BEAU CROW The only color photograph in the exhibition.
  • Courtesy of the artist and M-I-A Gallery
  • BEAU CROW The only color photograph in the exhibition.

The second exhibition at M-I-A Gallery is Delphine Diaw Diallo's The Great Vision, a series of photographs (all here) the young New York-based artist made during a month she spent on the Crow Reservation in Montana.

Diallo is Senegalese and French. Her representations of herself and other people and objects are rooted in her own experience of deep cultural mixing. At the Crow Reservation, she gravitated toward scenes that revealed both the tribe's history and its adaptive moves, as in Beau Crow, above.

Another photograph in the show—printed very large—is a portrait of an unusual five-dollar bill. It is old, wrinkly, and protected inside a plastic sleeve. The sleeve wears a price tag: $1,200.

This is the 1899 $5 Indian Note, a public-relations disaster for the American government.

This was to be the first American bill to feature a Native American. The Treasury Department set out to feature Sioux chief Running Antelope in the center of the bill.

But when the three feathers on Running Antelope's high-jutting formal headdress were too tall to fit into the allotted space in the middle of the bill, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing swapped in the headdress of a rival tribe, the Pawnee, on Running Antelope's head.

The result was deeply disrespectful. But I can't help but wonder if Diallo's photograph of it—in the context of her way of seeing the world—takes the bill in a more hopeful direction, as if mixing were inevitable from the start, and the most urgent question is what happens next.