Contemporary Art, together with the History Museum, presents Portraits of the Past: The Potawatomi as Painted by Van Sanden, on display through Friday, April 3.

Featuring artworks by Van Sanden, a 19th-century Dutch itinerant painter, the exhibition includes nine portraits created around 1835.

Little is known about Van Sanden other than that he was active in the Michiana area in the 19th century.

Though his portraits provide a glimpse into the people he knew well enough to paint or the patrons who commissioned portraits, it cannot be said that these are accurate representations of the sitters.

The paintings have not been viewed as a collection in many years. This is a unique opportunity to see all of the Van Sanden paintings in one exhibition. Eight of the nine portraits on display are believed to be Potawatomi, with the ninth being a self-portrait of the artist.

All works are on loan from the collection of the History Museum, South Bend. This partnership was facilitated by the Notre Dame Center for Arts & Culture Global Experience’s Indigenous World initiative and by SB150.

Crossroads Gallery is located on the main floor of the Notre Dame Center for Arts & Culture at 1045 West Washington Street in South Bend.

On exhibition at the Center for Arts & Culture and in the Galería America in the Institute for Latino Studies, McKenna Hall, through Tuesday, March 31, is Cielo Rojo, paintings by visual artist, writer and poet Maceo Montoya. The exhibition pairs portraits and landscapes, inviting the viewer to generate relationships between — and narratives for — the images. The works are on loan from the personal collection of the center’s executive director, Gilberto Cárdenas.

This story was originally published in NDWorks.