At the Museum

 I spent another hour at the big current exhibit at the Albuquerque Art Museum.  All the works in the exhibit are from the McMichael Canadian Art Collection including these two shown on their website:

There are several examples in the exhibit of animated masks operated with pull strings.  In my picture below the dorsal fin and mouth of the fish figure are opened and closed with strings.

My notes on the images are a bit muddled.  I think the big beaked figure in the glass case is by Henry Speck, Jr.  In the background are pieces by Norval Morrisseau.

Henry Speck Jr. created the three large pieces in the picture below.  The two framed drawings were done by Speck Sr.

The information accompanying Speck Jr.'s work points to an interesting aspect of the cultures of the groups along the Coast of the Pacific Northwest:  the hereditary chiefs are also artists.

This small mask by Beau Dick is said to represent a Wood Bug.

There are only a few pieces in the exhibit that go back beyond the mid-19th Century.  The governments of the U.S and Canada did their best to stamp out the indigenous cultures and nearly succeeded.  Archaeologists and collectors saved some things, but much of the provenance was lost in the process.  Contemporary indigenous artists have taken up the challenge of preserving and carrying forward the traditions and skills of their ancestral predecessors.

Rethinking the Value of Art

The Albuquerque Art Museum has brought another fine exhibition to town: Coast to Coast to Coast: Indigenous Art from the McMichael Canadian Art Collection. What most caught my interest in the show was the selection of traditional art from the Northwest Coast.  After a quick walk-through my first thought was to wonder at how I had grown up in Seattle and undergone sixteen years of "education" there without achieving a better understanding and appreciation of the area's indigenous art.  There are some obvious personal and social reasons, I think, but a large part of the educational deficit was the absence of native voices in the process.  What brought home that idea was the opening presentation by two Canadian indigenous experts on the subject of the show.

I had developed an interest in anthropology during my time at the University of Washington, but somehow it was not channeled into the local access that was available to native cultures.  Instead, I wandered off to explore a bit of the Northwest Amazon which my months there only gained me a superficial view of the possibilities of learning about traditional societies.

Most of the art  discussed by the presenters was recent work by Canadian indigenous artists.  I have never been very interested in museum-directed work of that kind, but the discussion did point to the importance  of the underlying motivations and history.  The brief comments on the role of art in the traditional cultures of the Pacific Northwest, however, really sparked my interest in the subject.

I was particularly taken by the explanation by Bonnie Devine about the Potlatch as a key element of a sustainable economy.  Of course, that subject was touched on in my college classes, but I only remember it being presented as kind of an aberrant curiosity.  Devine's few words on the topic made the tradition of giving away precious art objects seem perfectly rational and practical.  Thinking the next day about that viewpoint brought me to the idea that a modern day analogy might be the history of the Free Software Movement.

So, I am looking forward now to several more visits to the current exhibition at the Art Museum and to spending some time exploring the available literature on the subject.