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The collection originally resided on dirt floors in the basement of an old church on the school grounds. By the time Bordeaux came to the project, most of the works had been moved to rudimentary storage areas in the Center. “Paintings leaning against each other, piled on top of each other. Broken glass, scraps of paper everywhere, spider webs, lots of dust,” Bordeaux recalled her first day at Red Cloud. “I had that overwhelming feeling of ‘where do I start?’”
The Red Cloud Indian School has been a fixture on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota since 1888, when Oglala Sioux Chief Red Cloud invited Jesuit priests to provide education for the tribe. Housed on the Red Cloud campus in a 120-year-old building, the Heritage Center was founded in 1968 by Brother C.M. Simon, S.J. He spent nearly 40 years promoting the talents and skills of Native American artists and nurturing the Heritage Center’s collection until his retirement in 2002. With a keen artistic eye, a shrewd approach to acquisitions and an eclectic taste that spanned disciplines and tribal affiliations, the irascible Brother Simon had amassed what many consider to be the finest reservation-based collection of Northern Plains art works and artifacts. However, Simon also was famous for a somewhat “casual” sense of organization.
Bordeaux faced challenges at almost every turn. New shelving units proved too heavy for the Center’s antiquated floors. The School’s administration had to raise additional funds for capital improvements to shore up the building’s foundation. While the construction work was completed, Bordeaux and a team of student interns kept uncovering more unexpected works of art. “Quilts were rolled up together, not the two or three you thought, but maybe 12 or 13.” Then boxes would arrive from other museums returning works that Brother Simon had loaned years ago but had neglected to note in the Center’s records. “We’d empty one room…and the art work kept spilling into other rooms.”
Bordeaux quickly came to realize that there was a lack of the most basic documentation standards for significant art collections. While Brother Simon had filled out index cards for many of the pieces, background information such as date of creation, tribal history, purchase dates and physical condition of the work was inconsistent or missing altogether. She focused her initial efforts on establishing documentation policies and procedures, as well as selecting appropriate archiving software. Her toughest job, however, was convincing Brother Simon, who continued to work at the Center in semi-retirement, that it made sense to bring the collection and the Center into the 21st century.
“We would butt heads quite a bit,” Bordeaux observed. “He was so ‘old school’ and the collection was 40 years of his life. And I was gung ho, right out of school and wanted to get going. It took us a few months, and he wanted to make sure I was doing the right thing, but then he finally let me into his collection.”
Challenges of leadership transition
Their sometimes testy relationship was further complicated by the Center’s prolonged leadership transition. In the two years following Brother Simon’s retirement, there were three different people in charge of the institution. Current Heritage Center Director Peter Strong acknowledges that the lack of management stability was a serious complication for the project. He came on in 2005 with the responsibility of seeing the Center through the completion of the curatorial initiative as well as helping to define its future role and direction. Strong provided Bordeaux with the support she needed to adopt “correct museum standards and processes.” He also encouraged her to create “a place and a role for Brother Simon to help tell us about this artwork that we can’t find any information about.”
Mining the knowledge of an institution’s founder became Strong’s priority as well. In his job interview, Strong learned that as the new director he would have “to ‘download’ Brother Simon—get his knowledge into the computer, onto paper, into my own head because you never know what might happen.”
In July 2006, Brother Simon unexpectedly passed away at the age of 69. There was a palpable sense of loss for the community at the Red Cloud Indian School and for many on Pine Ridge. “We wandered around,” Bordeaux said. Strong counted the loss as two-fold. “We had lost a friend, on a personal level, someone who had gotten close to us. But from an institutional standpoint, there went a huge cache of knowledge. There was this thought of being lost.”
About a month after the death, Strong and Bordeaux began to adapt to the changed environment. Strong started getting calls from Brother Simon’s friends who offered to find artists who could help the curatorial team in its work. In the year since, they have helped him to organize a Collections Advisory Committee of artists, art historians and museum professionals across the country who can contribute knowledge about the nearly 2,000 objects that still need to be catalogued. Strong said, “In some ways, there is a benefit to the community in recognizing that we need to turn this into an institutional memory as opposed to an individual’s memory.”
Expanding those resources will be timely—the curatorial initiative received $75,368 in July from the Foundation, for two years of support building on an earlier grant of $40,000 in 2003. There’s also one more change ahead. Bordeaux begins graduate school for an MFA in exhibition planning and design this fall at University of the Arts in Philadelphia. After getting her degree, however, she plans to come back to the Heritage Center as a full-time curator. Bordeaux and Strong are confident that, by then, the cataloguing will be complete and, most importantly, a significant collection of the Native arts will be more readily accessible to the residents of Pine Ridge and the region.
Read more about the work of the Foundation's grantees and fellows in the
September 2007 issue of Giving Strength.
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