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This essay reconsiders the legacy of Ojibwa travellers who performed tableaux vivants or ‘living pictures’ alongside George Catlin’s Indian Gallery in Paris, 1845–46, many of whom died of smallpox before returning home. Contemporary Saulteaux artist Robert Houle’s architectural installation, Paris/Ojibwa, first exhibited at the Canadian Cultural Center in Paris in 2010, features a stage set peopled by paintings of the deceased travellers. Paris/Ojibwa invites us to see how tableaux vivants incorporated an Ojibwa understanding of the potential liveliness of images and objects. When wedded to complex indigenous notions of personhood, tableaux vivants reversed the ambitions of nineteenth century ethnography: instead of turning living Natives into static images, they reanimated pictures. Inviting audiences to participate in an indigenous view of a shared modernity, Paris/Ojibwa restores sociability to the archive of Ojibwa representations and models transcultural materialism inside Western institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents abstracts related to articles featured in the periodical including "Portraits and Politics in Classical Greece and Early Imperial China: An Institutional Approach to Comparative Art," by Jeremy Tanner, "Life Drawing and the Crisis of Historia in French Eighteenth-Century Painting," by Susanna Caviglia, and "Ojibwa Tableaux Vivants: George Catlin, Robert Houle and Transcultural Materialism," by Jessica L. Horton.

The essay analyzes the artwork of Native Canadian abstract painter Alex Janvier, with emphasis given to the impact of painter Carlo Altenberg's work and art instruction on Janvier. The similarities between Janvier's work and the Bauhaus artistic movement are explained. The author is broadly concerned with Janvier's artistic training as well, as he was perhaps the first Native Canadian to attend art school.

At the Venice Biennale of 2005 Rebecca Belmore's "Fountain" and James Luna's "Emendatio," although presented in different locales, converged for reasons that knowingly complicated the fact that both artists are Native North Americans. Their works were allegories about, as well as for, the location: reliant on Venice as a city of allegorical certainty; reliant on allegories, skewed and traduced, about the Native. Venice as its own allegory was both reiterated and disturbed by them, Venice also the container of countless allegorical tellings – on plinth, roundel and triptych, on wall, floor, ceiling and on roof – of the stories that held the whole operation together, the engines of its power. Many of them were re-tellings of the moral systems of other great powers – Greece, Rome, Byzantium – conjoined as the allegorical force of Christendom. It is suggested that on location at the Biennale, a hub for cognoscenti with some collective memory for reappraisals of allegory by Walter Benjamin, Paul de Man or James Clifford, "Fountain" and "Emendatio" are allegory-adjusted and in progress: that they are not so much stories as episodes, circular iterations, repeated suggestive disclosures – repeated, but restricted, demanding to know whose allegories, if any, are reliable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An index is presented to the issue of the journal "Art History."