“Altars of Reconciliation” Unites Faith and Culture

Erin Shaw’s Protect Us From Ruin shows photographs of three shadowed women confined within wooden panels like church windows. Each panel is wrapped with colorful bands that both imprison and protect the figures. 

That dichotomy, between protection and captivity, represents the friction between Shaw’s identity as a member of the Chickasaw Nation and a Christian. ​“As long as I can remember, I’ve had one foot in two worlds,” she explains in an accompanying statement. ​“It’s been the work of my life to live in that tension as best I can, understand and reconcile it.”

The artwork is at the Knights of Columbus’s Blessed Michael McGivney Pilgrimage Center at 1 State St., in its exhibition, ​“Altars of Reconciliation,” running now through Aug. 13. 

The traveling exhibition from Christians in the Visual Arts (CIVA) explores the complicated history of Christianity among Native peoples and attempts to unify the contrasting — but not necessarily contradictory — identities of faith and culture. 

“Often framed as a ​‘Christian vs. Traditionalist’ dichotomy, the real story is not nearly so clear-cut,” reads a plaque at the entrance to the exhibit. Shaw and fellow artists Tony A. Tiger and Bobby C. Martin use the medium of art to express the relationship between religion and ethnicity.

Shaw uses wooden panels cut and arranged in cathedral structures along with exquisitely detailed paintings of naturalistic images. The combination brings together the church and the outside world, to show that holiness can be found in all aspects of life.

Many of Shaw’s pieces feature tangles, from the layered lines wrapping around the panels in Protect Us From Ruin, to a bowl full of tightly wrapped balls in All My Sorrows, to a painted circle of woven strips in Sacred Unseen. These knots symbolize the enmeshed identities of Christian Native Peoples, with all the confusion and tension that comes from belonging to two separate categories. But Sacred Unseen suggests that faith is to be found within the tangle, and that the identities are not separate at all, but can be intertwined as one.

Tony A. Tiger’s Old Ways, New Vision is one of several prints layering tribal designs over old photographs. The combination of bright colored patterns over the black-and-white figures brings the photographs to life, as if drawing them into the physical world. Tiger has ancestry in the Muscogee Creek, Seminole and Sac and Fox nations, as well as generations of Christianity behind him. ​“Those who employed Christian organizations and churches as a means to end tribalism in North America did so without a true knowledge and faith in its Author,” he says in his artist’s statement. Tiger’s artwork reflects the Christian traditions that align with Native beliefs to create an amalgamation of old and new, and show history in a new light.

Bobby C. Martin, a Christian and Mvskoke artist, contributes a series of charcoal portraits against a background of gold leaf. The gold is reminiscent of Renaissance paintings of saints, exalting ordinary men and women to show that holiness is found within them all. Likewise, the black-and-white charcoal recalling everyday mundanities combines with the gold representing the divine to demonstrate divinity within the mundane. In Martin’s artwork, Native people are holy, and Christianity is found embedded within Native communities.

As one might expect from the pilgrimage center of the Knights of Columbus, ​“Altars of Reconciliation” seeks to find peace with Christianity within Indigenous tradition. In doing so, it avoids an examination of the history of violence within colonization that was the context of much of the missionary work that brought Christianity to Native peoples in the first place. But as Indigenous artists, Shaw, Tiger, and Martin encourage viewers to embrace the unity between faith and culture, not to dwell on the atrocities that led to the initial imposition of that faith. Their artwork invites viewers to find worship through art, to consider the tangled threads of identity that make up a person, and to realize that who we are is an amalgamation of different parts. When they all fit together, it can create something beautiful.

“Altars of Reconciliation” runs at the Blessed Michael McGivney Pilgrimage Center, Knights of Columbus Museum, 1 State St., through Aug. 13. Admission is free. Visit the center’s website for hours and more information.