As a child, Alan Michelson often rode the T past sculptor Cyrus Edward Dallin’s “Appeal to the Great Spirit” (1908) outside the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA). He was riveted by the statue’s grand horse and the powerful yet melancholy figure wearing a striking Plains Indian war bonnet. It was only in his 20s that the artist learned that he had been separated through adoption from his own Native heritage and Mohawk birth family in the Six Nations of the Grand River in Ontario, Canada. He soon learned that the Dallin sculpture he marveled at in childhood symbolized the nefarious “Vanishing Indian” myth, which cast Indigenous peoples as doomed to extinction.
Last year, after four decades of reconnection with his Indigenous community, deep historical research, and the development of a highly acclaimed practice in video, installation, and public art, Michelson returned to the MFA to install his answer to the 1908 sculpture: two platinum-guilded bronze sculptures of living Native leaders who are Indigenous to the land now known as Boston. The gleaming forms of Aquinnah Wampanoag artist and activist Julia Marden and Nipmuc artist Andre StrongBearHeart Gaines Jr. stand proudly on the two large plinths on either side of the MFA’s entrance, resolutely toppling the myth that Indigenous peoples have disappeared from this land and honoring the vitality of Native communities today.
In this episode of the Hyperallergic Podcast, Michelson joins Editor-in-Chief Hrag Vartanian to discuss the process and inspiration behind this pair of works, titled “The Knowledge Keepers” (2024). They also discuss the dinosaur tracks on Mt. Holyoke that inspired the artist as a child, the reasons George Washington is known as a “Town Destroyer” in many Native languages, and how Michelson sees the land as a silent witness to history. We also talk with Ian Alteveer, the chair of Contemporary Art at MFA Boston, who walks us through the fascinating process behind “The Knowledge Keepers,” which is the inaugural installation in a series of monuments that will greet visitors at the museum’s main entrance.
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