MIA: Hearts of Our People

The current show at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts features a collection of artworks crafted by Native American women ranging from traditional Navaho weavings and Inuit sealskin jackets to an automobile painted in the style of a Maria Martinez pot.

A healthy proportion of the artworks showcase the traditional beadwork, quillwork, and decorative ceramics that we might expect to find in such a show, but the quality is uniformly topnotch, and the range of indigenous cultures that have been sampled , from Florida to the Northwest Coast and beyond, is impressive.      

Perhaps a lesser number of pieces, while exploiting traditional materials and techniques, also nurture a conceptual element: a machine gun, broken chards of china made of buffalo bones, post-modern adobe towers, a cartoon image of the moon. A few pieces look entirely traditional from a distance; only when you get up close do you see you're looking at a finely detailed acrylic painting rather than an elaborate century-old piece of beadwork.

There are poems hanging on the walls, some of them are recited on tape loops in the original languages through speakers nearby. In the first room you enter you meet up with a colorful stack of blankets at least fifteen feet high symbolizing nothing more, I guess,  than the comfort of blankets.

And there are high quality artworks that were created explicitly for the tourist trade, or at the request of ethnologists hoping to preserve examples of techniques that were in danger of being lost—for example, a series of exquisite strip baskets made in 1890 by a woman well-known at the time for her skill in this vanishing art.

Some of the pieces illustrate collaborations between native artists and established "white" industries, an example being a mahogany dining room chair fitted with seat- and back-panels decorated with Mikmak quillwork patterns.

And then there are creations that are totally "off the wall," for example, a vast field of small leather cups—it takes up a good portion of a room—connected in pairs by thongs vaguely  resembling the yarn often threaded through a winter coat to keep a small child's mittens together. What?!?

One of my favorite pieces consisted of four wooden pedestals  standing in front of glass-covered chalkboards with images behind and Cherokee words written on the glass. Thinking caps are suspended above each pedestal, and the mirrors are rimmed with images of human hands. I don't know what it means, but it looks cool.

Tradition, continuity, innovation, confrontation. It's a fascinating mix. And the exhibit is enhanced by video displays. Some are triptychs of the landscapes—desert canyons,  deep spruce woods— from which some of these artists draw their inspirations, others broadcast interviews of the women who made the art, often several generations of the same family.  

Such a concatenation of objects, cultures, styles, and themes is bound to evoke all sorts of aesthetic and anthropological quandaries. Though the scene I've been describing might sound schizophrenic, with radical and traditional objects vying for attention, the exhibition rooms are spacious, and the curious juxtapositions heighten the appeal of individual works, traditional and post-modern alike.

For some viewers, the exhibit is likely to evoke fond memories. I was reminded of the homes of Indian families Hilary and I have visited in Jemez Pueblo, Acoma, the Hopi village of Walpi, and even farm fields in SW Colorado where heaps of Ancestral Pueblan pottery are unearthed every year during spring plowing.  I recall a crisp Easter morning at San Ildefonso Pueblo (Maria Martinez's home town), where we stood with a few other tourists and villagers as forty-odd bare-chested male dancers emerged from the central kiva wearing pine boughs around their necks, deer antlers on their heads, and some slight wrapping around their torsos. Just then bells started ringing and people began to emerge from the church at the far end of the plaza wearing traditional "Anglo" dress.

Two of the locals standing nearby invited us into their two-room adobe home to share a brief meal of stewed lamb and hominy. I will never forget the shaft of morning light beam in through a window to illuminate the tidy square of bright green Jell-O on my paper plate.     

Camping on the edge of the Rio Grande Gorge or in the hills of Valle Vidal, or on the banks of the Chama river. The glint of the sun, the smell of the sage brush, the endless miles of stunted piñon and juniper.  It isn't that hard to make contact with the spirits of the ancestors, even if they aren't your ancestors, when you hear a rush of wind coming up a canyon and a flock of pinyon jays appear from around the bend and whiz by, only barely recognizable in the dusk. Thoughts of the Barrier art in Horseshoe Canyon, which predates most of the items in the exhibit by centuries, and of the Hubbell Trading post on the Arizona-New Mexico border, where (among other places) notions of turning household items into marketable works of art gathered steam, fill the head.

Meanwhile, contemplation of the artistry exhibited by a single basket, shawl, or pot, brings to mind hours of tedious repetitive activity resulting in works of remarkable vibrancy, endearing and covetable at first glance. As if the harmony of the universe could be restored once and for all by placing our stone-ground corn and  parched wild rice in the proper containers.

The flamboyant colors of the clothing are also appealing, though no one is likely to wear such garments to the grocery story—other than Robert Bly, perhaps.  Yet their beauty and ceremonial "power" is undeniable, and almost irresistible. Quite unlike the glittering silk robes on display at the recent China show, for example, these pieces carry the rough-hewn facets and the earthy grit of the materials out of which they're made, and it gives them an autochthonic authenticity that any Boy Scout could appreciate.

One of the central themes of the show is that female native artists have remained in the shadows too long, considering how stunning their aesthetic accomplishments often are. This may well be true, at least in the world of museums. But anthropologists and collectors have taking a keen interest in artists and their lineages now for at least four or five generations.

The massive, full-color, 340-page book that accompanies the show isn't cheap, but the text is dense and scholarly, fleshing out the background to the artists, their works, and the cultures from which they arose. It also includes photographs of quite a few pieces that aren't included in the show we saw the other day. I presume they'll join the exhibition as it moves on to Nashville, Tulsa, and Washington, DC.