Michelson, who lives and works in New York, knows Dallin’s piece well. He went to Boston Latin in the late 1960s; later, as a student in the 1970s at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts just around the corner, he passed it almost daily. “I think a lot of visitors don’t even question it,” he said. “It’s hard to open that up. That’s what my work is meant to do.”
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There’s irony that the Dallin remains the MFA’s unofficial greeter, even as the museum takes pains to reconcile many of the issues the piece seems to flout. Michelson said his project will confront “Appeal to the Great Spirit” directly, though he was leery to share details so early. He did say his work, titled “The Knowledge Keepers,” will match Dallin’s weighty bronze and connect to the Indigenous people upon whose lands the MFA sits. “I’m doing something that will first of all be site specific,” he said, “honoring Massachusetts natives, not this disconnected Plains warrior.”
His project will perch on the two vacant podiums on either side of the museum’s grand entrance staircase, occupied until recently by a pair or bronze urns seasonally adorned with flowers or Christmas trees.
Michelson’s work will not be permanent, but the first in an annual series of responses built for the museum’s front door. “I think it’s fair to say it feels a little stagnant,” said Ian Alteveer, chair of the museum’s Department of Contemporary Art, of the Dallin’s enduring solitude. “We knew whoever was going to make the first go at this was going to have to contend with that. That’s a lot to put on an artist’s shoulders, so it was incumbent on us to choose someone who was sophisticated and passionate about it.” Alteveer said he hoped the new work would “provide ways forward for us to think about what might happen next. That’s what made Alan so perfect.”
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For much of the Dallin’s tenure, “next” has rarely been a consideration, even as “Appeal to the Great Spirit” has long brought unease. Through its 112 years here, it has withstood major upheavals in American society around racial equity, from the civil rights movement in the 1960s to the American Indian movement of the 1970s, to the much more recent demands to relocate monuments at odds with racial justice. In 2020, just one month after George Floyd’s murder, the Boston Art Commission voted to remove a 19th-century bronze casting of Thomas Ball’s “The Emancipation Project,” after weeks of public protest. A scene of Abraham Lincoln bestowing freedom upon Archer Alexander, an enslaved man huddled at his feet, it had the patronizing air of divine gesture.
But the MFA has never seemed to seriously entertain relocating “Appeal to the Great Spirit.” It has only recently been willing to openly discuss its potential harms.
In 2019, the MFA hosted a public symposium about stereotype, appropriation, and intent around the piece. In 2020, the museum made its only permanent addendum to the sculpture, a sign affixed to the knee-height guardrail around it acknowledging that “for some, it represents a painful ‘vanishing race’ stereotype . . . and erases the stories of living Indigenous peoples, especially those here in Boston.”
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In 2021, the museum commissioned the artist Elizabeth James Perry to substantially interrupt the Dallin’s imposing solitude for the first time. Perry, an enrolled member of the Aquinnah Wampanoag tribal nation of Martha’s Vineyard, planted a native corn garden surrounding the sculpture’s granite plinth. The idea, she told me at the time, was for the corn to grow and swallow the podium, and create the illusion of horse and rider finally touching ground.
Ground, of course, is critical to any conversation about Indigenous culture and history; Native peoples have occupied this place for time immemorial. The figure is a litany of no-fixed-address Native American cliches, a vague mash-up of Navajo (Southwest) and Dakota (Midwest) aesthetics — “a cartoon,” Perry told me in 2021, “not in any way reflecting the sovereign nations of this place.” Her idea, she said, was to gently impose on Dallin’s piece the sense of place it lacked.
At the time, I also spoke to Tess Lukey, another enrolled member of the Aquinnah Wampanoag tribal nation of Martha’s Vineyard, then a curatorial research associate at the MFA. “It’s so problematic,” said Lukey, now the associate curator of Native American Art for the Trustees of Reservations. “It represents ignorance, and it represents misunderstanding.”
So, Michelson has a lot to contend with. Since 2021, “Appeal to the Great Spirit” has simply fallen back into its undisturbed stance at the museum’s threshold.
“In 1912, he was all he needed to be,” Michelson said, wryly, on a recent walk through the museum. “The Bostonian in me understands that Boston has so much history, and there are things you don’t want to destroy,” he said. “I’m lucky I’ve been given the opportunity to intervene in [the piece’s] message at a time when I think it’s really needed, and put out another one.”
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Michelson works in a range of media, including video and film; “Hanodaga:yas (Town Destroyer”), a 2018 piece that projects Colonial survey maps over a bust of George Washington, is on view at the Peabody Essex Museum right now. And his history with public commissions around Indigenous issues is long. In 1990, he created “Earth’s Eye,” a stony memorial to the ancient alluvial pond that lies deep beneath Manhattan’s financial district; more recently, he made “Mantle” in 2018, a massive stone spiral built into the earth in Richmond, Va.’s Capitol Square to honor the state’s Indigenous nations, decimated by the Colonial era.
“I often see the need to deal with all this history, because there’s been such a clear effort to erase it,” he said. “But it hides — in archives and in documents, if you know where to look. And I’ve been looking for a long time.”
Those looking to defend “Appeal to the Great Spirit” draw on another history. Dallin, raised in Utah, grew up amid late-19th century Western expansion and saw up close its ravages on Indigenous nations. He remembered visiting as a child the nearby Ute reserve, where members had been sequestered as more and more of their land was stolen.
When he later became a prominent sculptor here in Greater Boston — his sculpture of Paul Revere in the North End is one of the city’s landmarks— he set up shop in Arlington, where there’s still a museum in his name. Memories of the indignities forced on the Utes fueled his creative fire. He became an activist for Indigenous rights.
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“Appeal to the Great Spirit” is one of his series of Indigenous representations, none commissioned, all out of his own sense of purpose, and pocket. And make no mistake: The piece is no easy throwaway, nor should it ever be. Dallin was a recognized master of his time — “Appeal to the Great Spirit” won a gold medal at the Paris Salon in 1909, before landing on the museum’s front lawn.
Even so, the “vanishing race” notion of Dallin’s time is both chillingly outdated and an overwrought doom narrative plied for dramatic effect; Native Americans were surely decimated, but that’s their story to tell. And it undermines the simple fact that Indigenous culture now is a thriving, contemporary force. Look no further than Jeffrey Gibson, the Choctaw-Cherokee artist currently representing the United States at the Venice Biennale, the world’s most important contemporary art showcase.
It’s worth noting that the Dallin was never intended to be permanent, according to the MFA’s own website (in 1912, it notes, it was “a work of contemporary art”). In short, almost nothing about “Appeal to the Great Spirit” is right, if that’s even the word to use. “Appeal to the Great Spirit” embodies Dallin’s own impressions and sympathies hardened in bronze; there’s no right or wrong there. But as an unintended emblem of an institution embracing reconciliation efforts with a broad slate of underrepresented groups, it undermines what the museum is doing right.
Michelson’s work will be the Dallin’s counterweight. It will also not be permanent, ceding its space to a series of projects year to year. I like to think of it as a softening gesture, getting Bostonians used to the idea that nothing need be forever — even out here on the grand promenade of the Avenue of the Arts. Maybe, after a few changeovers, “Appeal to the Great Spirit” might finally cede its own ground, dispatched to a new home, so that something fresh and new, and more reflective of our time, might take a turn.
Murray Whyte can be reached at murray.whyte@globe.com. Follow him @TheMurrayWhyte.
