Reel Myths, Real People: Native Representation in Classic Hollywood Westerns
From galloping riders to sweeping desert vistas, the American West as we know it was shaped as much by the artist’s brush as by the filmmaker’s lens. Our current exhibition, The Cinematic West: The Art That Made the Movies, explores how Western art influenced—and was influenced by—the silver screen. The exhibition invites us to reflect on how painters and filmmakers alike helped craft a mythology of the frontier, a mythology that persists in American popular culture. But behind the romanticized imagery of cowboys and Indigenous figures lies a more complicated story, especially when it comes to how Native people have [...]