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In the early years of the 20th century, a woman living on the Fort Peck reservation in Montana gathered the materials she needed to make a “possible bag”: brightly colored glass beads, small, ornamental tin cones, feathers, and thread, which she sewed and applied onto a tanned animal hide. 

The possible bag’s purpose was to hold whatever its carrier needed, hence the name, and so would have been indispensable. 

Beyond its function, the possible bag had—and has—value as a work of decorative art, the beads and other elements arranged in symmetrical diamond and rectangular patterns in deep red, blue, and white colors, testimony to the skills, training, and cultural heritage of the artist, who, for decades, was known in records only as Mrs. Lone Dog. 

Now on view at the Hood Museum as part of the exhibition, , the bag, part of the museum’s extensive collection of Native American art, also illustrates how objects once incompletely attributed or described merely as the work of “Artist Unknown” or “Artist Unrecorded” are being reevaluated and renamed. 

The Hood Museum in 2022 decided to take a different approach to the “Artist Unknown” nomenclature, using instead the phrase “Artist Once Known,” a jumping-off point for further cultural and historical research into objects, some made by women and people of color, whose provenance was often ignored, misattributed, or not attributed at all. 

This more recent, nuanced terminology, now in use in a number of North American institutions, illustrates that “the reason that the information doesn’t exist is because the person who collected it, or the institution that collected it, didn’t record that information,” says, associate director of curatorial affairs and curator of Indigenous art and co-curator of the Always Already exhibition.

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A tipi, or “possible bag,” that Hood Museum curators have determined was made by a woman known as Wi-he-ha in Nakota. (Photo by Katie Lenhart)

The contradiction is that such “artists weren’t unknown during their lifetimes. They were known and beloved and respected in their communities for the important work they did,” Powell says.

In the case of the possible bag, recent genealogical research by a Dartmouth alumna working as a volunteer in consultation with Powell zeroed in on the full identity of Mrs. Lone Dog as Lucy Lone Dog. Her Nakota name was Wi-he-ha (Owl Woman). 

The bag was one of numerous objects bequeathed to Dartmouth in the mid-1940s by Clara Churchill, the widow of West Fairlee, Vt., native Frank Churchill. Appointed in 1905 as an Indian inspector by President Theodore Roosevelt, Churchill traveled throughout the U.S. with his wife visiting scores of Indigenous nations, according to the National Museum of the American Indian. They collected art, kept journals, and took hundreds of photographs of the people and places they visited. 

“We have so many works in the collection that don’t have full information because they came to the College either before the Hood Museum existed, and then became part of the collection; or they came into the collection before there was a dedicated curator. So there’s decades of work to be done, to do more projects like this,” Powell says. 

, the Jonathan Little Cohen Associate Curator of American Art at the Hood Museum, estimates that perhaps 35% of the Hood Museum collection falls into the “Artist Unknown” category; and of that, perhaps as much as half of the Native American collection has the same designation.

Some institutions in North America are now choosing to use the “Unrecorded Artist” nomenclature, Powell says, to shift the perspectives of museum goers long-accustomed to seeing “Artist Unknown” or “Workshop of” on museum and gallery wall labels, which may lead visitors to think that the pieces are less accomplished, or that they can be skimmed over. 

Hartman says that with objects such as silver or furniture, there may be a name attached; but that a fuller attribution should take into account that enslaved people may have helped make a particular piece but were never recognized for their work. 

“It’s a very different sort of situation because that person was not meant to be recognized in the period. So trying to think of ways to make that recognition broader is what we’re trying to do with the terminology,” Hartman says.

“And one of the broader questions that Michael and I are asking, and other curators are asking through this, is: How do we acknowledge the collaboration that is inherent within artistic production?” Powell says.

A label on the museum’s second floor with more information about “Artist Once Known” directs visitors to download a QR code through their cell phones, which takes them to a more extensive that explains the thinking behind the terminology change, and how it can expand the base of curatorial and visitor knowledge. 

“When people have asked me about it in the galleries over the past few years, when I explain it to them, they say, ‘Oh, that makes so much sense,’” Powell says. 

“We actually wrote the label and blog post because our Visitor Services guides were telling us so many people were asking about it. So these were actually created in response to feedback from visitors asking a lot of questions,” Hartman says.

Hartman points to another piece in another current Hood exhibition, .

The mid-19th century work “Yellow Rose” is a reverse painting on glass, made by a young woman as part of her education, Hartman says. Found in Maine and bought in New York City by the prominent collector Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, who then donated it to Dartmouth in 1935, the work is in the medium called “tinsel painting.” 

The artist painted the luminous rose on the back of the glass and then applied foil to parts of the glass so that the work shimmered when light passed through it, Hartman explains. If it had been placed, say, in a window where the light could strike it, “it would have been really, really striking,” he says. 

And while the museum doesn’t have the young woman’s name, its use of “Artist Once Known” reminds the viewer that “someone did this and someone thought it was important enough to save and cherish,” Hartman says. 

There are larger themes in play, says Powell. “It seems like we have only grown farther apart in terms of the divide in our country around issues of politics and ideology. And art is a place where we can come together and recognize our shared humanity.

”For me,“ Powell says, ”the ‘Artist Once Known’ is, first and foremost, about the recognition of the humanity of the individual who created this work—that we all get to benefit from, by having it here at the museum."