When: Now through Aug. 31
Where: The Alluvion, 414 E. Eighth St., Traverse City
Cost: Free
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Officially, it's called "The Traveling Gallery of the Intercontinental Biennial of the Native American, Indigenous or Millenarian Art and Culture." Long title, but then, it's a big exhibition.
Started over 20 years ago, the broader collection features works from around the globe. This iteration of the traveling exhibition especially highlights artists from South and North America, including Traverse City artists Paul Sinclair and Janelle Dahlberg, as well as St. Ignace artist Darryl Brown.
More than 100 works are on display at the Alluvion in Traverse City across all three floors of the building.
Jorge Iván Cevallos is the producer and general director of the Indigenous Biennial. As he leads a tour of the art, he stops in front of a small alcove and points to a portrait of Geronimo, of the Bedonkohe band of the Chiricahua Apache tribe.
His image is famous, but artist Anderson Jahir Colcha Viñan has taken a new approach — putting half the image in color, half in black-and-white, and depicting Geronimo in two different ways, split down the middle.
It's one of Cevallos's favorites.
"He created a piece which combines the feathers of the traditions of the Native American, plus the calmness of this big chief of North America," he said. "The combination of black-and-white with color is beautiful in this piece."
The Alluvion's curator for visual arts, Jessica Kooiman Parker, first saw this exhibition in a different form, in St. Ignace.
"My immediate thought was 'We don't get to see this kind of thing in Traverse City. I need to provide a larger venue, I need to provide a space where people can see this," she said. "We're really lucky to be able to look at art and judge it for a few seconds. But there's a person behind it. And with this exhibition, there's cultures behind it, there's countries behind it. There's so much behind this work."
Her favorite work here is an enormous pair of oil-on-canvas paintings called "Amazonía 1" and "Amazonía 2," by Ana Piaguaje of Ecuador.
They depict lush rainforest scenes.
"So you're looking at hundreds of thousands of leaves in the painting," Kooiman Parker said. "I can almost hear the sounds and feel a little bit warmer by looking at it."
You have until Aug. 31 to see the exhibition in person, though some of the works will remain on the building's third floor through the end of the year.
