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Pictures From a Genocide
An astonishing new show of Native American ledger drawings brings a historic crime into focus.
Many of the drawings were made in a prisoner-of-war camp in St. Augustine, Florida, where dozens of members of the tribes of the Great Plains were incarcerated amid a brutal U.S. military campaign of relocation and displacement. The drawings depict, with a simplicity that belies their sophistication, heartrending scenes of imprisonment, isolation, and forced assimilation as well as glorious celebrations of a way of life outside the prison walls that was already receding into oblivion. The current exhibition is timed for Master Drawings New York in the hopes that curators might rectify the inexplicable and disappointing arm’s-length stance the art world has so far adopted toward this work.
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