Western artists have frequently depicted Indigenous subjects as exotic, anonymous figures frozen in time and represented in poses of subjugation, violence, or reverie. By contrast, Alan Michelson’s The Knowledge Keepers represents two contemporary local Indigenous cultural stewards, Aquinnah Wampanoag member Julia Marden and Nipmuc descendent Andre StrongBearHeart Gaines Jr., posed in dynamic gestures of public address. Michelson’s project is the first in a new series of sculptural commissions for the MFA’s Huntington Avenue Entrance, where contemporary artists engage the site in all of its complexity.

Cast in bronze and gilded in shimmering platinum, The Knowledge Keepers pays tribute to the Northeastern Woodland nations’ reverence for copper, crystal, shell, and silver, materials treasured for both their physical and metaphorical luster. Platinum, with its resistance to corrosion, chemical stability, and role in advanced electronics and spacecraft, translates that tradition into the future.

Marden, an artist and specialist in twining, crafts all of her own regalia. She raises a eagle feather fan in a gesture of honor. Gaines, an Indigenous activist, public speaker, and builder of wetus (traditional homes) and mishoonash (dugout canoes) reads from a page of text in the classical pose of an orator. Michelson’s selection of them as models emphasizes their roles as cultural models. By extension, The Knowledge Keepers seeks to honor and celebrate the beauty, presence, agency, and endurance of the Indigenous nations of Massachusetts.

About the Commission

For this inaugural “Huntington Avenue Entrance Commission,” the MFA invited internationally recognized artist Alan Michelson (b. 1953) to create site-specific works for the two empty plinths outside the Museum’s historic building. In addition to creating indelible tributes to local Indigenous keepers of ancestral knowledge, Michelson’s installation also forms, in part, a response to Appeal to the Great Spirit, a sculpture by Cyrus Dallin that has stood at the center of the MFA’s entrance plaza since 1912. The “Huntington Avenue Entrance Commission” is part of a broader initiative to activate the MFA campus, which has included outdoor film screenings and installations such as “Garden for Boston” (2021), led by artists Ekua Holmes and Elizabeth James-Perry (Aquinnah Wampanoag). The Knowledge Keepers is also produced in partnership with the Boston Public Art Triennial, a citywide project launching May 2025 with many other institutions around Greater Boston participating.