Rapheal Begay (Diné) may have exhibited his photography across several museums already, but his family and Diné relatives have rarely come to those shows. “Museums tend to be very academic and elitist, and have for a long time excluded the stories and the history of minorities, specifically those of Indigenous peoples,” Begay says. “A museum just wasn’t originally a space for us, and many of us don’t feel comfortable in a space like that.
"In addition, a lot of the objects in museums — Indigenous objects, Native-made objects — are primarily stolen objects or have been procured or obtained without prior informed consent. Even my own family has a lot of hesitation going to my own shows within museums.” To remedy this, Begay decided to bring the museum to the Diné.
His new photography exhibition, ALL REZ: Kéyah, Hooghan, K’é, Iiná / Land, Home, Kinship, Life , is an experiment in museology. Begay is ALL REZ ‘s artist, lead curator, and creative director; Lillia McEnaney — a museum anthropologist and independent curator from Santa Fe — is the co-curator and the project’s manager. Together, they organized an exhibition that’s in part in situ — inside the walls of the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology at UNM — and in part on the road, inside Axle Contemporary’s mobile art space, a retrofitted van from the 1970s that Begay decked out with his photographs of the Navajo Nation.
ALL REZ: Kéyah, Hooghan, K’é, Iiná / Land, Home, Kinship,.
