dayboat journal: ART: Autry Museum; Floral Beadwork & Masters of the American West Art Exhibit

On a grace-filled southern California winter's day, white branches of the sycamores triangulate our singularly blue skies. A remarkable and moving exhibit of women's artistry and patience calls me. And I want to see the Western paintings chosen for exhibit - what's seen as exemplary, worthy of sale?

NATIVE AMERICAN FLORAL BEADWORK EXHIBITION

What happened to the culture of Native North Americans during encūentro is similar to that of other societies whose patrimonies held rich worlds of unique beauty and identity.

octopus beaded bag

European missionaries and traders introduced glass beads, fabric dyes, yarns, craft and art techniques, and Christianity throughout the world. Indigenous products began to be manufactured for trade and collection, the designs modified and interpreted to suit occidental, colonial tastes. The authentic cultural product was just too strange and uncomfortable, too powerful evidence of the exploitation and domination taking place.

And yet the beauty remains, the humanity manifest, immanent.

online photo

So we have Chinese and Japanese export ceramics, Indonesian and Indian textiles, African ivory figurines, Hawai'ian quilts, Samoan-style tattoos.

Native Americans already beaded with shells, porcupine quills, seeds, and bones, mostly with geometric and abstract symbols that were deeply connected to their religious practices.

Now their beadwork designs began to use trade beads and include secular European floral motifs. But the Native Americans combined them with their own cosmological symbols. Frequently a cross that symbolizes the cardinal directions is worked into the overall design, for instance.

photo from Cree art reference website, Birmingham Museum

This is a Cree head-covering designed for wear by women attending Christian churches. The sides would limit peripheral vision and conceal much of the face and hair, like a nun's coif, the similar purpose. In the center of each rose winding around the face appears the cardinal directions symbol, retained and integrated into the design. It's one of the most moving objects in the exhibit, symbolic of how Native Americans at once submitted and sustained their culture even as their world was destroyed.

photo retained from online search

Even more evocative is the collection of moccasins. A large group fills one wall, decorated soft foot coverings. In most of them, one can see the shapes of toes and arches retained by supple buckskin. Sometimes one is slightly larger than its mate, revealing the anatomical disparity of foot size or the preferred lead walking foot.

Where do those feet tread now? I hope they may be wind spirits, that I can put my face up to them and tell them that we venerate them in our tragically compromised fashion.

WESTERN ARTISTS YEARLY SALE EXHIBITION

George Carlson, Witness of Time

Contemporary western genre art to be seen here, mostly cowboy and Indian portraits and historical action narratives. I want to like them, and do, but it's the landscapes that I will love unequivocally.

The paintings are beautifully well-executed, unabashedly realist, detailed, lovely warm-toned images, leaving me impressed by the painters' mastery of technique. So what's not to like? They are attractive, innocent. It's not about liking. So I worry.

Are they perhaps clichéd, grounded in sentimental populist nostalgia, less authentic as a consequence? There is also the problem of intentionally or unintentionally commodifing Native Americans, and Western history itself.

Jay Lipking, Young Girl, Profile

I love Western movies, but why paint them? Narrative genre painting is trumped by historical photography and then marginalized by modern cinema. Photographs by Edward Curtis, a George Catlin painting; I feel on more authentic ground with these. So there is is: the compromised intention makes for compromised results.

I think landscape painting seems to be on more stable political and artistic ground. The earth and its natural beauty are ageless metaphors for spirituality and transcendence, identity,survival, the American frontier and way of life. They are especially poignant as we live with the reality of the degraded beauty of wilderness.

An artist who chooses landscape, eschewing abstraction, can still be viable, though perhaps will never be fully appreciated in today's commercial museum scene.

These are the landscape painters I most admired in the exhibit: