Michener Art Museum featuring 1st Indigenous exhibit, 'Never Broken: Visualizing Lenape Histories'

DOYLESTOWN, Pa. (WPVI) -- Never Broken: Visualizing Lenape Histories presents new Indigenous perspectives on historic events in early America.

"We look at the way that art can shape and convey stories about history and identity throughout time," says Dr. Laura Turner Igoe, the Gerry and Marguerite Lenfest Chief Curator at the Michener Art Museum.

"Showing it here, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, holds extra meaning," says Joe Baker, who is an enrolled member of the Delaware Tribe of Indians.

"This is our ancestral land, so this exhibit is really about a homecoming," he says.

Baker is the Co-Curator of Never Broken: Visualizing Lenape Histories, as well as the Co-Founder and Executive Director of Lenape Center in Manhattan, New York.

He's also an artist who made pieces for the exhibition, like the Big House Post, made from a Bigtooth Aspen tree.

"The Big House ceremony was the principal religion of the Lenape," he says.

Three other Indigenous artists are featured.

Holly Wilson uses sculptures to tell her story with a piece she calls "Bloodline."

Wilson says she originally created it trying to prove her son's lineage.

"Each of these logs represents a generation of my family," she says.

Ahchipaptunhe, a modern native artist, created paintings "made in response to historic Lenape ceramics and baskets," according to Dr. Igoe.

Ahchipaptunhe says the four works he created are "based on fire, water, earth and breath."

"From the idea of the life that's put into the pottery," he says.

Artist Nathan Young reexamines the Walking Purchase of 1737 in his sound and video installation.

"I really don't know what things were like for them," says Young of his ancestors.

However, he says that's what he would like people to think about, "being faced with being forced to leave," when viewing his work.

"The exhibition is really intended to be a conversation," says Baker. "It's about really bringing back our contemporary voice to this ancestral land."

You can see Never Broken: Visualizing Lenape Histories at the Michener Art Museum through January 14, 2024.

Never Broken: Visualizing Lenape Histories | Tickets at the Michener Art Museum