Counterculture

The line of sculptures before you, entitled *Counterculture*, is a temporary installation presented in conjunction with the exhibition *To Take Shape and Meaning: Form and Design in Contemporary American Indian Art*, on view in the NCMA galleries through July 28. With eyes that go through their heads, the figures represent watchful presences perpetually observing and reminding us of what the original stewards of these lands already knew: we are all guests in the natural world. The figures in Counterculture look across what is, for Indigenous peoples, a postapocalyptic vista of the vast homelands from which Native communities were forcibly removed to make way for settler colonialism. Like mothers minding children, the all-seeing, feminine-bodied forms implore us to go forward with respect and honor for all that came before. The artist, Rose B. Simpson, descends from an Indigenous American tribe famous for the ceramics made by women since the sixth century. Simpson’s work builds on this tradition with new materials and methods. The ceramic necklaces adorning the figures resemble fireclay from the artist’s ancestral lands in present-day New Mexico. The earth-tone dyed concrete used to cast Counterculture pays homage to landscapes near and far, including the woodland hills stewarded by the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohicans, on whose ancestral lands Counterculture was first installed.