During the 1918 flu pandemic, an Ojibwe man’s daughter was sick. He dreamed of a dance performed by women wearing dresses adorned with little cones made from tin cans, a dance that would heal her. He made the dress and taught her the steps to the dance. She recovered and became the first jingle dancer.
That’s the origin story of the jingle dress and dance — now a mainstay of powwows across North America. Women from many Native American nations perform in dresses such as one made in 2024 by Aerius Benton-Banai, a Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe artist from Wisconsin, on display as part of the exhibition “Making a Noise: Indigenous Sound Art” at Shelburne Museum. The show, on view through October 26 at the Pizzagalli Center for Art and Education, features works by six contemporary Indigenous artists.
Despite its title, the exhibition is less noisy than visitors might expect. The works are not loud, immersive or overwhelming; they use sound as one element of composition more than as a primary medium. Victoria Sunnergren, the museum’s associate curator of Native American art, sets the stage for the contemporary works with two historical ones — 19th-century Diné weavings from the museum’s Anthony and Teressa Perry collection of Native American art. The patterns that run through the blanket and biil (a dress made from two rectangular panels and worn with a belt) resemble sound waves, and their red, indigo, white and black palettes seem to vibrate.
Weavings such as these were an inspiration for Albuquerque, N.M., muralist Nanibah Chacon, who is also Diné and Chicana. Together with sound engineer Lucas Gonzalez, she created “EMI Nahasdlii,” a wall-size installation commissioned for the show. Black, gray and red geometric forms interact with a series of steel, guitar-like strings, stretched on pegs, that zigzag across the wall. This is one of several works that the museum encourages visitors to touch.
Doing so is really, really fun. Many of the strings span long distances — the mural is 20 feet wide — so their twang is deeper than a bass; others are shorter and sharper. Playing the installation is a bit like reaching inside a grand piano to pull something and see what happens, with equally melodious results. It’s clear, though, that this isn’t a tuneful instrument. It’s more like an amplifier for the cultural significance of the weaving tradition, highlighting how the activity shaped daily life. Picture someone trying to weave while her kids are running around, plucking the strings on the loom for fun, and you’ll get some of the joy that’s inherent in this mural.
Visitors can run their hands through the cones, rub up against the sculptures like a cat or crash into them headfirst.
It contrasts with Chacon’s other piece in the show, a 9.5-by-11-foot painting called “Toohoołtsódii Grieves Her Missing Baby, Her Tears Create Chaos … and Flood the World.” In it, we see the horned, scaly and yet perfectly manicured “Big Water Creature,” as she is described on the label, grieving her children, who have been stolen by Coyote. The painting is silent but articulates a deep, broken sadness — an undercurrent of many of the works in the show and one that offers context for sound as a much-needed force of healing.
Benton-Banai’s jingle dress is displayed as an example of the custom-made dresses that dancers wear at powwows, and it is quite a stunning one, with silvery swirls, appliquéd stars and rows upon rows of jingle cones hanging from short ribbons. Jingle cones, which are like bells with no clappers, were originally made from can lids and are now commercially manufactured. They produce a light, tinkling noise as the dancer moves, a sound intensified by the dance’s elegant sweeping motions.
In the 1920s, the U.S. Department of the Interior banned any religious rituals or dances by Indigenous peoples — a ban not lifted until 1978. Because of that, the jingle dance has political overtones and has become symbolic of resistance as well as healing. According to curatorial text, the jingle dress dance became an official category in competition powwows in the 1960s — evidence that women had been practicing it for decades, despite the risks. Chelsea Bighorn, a Lakota/Dakota/Shoshone-Paiute artist based in Chicago, created “Jingle Cone Chainmail” — a piece made from aluminum cans that alludes to that history. The obvious time and labor required to make the wearable artwork speak to generational patience and endurance as tools of opposition to erasure.
Marie Watt, a Seneca artist from Portland, Ore., has used jingle cones to create “Sky Dances Light: Forest IV, Forest V, Forest VI,” a gloriously interactive sonic sculpture. The artist has attached hundreds of them to red mesh forms that dangle from the ceiling. They’re thick as tree trunks but hollow and lightweight; they make a noise like light rain or wind rustling autumn leaves. Visitors can run their hands through the cones, rub up against the sculptures like a cat or crash into them headfirst — an approach favored by gallery visitor Rowan, age 4, who had no trouble understanding the nature of the work.
One other piece, “Thokhántanhan (From Elsewhere),” by the Oglála Lakhóta artist Kite, an assistant professor at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., also uses sound in direct conversation with the body. Viewers who approach the piece trigger an ambient composition, which is paired with a carbon-fiber sculpture of the artist’s family burial grounds based on U.S. Geological Survey maps. The sound here is an experiential way of describing a spiritual space. Yet the fact that the gallery visitor is in a certain sense being surveilled turns the tables, introducing discomfort as perhaps another tool for cross-cultural healing.
Kite’s installation “Opening, Opening, Opening, Opening, Opening, Opening, Opening, Opening, Opening” is an arrangement of simple white stones in what the curatorial text describes as a visual score. It’s accompanied by a diagram and a lengthy untitled poem. An instruction reads, “For two dreamers: Traverse the opening through sound.” Though there’s no direct translation of this visual language, the poem is about repairing rifts in communication itself — between people, the Earth and the universe. The label says Kite’s grandfather taught her that stones speak, see and know — and “‘Most importantly, stones want to help.’”
Across from the Pizzagalli Center, loud machines are busy constructing the new Perry Center for Native American Art, slated to open in 2027, which will house the museum’s collection of more than 500 objects from 389 different Indigenous peoples. The curatorial direction Sunnergren has taken with this exhibition bodes very well for how the museum will eventually present that collection.
Though this is a show of contemporary art, “Making a Noise” encourages the viewer to see cultural objects — including historical ones — entirely differently from how many museums might show them. They’re artworks, artifacts of healing, musical instruments and symbols of resistance, all at the same time. They draw on tradition but aren’t relegated to the past. They are fun, sad and magical. And everything, from a woven blanket to a tin can to a small rock, has a lot to say.
“Making a Noise: Indigenous Sound Art,” on view through October 26 at Shelburne Museum. shelburnemuseum.org
The original print version of this article was headlined “Jingle, All the Way | Indigenous artists explore sound at Shelburne Museum”
This article appears in Sep 10-16 2025.
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