Ohio’s Adena Effigy Pipe is featured in the new exhibit The Plains Indians: Artists of Earth and Sky. The  musée du quai Branly and the Nelson-Atkins Museum put the exhibit together with the collaboration of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and it will be presented at all three institutions. It opened at the  musée du quai Branly in Paris on April 7th. Julián Zugazagoitia, Director of the Nelson-Atkins museum, describes the exhibit as a defining moment in the understanding of Native American art.

One online review I’ve seen describes the exhibit as groundbreaking. It unites the Plains Indian masterworks found in European and North American collections, from pre-contact to contemporary, ranging from a 2,000-year-old Human Effigy stone pipe to a 2011 beaded adaptation of designer shoes. A video posted on YouTube by the musée du quai Branly indicates that the Adena Effigy pipe speaks to the evolution of artistic form in Native American art. The feather bustle worn by the Adena man also is an indication of fascinating continuities in ceremonial regalia over many centuries and vast distances of North America. The musée du quai Branly’s website states that “continuity in forms and designs is revealed in the exhibition by means of a great variety of objects and media: paintings and drawings, sculptures in stone, wood, antler and shell, embroideries using porcupine quills and glass beads…” If you aren’t able to see the exhibit in Paris, it opens in Kansas City at the Nelson-Atkins Museum in September and in March of next year it will be in New York at the Met.

Screen grab from the Musee du Quai Branly’s excellent video describing the exhibit on the Indiens des Plaines

Brad Lepper