The Beauty of My Culture: An Interview with Arnold Jacobs (original) (raw)
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Northwest Coast Native American Art: The Relationship between Museums, Native Americans and Artists
2016
OF THESIS Northwest Coast Native American Art: The Relationship between Museums, Native Americans and Artists Museums today have many responsibilities, including protecting and understanding objects in their care. Many also have relationships with groups of people whose items or artworks are housed within their institutions. This paper explores the relationship between museums and Northwest Coast Native Americans and their artists. Participating museums include those in and out of the Northwest Coast region, such as the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, the Burke Museum, the Royal British Columbia Museum, the American Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian Museum. Museum professionals who conducted research for some of these museums included Franz Boas, James Swan, and Frederick Ward Putnum, and they worked with Natives and artists like Charles Edenshaw who influenced later artists including Bill Holm, Bill Reid, Mungo Martin, Willie Seaweed, Rober...
In 2014, The Heard Museum, The Philbrook Museum, and numerous newspapers celebrated the 100-year anniversary of the birth of Allan Houser. In 2015, The Wheelwright Museum expanded their gallery and debuted their Center for the Study of Southwestern Jewelry, which featured the work of Charles Loloma. In 2016 the Institute of American Indian Arts, the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture and the New Mexico Museum of Fine Arts celebrated the 100-year anniversary of the birth of Lloyd Kiva New. Finally, in 2016 the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park, Kansas debuted the opening of “Super Indian: Fritz Scholder 1967-1980.” This paper examines how these four artists influenced and ushered in a new era of Native American artwork. It also explores how the Institute of American Indian Arts facilitated opposition to established artistic canons serving as an incubator to develop breakaway artistic concepts. More importantly, this research questions the importance of the relationship between these artists and the Institute of American Indian Arts. Without the Institute would these artists have been as successful as they were, and without these four particular artists would the Institute have been as influential as it was? This research examines the contribution of each of these four individuals and the effect their work had on the success of the Institute of American Indian Arts.
Exhibition: Urban Thunderbirds/Ravens in a Material World LessLIE, Rande Cook, Frances Dick, and Dylan Thomas Co-curated by LessLie, Rande Cook, and Nicole Stanbridge At the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, September 20, 2013 – January 12, 2014 "There is an animus infusing contemporary Native art. It is ancient and new, fierce and comical. It is Trickster, a timeless archetype with a global diffusion, though its forms vary from culture to culture. Primarily, across borders of culture and ethnicity, it acts as a gentle goad to social evolution – a kind of ‘gentler, kinder’ cultural revolutionary force. The “Trickster movement’ in contemporary Native art represents a bloodless, ideological coup going on beneath the surface of current events, erupting only occasionally in populist expressions such as the international wildfire of guerilla ‘actions’ operating under the banner of ‘Idle No More.’ Taking place last summer after an inaugural action at the Hudson’s Bay company headquarters in London, these were non-violent protests and demonstrations utilizing a wide array of arts media to make their unified point. Indigenous people worldwide stood in powerful, symbolic unity to resist political and corporate theft, appropriation, exploitation and graft." ~ Yvonne Owens, Victoria, 2014
Issues in Contemporary American Indian Art: An Iroquois Example 1
Katsi George left her reservation to go to university when she was eighteen. She decided to study art because she had always had a passion for making things. As a teenager she had worked with her grandmother and uncles gathering and preparing basket materials so that her grandmother could supplement the family income by making baskets. She also worked with one of her grandmother's sisters learning to bead the edges of leggings and skirts worn for ceremonies in the longhouse. While she was still in high school, because it was clear that she had the interest and patience, she began to work making husk dolls in traditional dress and then gajesa or Husk Faces for use in the longhouse. She loved making things that were used to keep the cultural life of the people alive. She also loved to draw and paint pictures that made references to traditional stories handed down for generations. Her interest in making things made art seem like the perfect choice for a major in college. As a freshman student, Katsi was advised to take a 3 credit course called Introductory Design for Art Majors and another called Introduction to the History of Western Art along with three other courses to satisfy her general education requirements. She found these classes interesting, but it was clear that none of her courses related to her cultural life or the values she had learned on the reservation. In her Introductory Design course, all of her assignments, while they taught her skills in a variety of art media, did not allow her space to use the media she had learned growing up at home. Indeed, she was told for the first time in her life that basket making and beadworking were considered crafts and were valued less than painting and sculpture. She was given an assignment to draw a paper bag, and several to do various types of figure drawing. She did twenty, five-minute, ink paintings of a towering still life set up on a table, and a detailed, forty minute pencil drawing of a surreal still life built in a box and lit so that objects cast strong dramatic shadows. Other assignments taught her to design a series of small abstract sculptures out of paper, cardboard, and various odd blocks of wood. She was instructed to glue the blocks to one another and to a base and to paint her composition in a single color. She also learned about perspective, and did a drawing of a hall in the art building that used a vanishing point. Finally, she did a series of abstract color studies. She did not find the assignments difficult, and generally got A's on her assignments and praise from her professors. There was, however, no space to produce works that thematically related to her culture, and she really missed the connections she had experienced between her artwork and her culture when she was living with her family. 1 Gail Tremblay is a Member of the Faculty at The Evergreen State College and a member of the Onadoga tribe. Copyright held by The Evergreen State College. Please use appropriate attribution when using and quoting this cases. Cases are available at the Enduring Legacies Native Cases website at: www.evergreen.edu/tribal/cases. All images are used with permission of the artists.
ARTMargins, 2015
This article discusses the relationship between Native American art and place as a curatorial strategy in the recent exhibition Before and After the Horizon: Anishinaabe Artists of the Great Lakes. It is argued that while the Anishinaabe connection to the Great Lakes region as a spiritual, cultural, and epistemological center is essential to the art of the exhibition, the curators present this place as timeless and unchanging. The result is an interpretation of the Native American relationship to place that is idealized, ahistorical, and inaccurate to the tumultuous legacy of colonialism. Rather, as the art on display makes clear despite the curatorial context, the relationship to place is dynamic and changing. Other recent exhibitions of indigenous art show that these curatorial decisions were not unavoidable and that Native American art can be exhibited to show that its relationship to place has adapted and changed while still being maintained. Christopher T. Green, "Anishinaabe Artists, of the Great Lakes? Problematizing the Exhibition of Place in Native American Art," ARTMargins 4:2 (2015), 80-96.