Dotted Dialogues Exhibit Analysis

When walking in to the Dotted Dialogues exhibit, I went in with an ignorant mind and misunderstanding of what the paintings truly meant and stood for. While attending the exhibit I learned that the tribespeople saw the world from a different perspective than anyone else. Rather than seeing it from straight on and as a landscape, they saw it from a bird’s eye view; seeing mountains as ovals, and trails as branched, connected lines. These paintings were made from hundreds to thousands of dots painted on to a solid color backboard and creatively formed into an image. “All this artwork is grounded in ancestral religious stories,” said Françoise Dussart, the well-known and prestigious professor of anthropology, also the curator of the exhibit. “The intent of the artist is to use those stories and their skills as artists to dialogue with non-indigenous people and show they had not lost their culture despite colonization and they still knew about their culture and the land.” This exhibit was held by a chosen group of students of the University of Connecticut, the Spring 2015 Anthropological Perspectives in Art class, which is taught by Professor Dussart.

Dussart had said, “The religious dimension is about identity. Religion is tethered to the land, and you are tethered to both. Unlike Christianity, it cannot be exported. This cannot be owned by anybody else than those people who inherit the rights to those particular stories on those specific sites.” The art that majority of this population has come to know is inspired by the beliefs of the “normal” Western civilizations, however, this art is linked to these lands and cultures. Without those people to tell these stories, we would otherwise be oblivious. The artwork is attempting to transfer and show this knowledge to the generations to