Who Says I Like Right Angles?

I went to the National Museum of the National Indian on a rainy Monday morning.  That L'Enfant Plaza station gets me every time, but eventually I made it to the front entrance.  

I went there specifically to see Brian Jungen's Strange Comfort Exhibit.  He turns consumer objects- golf bags, plastic chairs, Air Jordans- into pieces that look like Native American art. The golf bags become totem poles.  The Air Jordans become masks.  They become expensive and useless and beautiful.  I stood looking at each piece for longer than I expected.

I also saw the Indi(visible)- a small exhibition on African-Native Americans.  I think that term is contested.  It illustrated, through family pictures, maps, and sketches, the intermarriage of Africans and Native Americans during the pre-colonial period.  There was a video with African-Natives speaking about how they try inhabit both identities.  Publicly, they tend only to be identified as African-Americans.  I had never heard of African-Native Americans but, of course, it makes sense.  It made me think of an exhibit I saw at the Philadelphia Art Museum on early Spanish settlers in the Americas- they intermarried without much controversy with the Native population.  All sorts of families emerged.

I enjoyed the museum and the architecture is stunning.  And no right angles which gives me an excuse to use my first Ani quote.