FORT GARLAND– On the walls of rooms that once housed Army commanders, officers and their families, Eric Carpio, Director of Fort Garland Museum, hangs artwork from “Merciless Indian Savages”, an exhibit opening at the museum on Friday, June 24.
The exhibit is the creation of nationally renowned Gregg Deal, an artist, “sometimes-activist” and member of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe.
Deal is “primarily a painter”, working in mixed-media and paint, creating “work that is about indigenous identity, historical consideration and decolonization.”
Deal is also a performance artist who “tackles things like stereotypes, conceptions and misconceptions, and concepts from Standing Rock to blood quantum - the way we are quantified through an American process that decides how much Indian we are and whether or not we’re Indian enough to matter.”
To Carpio, displaying the exhibit at Fort Garland is key. “The original purpose of the fort was to facilitate western expansion and control the indigenous population to protect the settlers.”
The rooms holding the exhibit were Fort Commander Kit Carson’s living quarters for eighteen months and, upon its closure as a fort and transition to museum, held an exhibit for 69 years dedicated to Carson alone.
Mount Blanca, one of four mountains sacred to native culture, can also be seen through the window.
Both of those things are its history, Carpio says, and Deal’s work has a strong historical component. “Especially in native cultures,” Carpio says, “artists are historians.”
Deal’s work is evocative with images, some straight out of historic newspapers and others reminiscent of illustrations found in old comic books, that will likely seem familiar to visitors.
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