Category Archives: Art and Art History

From Haida Gwaii to the Chicago World’s Fair and Beyond: Excerpt from ‘Skidegate House Models’

Based on over twenty years of collaborative research with the Skidegate Haida community, Skidegate House Models by Robin K. Wright features vital cultural context on the Skidegate model village carved by Haida artists for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. While promoters of the Chicago World’s Fair used the village to celebrate the perceived “progress” of the dominant society, for Skidegate residents it provided a means to preserve their history and culture.

After the exposition, the models went to the Field Museum of Natural History and many were dispersed from there to other collections, but fourteen of the model houses have not yet been located. The book provides extensive archival information and photographs that contextualize the model village and might help locate the missing houses while offering valuable insights into Northwest Coast art history. The following is an excerpt.

From the Foreword by Jisgang, Nika Collison

My name is Jisgang, I belong to the Ḵaay’ahl Laanas clan. Gaahlaay is my chief. My mother is Gid Ḵuuyas, my father was Skilay. I grew up in HlG̱aagilda Llnagaay Skidegate Village. I am one of the last generations to receive the smallpox vaccine. I was five or six when I got it. My mom explained the shot would really hurt, and probably scar a lot, showing me hers. She explained why I needed it. That is how I learned my village should have been much bigger than it was.

In 1862 colonizers purposefully introduced smallpox to the Northwest Coast, killing hundreds of thousands of Indigenous people and almost annihilating some Nations, including the Haida.1 Survivors in northern Haida Gwaii migrated to G̱aw Tlagée Old Massett in order to survive. Chief Skidegate welcomed southern survivors into the village of HlG̱aagilda. Haawa Kilslaay, sah uu dang G̱iida. Before the smallpox epidemic we had successfully kept colonists from our territories. In 1867 the colonial state of Canada was formed, with assigned authority over “Indians and Lands reserved for Indians.”2 In 1876, Canada legislated the Indian Act, which was so effective it informed parts of Apartheid. The year 1876 is also the year missionaries arrived on Haida Gwaii. They shamed and prohibited our ways, often forcing the destruction, sale, or handing-over of our belongings. Desecration of our Ancestors’ graves would soon follow “in the name of science.” Around 1883, Canada and the Church joined forces to create the horrific Indian Residential School System, which operated for more than one hundred years. In 1884, Canada legislated the Potlatch Ban, which criminalized the legal system of the Northwest Coast from 1885 to 1951. Offenders faced seizure of belongings and up to six months in jail. A final mass exodus of our Ancestors’ belongings and funerary remains would follow.

HlG̱aagilda Llnagaay, 1878. Photograph by George M. Dawson. Courtesy of the Canadian Museum of History, neg. no. PA-37756.

In other words, we were thirty years into the genocide of the Northwest Coast when James Deans traveled to Skidegate to commission a model village for the Chicago World’s Fair. [Robin K.] Wright notes that when Deans arrived, there were only about eleven poles and three longhouses still standing in Skidegate (families were largely living in colonial-style homes). Fourteen years prior, almost eighty poles of varying purpose stood in Skidegate. Deans directed artists to use an early photo of Skidegate to create their replicas. The end result was a massive model village that, while commissioned during times of duress, was built on our peoples’ own terms. It was sent to the World’s Fair along with a large collection of our peoples’ belongings, including a real-life pole, house, and canoe. When the fair ended, the village and greater collection were split up and dispersed willy-nilly around the world, far away from Haida Gwaii.

Our Ancestors did everything they could to preserve our Haida-ness. Each subsequent generation has been dedicated to the same. For decades we have been piecing ourselves, our clans, and our villages back together the same way Dr. Wright pieced the Skidegate House models back together.

Jisgang, Nika Collison

About 120 years later, Dr. Robin Wright started to piece the village model back together. For more than twenty years she searched the globe tracking down the model houses and poles; scoured archives to sort out the work of early anthropologists, photographers, missionaries, government agents, and museums; and worked with our people to sort these findings out further, along with working on Haida language, genealogies, privileges, and histories. The findings were woven together into this precious book. In piecing back together as much of our model village as she could, Dr. Robin Wright has not only created a fascinating body of critical research, she has assisted our Nation in our greater plight: piecing ourselves back together.

