The Brooklyn Rail Reviews Fort Marion and Beyond

In her exhibition review published in the Brooklyn Rail, Susan Harris describes Fort Marion and Beyond: Native American Ledger Drawing 1865-1900 as an “exhilarating presentation of nineteenth century drawings that illuminate an essential and complex piece of American art and history.” Over one-hundred Ledger Drawings are on view, collectively testifying “to the power of the image both in its making and in its capacity to speak to the depths of the human spirit.”

Ledger Art is an evolution from earlier figurative representations of individual warriors’ martial accomplishments on hide. As Euro-American settler-colonialists expanded across the Great Plains, and with the concomitant extinction of buffalo herds, Native warriors transferred the earlier pictographic painting traditions on hide to accounting books, notebooks, or on single sheets of paper acquired through trade or as exploits of war. “It is tragically ironic how the compression of their recorded chronicles from buffalo hides to sheets of paper corresponded to their forced confinement,” Harris writes. However, in contrast to mainstream narratives, “a rich and turbulent history unfurls from an exclusively Indigenous perspective in this thoughtful installation.”