My best advice is: Make a weekend of them while they are both still on. For five more weeks, New Englanders have an unprecedented opportunity to see hundreds of amazing objects, from large-scale installations made in the past few years by brilliant artists who happen to be Native American, to traditional objects of bewitching beauty and palpable spiritual presence (totem poles, blankets, painted ceramics, woven baskets, bandolier bags, and so on) as well as numberless things, neither traditional nor contemporary, whose existence you might never have guessed at.
It’s impossible to rank one show higher than the other. “Shapeshifting,’’ at Peabody Essex, is perhaps more beautifully presented. It’s also slightly more ambitious in its mix of contemporary and traditional art. But there is something particularly moving about the presentation at Dartmouth College, which, though it was founded with the education of Native Americans in mind, has a long history of betrayal and disappointment for which it has been trying, for several decades, to make amends. This show is part of that effort; it transcends its own good intentions.
The Hood show is drawn entirely from its permanent collection. Remarkably, most of the objects are on public view for the first time. Although the show is divided up according to art-producing regions (Arctic, Northwest Coast, Plains, Woodlands, and so on), it mixes modern and contemporary work with older objects.
So, for instance, you might see a girl’s traditional fringed dress made from tanned hide, glass beads, bones, string, sinew, and thread within view of a contemporary digital photograph by Rebecca Belmore, which shows the bare back of a reclining woman (Belmore is one of several artists who appear in both shows). That back is traversed, troublingly, by a long scar from which a fringe of red strings descend, like rivulets of blood. The connections between the two pieces, and many more nearby, do not need spelling out.
