MFA Boston unveils sculptures of local Indigenous cultural stewards
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), unveiled The Knowledge Keepers by Alan Michelson on November 14, 2024, the first in a new series of sculptural commissions for the MFA’s Huntington Avenue Entrance inviting contemporary artists to engage the site in all of its complexity.
Western artists have frequently depicted Indigenous subjects as exotic, anonymous figures frozen in time and represented in poses of subjugation, violence, or reverie. By contrast, Michelson, a Mohawk member of Six Nations of the Grand River who was raised in Boston, represents two contemporary local Indigenous cultural stewards—Aquinnah Wampanoag member Julia Marden and Nipmuc descendant Andre StrongBearHeart Gaines, Jr. Occupying the two large plinths outside the Museum’s historic building, the life-sized sculptures are posed in dynamic gestures of public address.
Cast in bronze and gilded in shimmering platinum, The Knowledge Keepers pays tribute to the Northeastern Woodland nations’ reverence for copper, crystal, shell, and silver, materials treasured for both their physical and metaphorical luster. Platinum, with its resistance to corrosion, chemical stability, and role in advanced electronics and spacecraft, translates that tradition into the future.
Marden, an artist and specialist in twining, crafts all of her own regalia. She raises a turkey feather fan in a gesture of honor. Gaines, an Indigenous activist, public speaker, and builder of wetus (traditional homes) and mishoonash (dugout canoes) reads from a page of text in the classical pose of an orator. Michelson’s selection of them as models emphasizes their roles as cultural ambassadors. By extension, The Knowledge Keepers seeks to honor and celebrate the beauty, presence, agency, and endurance of the Indigenous nations of Massachusetts.
Michelson’s installation also forms, in part, a response to Appeal to the Great Spirit (1909), a sculpture by Cyrus Dallin that has stood at the center of the MFA’s entrance plaza since 1912. The Huntington Avenue Entrance Commission is part of a broader initiative to activate the MFA campus, which has included outdoor film screenings and installations such as Garden for Boston (2021), led by artists Ekua Holmes and Elizabeth James-Perry (Aquinnah Wampanoag). The Knowledge Keepers is produced in partnership with the Boston Public Art Triennial, a citywide project launching in May 2025 with many other institutions around Greater Boston participating.
