Some of the oldest art depicting the Indigenous people of NC has a new home at UNC
Some of the earliest known art depicting this country’s Indigenous people has a new home at the Ackland Art Museum.
Last year, the UNC-Chapel Hill art museum received a major donation of over 140 rare historic engravings drawn and designed by Theodor de Bry, a 16th century artist famous for his depictions of some of the first expeditions of European colonial settlers to the Americas.
The donation came from UNC alumnus Michael Joyner, a longtime donor and philanthropist who has been passionate about the Ackland since his undergraduate years in the mid-1970s.
Now they’re on display at the Museum of the Southeast Indian at UNC-Pembroke, the beginning of a new initiative called the Ackland Exchange, through which the Ackland “will share its collection and expertise with other campuses in the UNC System,” according to a news release.
“This is one of the very first times that these engravings have been presented and sort of interpreted from a Native American point of view,” said Peter Nisbet, Ackland deputy director for curatorial affairs, in an interview with The News & Observer.
“I think that that’s important in general,” Nisbet said. “Overall, I think that’s just an example of the use the Ackland expects to be made of these prints.”
The Museum of the Southeast Indian, located in the heart of the state’s tribal Lumbee community, is showing “Wuskitahkamik Miyai: Intersection of Worlds,” a portion of the collection, through May 14.
“For more than 400 years the world has viewed the first illustrations of Native peoples through Theodor de Bry’s engravings,” reads a description of the exhibit on UNC-Pembroke’s website. “Based on John White’s watercolor paintings, this collection of 16th century engravings depict Algonquin peoples during the 1587 settlement of the Roanoke Colony.”
The collection includes voyages to what would become North Carolina, making these engravings “influential cultural documents,” Nisbet said. The De Bry engravings will be in the Ackland’s permanent collection — available on an online database — and used for exhibitions, teaching and research, Nisbet said.
Images depicted in the prints are illustrated by John White, an artist who accompanied English settlers on Roanoke Island off the coast of North Carolina. White painted his encounters with watercolors, which de Bry used as sources for his illustrations.
The collection of prints was originally printed in the 1590 book, “A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia” by Thomas Harriot, which was published in several languages and served as a form of “propaganda” to invite Europeans to come and settle in America, Nisbet said.
Rich historic details
The engravings were taken out of published books long ago, allowing their prints to be displayed on walls individually. Many of the engravings are hand colored, also offering some of the earliest examples of drawings colored by hand and what the European imagination of what the colors of the New World were.
“With these individual prints ... we have a resource not only for scholarly research, but really for public engagement,” said Nisbet. “The gift is exemplified by the exhibition, which UNC-Pembroke has co-organized with us ... (UNC Pembroke’s) students and the population in the region, especially the Native American population, the Lumbee nation, can engage with these images individually.”
The prints offer images with rich and appreciative detail of the daily lives of the Algonquin people — their culture, agriculture, customs and their “nobility and humanity,” Nisbet said.
“They are in not in any obvious way putting the Native Americans down or denigrating or trying to portray them as lesser ... it’s complicated of course, as you can imagine,” said Nisbet. “But in general, I think it’s really interesting to the public to see how affirmative these prints are in certain ways.”
In 2014, part of Joyner’s collection was on exhibit at the Ackland. The exhibit at the Museum of the Southeast American Indian is a new version of that exhibit with 44 individual engravings of the Ackland’s new collection.
Joyner recently retired after a career in corporate communications and philanthropy with GlaxoSmithKline, the Ackland said.
“The gift of this extraordinary collection puts the Ackland on the map for anyone interested in the visual record of the decisive encounter between Native Americans and European settlers at the end of the 16th century,” said Katie Ziglar, director of the Ackland, in a statement.
This story was originally published March 23, 2022 at 6:05 AM.
