For example, in one text description accompanying a painting where an historical quote uses the term “Indian” it is followed by a parenthetical clause that alerts the reader that “Indian” is: “the word used to call Indigenous people in the day”. The exhibit goes out of its way not to hurt the victims of Western expansion by being sensitive to language and representation. Which is not to say that the curators are oblivious to the more sensitive issues that make up the genre in fact issues of colonial conquest and the terrible treatment of Native Americans is cited and acknowledged throughout the exhibit. If you go to the exhibit expecting a complete revisionist account of the knottier issues tangled up with the western, issues of race, genocide, Manifest Destiny, Nationhood, you might be disappointed.
The exhibit is a joint effort between the Denver Art Museum and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and is a sprawling overview of the social, political, cultural and aesthetic impact of the western on the psyche and imagination of a Nation. A New Frontier in Art and Film” Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Show Entertains and Enlightensīy Donato Totaro Volume 22, Issue 1 / January 2018 15 minutes (3562 words)įor fans of the most American of genres, the Western, I urge you to get on over to the Museum of Fine Arts exhibit on the Western, “Il Était une fois….le western: une mythologie entre art et cinema” before it ends on February 4, 2018.
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