November 5, 2009

Gov. Nixon's remarks for the opening of the American Indian Galleries

Thank you, Marc.

It is a great honor to be here tonight for the opening of the new American Indian galleries at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. My wife, Georganne, is also here tonight, just as she was back in April for the opening of the new American Art galleries. The location of these galleries -- adjacent to one another -- offers a unique and uninterrupted look at the achievements of American artists from pre-European contact to the present.

These exciting additions continue to raise the national stature of the Nelson-Atkins, making it an important destination not only for the people of Missouri, but for all the citizens of our country...and the world.

The museum has always been one of our favorite places to come and spend time in the company of great American artists. Now we have even more reasons to come back.

This evening, I would especially like to thank Chief Jim Gray, Principal Chief of the Osage Nation, and Dr. Linda Sue Warner, President of Haskell Indian Nations University, for being here to celebrate this special occasion.

This is an extraordinary gathering of works of art - seven years in the making. It took the vision and patient optimism of Gaylord Torrence, founding curator of the museum's Department of American Indian Art, to bring this to fruition.

It would not have been possible without the generosity and connoisseurship of Estelle and Morton and Sosland, who have been tireless volunteers, passionate advocates, fund-raisers and benefactors to the Nelson-Atkins for more than five decades. With their gift of a collection of masterpieces from the Northwest Coast cultures, this is their night to shine.

These striking, and sometimes haunting, objects represent centuries of the American Indian story, in all its glory...and its agony. It is a story that began millennia before there was a United States of America, or a city called Kansas, or a state known as Missouri. It is a continuing epic written across thousands of miles, sweeping from the Great Plains, to the mesas of the Southwest, to the waters of the Northwest Coast.

All of us here tonight are part of that story, whether we are descendants of the First People, or new arrivals from distant shores.

The sophistication of the artists who made these objects is all the more remarkable given the primitive materials available to them: wood and bone, buffalo hide and red clay, porcupine quills and human hair.

There is great diversity here: most of the major North American Indian groups are represented, from Acoma to Zuni. But there is continuity as well. The currents of culture mingle and flow like the wild, braided streams of Alaska: joining here, branching there, disappearing in one place only to emerge in another.

Throughout history, the art of every culture has been an expression of what it is to be human: hopeful, fearful, tender, violent. Art poses life's most profound questions: Who are we? Where did we come from? What is our purpose in the Creator's masterwork? The eloquence of these objects echoes through time.

We appreciate the generosity of the many tribes whose culture and traditions are honored tonight.

My congratulations to the leadership of the Nelson-Atkins, its curators and staff, for a brilliant exhibition that shows these treasures the respect they so richly deserve.

Thank you.