BLACK AND WHITE AND RED ALL OVER: Comic Art Indigene. The National Museum of the American Indian has an exhibit on Native Americans and comics, up through May 31st. It’s… it’s scattershot.

There are about three examples of everything the exhibit wants to talk about. Three examples of traditional art forms done with comic-book motifs and themes (the pottery where the deer hunt uses imagery possibly taken from Krazy Kat was pretty awesome); three graffiti-influenced artworks with Indian characters; three contemporary satirical cartoons. You get the picture. It’s all interesting, but it’s a Tantalus exhibit, withdrawing just when you’re starting to want more.

I’m also not sure who the target audience is. When I visited, a teacher was herding a group of little kids through the exhibit–hurrying them past the Indian lesbians to get them to the skateboard with Speedy Gonzales painted on it. The wall captions are really intro-level and kid-friendly, but the scratchy horror comic on the wall is not.

Not a lot of sequential art here; not a lot of comics-specific storytelling techniques, as versus obviously comics-influenced pictorial techniques.

And from the one other review I’ve read, I got the impression that there are a lot of developments in Indian comics which just got ignored or treated with extreme shallowness, like the growing influence of manga.

All of that said–this is a quick and occasionally provocative exhibit, which I liked a lot. I hope you get that my main complaint is that I wanted more! It’s definitely worth the trek down the Mall if you’re in the city already. Plus, you know, it’s free….