajo Nation in the 1960s.

The works, included in a gift to the museum last year, held a big surprise for museum staff.

“The works were donated independently by the anthropologist-curator who commissioned them at the time,” said Veronica Passalacqua, the Gorman Museum’s curator. When she and the donor began discussing the works, Passalacqua did not know who had drawn them.

“But once we started talking, and, of course, viewing the collection, it was an intervention of fate,” Passalacqua said. The fate being that one of the artists was the late Andrew Tsinajinnie — father of Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie, associate professor of Native American studies and director of the Gorman Museum.

Tsinajinnie (his children’s surname differs in spelling) drew three of the illustrations included in the trachoma series, which goes on display for the first time as part of Visualizing History, opening Monday (June 25).

Tsinhnahjinnie became an artist like her father. He taught her to paint, and she grew up watching him work, but she did not recall the illustrations that now belong to the Gorman Museum.

The Tsinajinnie illustrations are being shown alongside pieces by Carl Nelson Gorman (Navajo), the museum’s namesake; Doug Hyde (Nez Perce-Assiniboine-Chippewa); and Ron Noganosh (Ojibway).

Also featured: a selection of photographic works by Lee Marmon (Laguna Pueblo), Shelley Niro (Mohawk), Larry McNeil (Tlingit-Nisga’a) and Wendy Red Star (Crow).