Fort Marion and Beyond: Native American Ledger Drawings, 1865 - 1900
25 January – 2 March 2024
David Nolan Gallery
24 East 81 Street, New York

Reexamining the mainstream art-historical merit of 150-year-old ‘ledger drawings’ by Indigenous artists (including 30 works created at a prisoner-of-war facility in Florida), a new exhibition chronicles and preserves memories of pre-colonial Indigenous culture—and bears witness to specific aspects of the U.S. government’s institutionalized efforts to erase it.

Fort Marion and Beyond: Native American Ledger Drawings, 1865 – 1900 features 75 works on paper that collectively demonstrate the preeminent importance of Plains pictographic art to the documentation, preservation, and dissemination of the rich and diverse cultural heritage of several Plains-region Indigenous communities (including Arapaho, Cheyenne, Hidatsa, Kiowa, and Lakota) prior to and during the height of the U.S. government’s ‘forced assimilation’ policies.

This 75-work survey represents one of the world’s most significant groupings of the genre under one roof; the others are held in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian, Yale University, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

More information is in the above-linked press release, and a preview of works on view is below. See the Dropbox folder linked above to download high-resolution image files. Artwork information is in each image’s file title.