SYRACUSE, New York — Peter B. Jones (Onondaga Nation) isn’t afraid to speak (or sculpt) truth to power. Among the many significant political works in the Syracuse University Art Museum’s Continuity, Innovation, and Resistance: The Art of Peter B. Jones, a glazed stoneware sculpture (“The Pope,” 2019), stands out. The work — its form resembling Pueblo storyteller dolls (an allusion to time Jones spent in Santa Fe, New Mexico) — depicts a pink-faced pope with a prominent gold crucifix, holding several child figures with various skin tones in his lap. One child peeks out from the pope’s robe, gazing up from between his knees. A clear comment on the Catholic church’s many scandals and colonial history, this unabashed critique demonstrates Jones’s propensity for cultural criticism — especially regarding the sociopolitical issues affecting Haudenosaunee and other Indigenous peoples, past and present.
Most of the works in Continuity, Innovation, and Resistance are figurative, including Jones’s signature cylinder sculptures — columnar pieces honoring Haudenosaunee oral histories, legends, and key figures, as in the sensitively sculpted “Ode to Caroline Parker” (2013), an exceptional Seneca textile artist and beadworker, or the grimacing “Untitled (Bird Effigy)” (2007), portraying a man with a bird headdress, one hand morphing into a claw; the man’s brown and white-striped face represents the clash of Indigenous and White settler worldviews. Other political pieces address contemporary issues like blood quantum, missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, and broken treaties.
Jones employs precolonial Haudenosaunee pottery methods and motifs in his work to revive, maintain, and continue the culture’s disappearing artistic lineage. While the exhibition primarily focuses on his figurative work, it includes some of his traditional pottery and pieces that meld historical and contemporary concerns. For example, the sculpture “9-11” (2002), a recognizably Haudenosaunee vessel, is embellished with screaming figures and airplanes. It refers to the 2001 attack on the Twin Towers, the Mohawk ironworkers who constructed buildings throughout Manhattan, and their descendants who helped remove the remains of the Towers.
Through works like these, Jones communicates the history and cultural continuance of the Haudenosaunee people as he fights for a brighter future.
Continuity, Innovation, and Resistance: The Art of Peter B. Jones continues at Syracuse University Art Museum (Shaffer Art Building, Syracuse, New York) through December 15. The exhibition was co-curated by Syracuse University students, including Charlotte Dupree (Akwesasne Mohawk Nation), Eiza Capton (Cayuga Nation), Anthony V. Ornelaz (Diné), Ana Borja Armas (Quechua), and Jaden N. Dagenais, and supervised by Sascha Scott and Scott Manning Stevens (Akwesasne Mohawk Nation).
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