For over 112 years, Cyrus Dallin’s sculpture “Appeal to the Great Spirit” has greeted visitors to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Clad in a mishmash of Lakota and Diné-style regalia, the Indigenous warrior on horseback wears a war bonnet but carries no weapons and is plaintively posed with outstretched arms raised in supplication. This dignified, bronze-cast figure can be seen as a stereotype of colonial oppression perpetuating a racist mythology. With increasing demands to relocate monuments that are at odds with social justice, criticism of Dallin’s sculpture has intensified.

“Many want to see that sculpture gone, but many want to see it stay,” says Ian Alteveer, the MFA’s Beal Family Chair of Contemporary Art. Its proponents point out that in the early 20th century, Dallin’s sculpture was acclaimed as a tribute to Indigenous people. Notably, in addition to his prominent career as an artist, Dallin was an early activist for Indigenous peoples’ rights.

So Alteveer and other MFA curators conceived of a series of site-specific works that would sit at the Huntington Avenue entrance, respond to the site, and offer a new sense of welcome. They also knew that the first commission would have to address the iconic but divisive statue in the space. 

Enter Alan Michelson, A81 (BFA), an Indigenous American artist, curator, writer, and lecturer who believes in facing controversy through engagement. Internationally renowned for his site-specific and multimedia installations, Michelson creates art that challenges stereotypes and racial myths about Indigenous people by weaving repressed histories into modern-day narratives.

“People have all these tropes around native people that are wrong and that need correction. I think art can be a vehicle for that,” says Michelson, whose work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian; the National Gallery of Canada; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Michelson has been recognized with numerous fellowships, exhibitions, and site-specific commissions across the United States, Canada, Australia, and Europe. 

Most recently, his sensitive approach to controversial subjects caught the eye of the MFA curators, who commissioned him to create the inaugural installation for the Huntington Avenue entrance project.

For the commission, Michelson positioned a pair of works representing two real-life, modern-day individuals from local tribes on the large plinths flanking the entry’s staircase and facing Dallin’s anonymized figure. Calling the installation “The Knowledge Keepers,” Michelson aims to challenge the tropes of Dallin’s statue, compelling viewers to consider the history of these tropes and how they might be amended to bring about a more inclusive future. 

Dallin’s figure on horseback may have been intended as homage, part of a veritable pantheon of heroes that include his statues of Paul Revere in Boston’s North End and the angel Moroni atop the spire of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints’ temple in Salt Lake City. But his perspective is now dated. 

“In 1909, when Cyrus Dallin cast ‘Appeal to the Great Spirit’ in Paris, the image of the noble but defeated Plains warrior as an exemplar of the ‘vanishing race’ was popular worldwide,” Michelson says. “In 2024, I hope my site-specific installation will challenge ingrained stereotypes and racial myths by presenting a story of survivance and agency, not defeat or appeal.”

Michelson’s mission exemplifies the MFA’s goal for the project. “By representing real people who live now, Alan is speaking to the ‘vanishing race’ theory, which of course is just a myth,” says Alteveer. “Indigenous people are still alive and live amongst us, work with us, and care for land stolen from them. This installation is an opportunity for the museum to do something adventurous that might also activate the site in a different way.” 

History and the Artist

A Mohawk member of Six Nations of the Grand River, Michelson recalls an early exposure to art and history during his childhood in Holyoke, Massachusetts, at the Wistariahurst, “a quirky house museum that had just opened when I was seven years old and where I took my first art classes.” A few years later, his family moved to Boston; there, he says, the MFA became the “wonder encyclopedia of my childhood.” 

In grade school, Michelson attended Boston Latin, riding to class on the trolley that passes the MFA’s façade with the Dallin sculpture. “At the time, I accepted it like everybody seemed to accept it,” he says. “It’s been there forever and it’s cool. But as I got deeper into my culture as an adult, it became clear to me that this work was fraught with this notion of the dying Indian, of the twilight of the race.”

He attended Columbia University before realizing his greater passion for art, so he returned to Boston to study at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, where he concentrated in painting and earned a BFA from Tufts. By the late 1980s, he gravitated toward site-specific installation, where he could explore themes of place and history, many set upon the actual locations he was addressing.

For his first solo public artwork, “Earth’s Eye,” created in 1990, Michelson represented a buried pond in lower Manhattan with 40 markers arranged on the same space where the water once was, as evidenced from old maps. Each marker contained a relief cast referencing how the pond was altered from a pristine, spring-fed source where Indigenous people had lived in harmony with the space for centuries to a body of water swiftly polluted by colonial industry and ultimately filled in by urbanization. “This can be an instructive lesson showing how one way of thinking about living with the land contrasts with another,” Michelson says.

Now based in New York City, he works in a range of media that includes painting, sculpture, photography, sound, video, glass, and stone, sourcing from both Indigenous and Western cultures. He explains that his materials and methods are not consistent with native tradition. “I’m not beading or carving wood. I mainly work in contemporary media,” he says. 

His 2022 photo series “Hanödaga:yas (Town Destroyer): Whirlwind Series” appeared in a gallery of the MFA’s Americas Wing alongside Thomas Sully’s colossal 1819 painting “The Passage of the Delaware,” with its life-size portrait of  George Washington. Michelson presented a more complicated legacy of the country’s first president, who inherited the Indigenous title “Town Destroyer” from a Virginia militia-colonel ancestor who killed five Susquehannock chiefs at a parley in 1675, but earned it for his brutal 1779 Sullivan Campaign in which his armies burned some 50 villages to the ground. The series of six photographs, taken from a 2018 video installation by the artist, feature a portrait bust of Washington emblazoned with historic maps, documents, and other materials related to the campaign and the seizure of the land.

In his panoramic installation “TwoRow II”, created in 2005, Michelson presents a pair of videos, one atop the other, rolling simultaneously across a wide screen like a textile on a loom. The videos depict two banks of the Grand River, which divides the Six Nations Reserve from non-native townships in Ontario. The color and placement of the moving panoramas reference the design of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) “Two Row” wampum belt—woven purple and white shell beads that symbolize an early treaty of “respectful coexistence” between their confederacy and the Europeans. A soundtrack combines narratives of a Canadian cruise boat captain and native elders with ambient sounds of a boat’s engine, music, and activity along the river. The overall effect is serene and mesmerizing, reminding viewers of the possibility and value of peaceful coexistence.

“The Knowledge Keepers,” which was unveiled with a ceremony, an artist talk, and a reception on November 14, will become part of the Boston Public Art Triennial, a city-wide celebration of public art in May 2025. 

“I’m honored to be the artist chosen to inaugurate the Huntington Avenue Entrance Commission,” Michelson says. “It’s great to see Indigenous artists recognized. Maybe this will lead to some positive change. I think it already has.”