Model of HlG̱aagilda Llnagaay, Skidegate village, installed in the Anthropology Building at the World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893. Courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, 93-1-10/100266.1.39.

Several years ago, I was listening to a radio program on strategies of war and the annihilation of a people. In addition to destroying lives, destroying heritage was a critical tactic. Shatter identity so that the survivors don’t know who they are, where they come from, or their place in the world. I was born in 1971. The population of Skidegate numbered fewer than three hundred people. Growing up, we were called “Indians” and our home, the “Queen Charlotte Islands.” I lived with my grandparents behind the only pole left standing in our village.3 Part of my family lived “off reserve” and part off island, disenfranchised from their community through colonial regimes. Haida was rarely spoken, if at all. The were no masks, dance blankets, songs, or dancing. I didn’t have a proper name. Many didn’t. It was all silenced—hidden away in minds, archives, museums, and behind closed doors.

That was for the first few years of my life. I also grew up during a time of great cultural and political revitalization. Despite massive population loss and colonial regimes, our Ancestors preserved as much Haida knowledge as possible by employing subversive tactics and by working with anthropologists and other foreigners to record our knowledge. We started coming back out through the art, through the poles. I was seven when I witnessed the first pole to be raised in Skidegate Village in almost one hundred years, the Skidegate Dogfish Pole. Carved by my chinaay grandfather Iljuwas Bill Reid, the pole was raised in 1978, in front of the first longhouse to be built in Skidegate since the late 1800s, with a great community potlatch.4 A similar event had happened nine years earlier in the village of Old Massett, when Robert Davidson gifted his community a pole to raise. These events awakened much more than I think either artist anticipated.

My children are Haida, not Indians. They live on an archipelago called Haida Gwaii. The population of Skidegate is nine hundred strong, and more than five thousand as a Nation. My children have proper names, given in potlatch. They have attended many pole raisings in their lifetime, wearing their regalia. They are learning and growing up in the art, the language, the culture, the land and water. They are learning their family ties and their clan and nation histories. They were Haida singing and dancing in the womb.

House Model No. 5, Sgyam Sgwaan Naas, “Sparrow Hawk House,” made by Adam Brown, 1892. Courtesy of the Field Museum, cat. no. 17816. Photograph by Gail Specht.
House Model No. “2” really No. 21, Naa
Gudgiikyagangs, “People call to each other
in it,” 1892, made by Niislant, John Cross,
110 cm × 11 cm × 13 cm. Courtesy of the
Field Museum, cat. no. 17802. Photograph
by Gail Specht.

Today there are sixteen poles of varying purpose standing throughout Skidegate.5 My clan is readied for a memorial pole-raising in September 2022, and by the end of 2023, four new carved house posts will be standing at Xaaynang.nga Naay, the Skidegate Health Centre. There are nineteen poles in G̱aw Tlagée Old Massett, the most recent being raised in August 2022, marked by a two-day potlatch hosted by Christian and Candace White (Yahgu Jaanas/Laanas clan) in Old Massett. And more recently, in October 2022, a memorial pole was raised for Tlajang nang kingaas, Benjamin Ray Davidson.

We might be a far cry from eighty poles standing in Skidegate alone, but we are also a far cry from one pole left standing. Our Ancestors did everything they could to preserve our Haida-ness. Each subsequent generation has been dedicated to the same. For decades we have been piecing ourselves, our clans, and our villages back together the same way Dr. Wright pieced the Skidegate House models back together.

Like Dr. Wright’s restoring of our model village, the restoration of our world is not fully complete. Not everyone and everything has been located or gathered. There could even be a correction down the road. But we are still here—we are Haida—and we know our place in this world. My friend’s book is an important contribution to this journey. So many years of working with our people to bring critical stories together under one roof. So many names, clans, genealogies, houses, and poles reunited. When I hold this book, I am holding a part of myself, my family, our community, our Nation. When I hold this book, I am holding a part of our past, present, and future, all at the same time.

Haawa to my friend Robin for your respect, passion, and scholarship. Haawa to Haida Gwaii, our home. Haawa to the Ancestors, without your determination we would not be here as Haida. Haawa to our knowledge holders and scholars who scour their minds and the earth to gather the knowledge our Ancestors preserved. Haawa to the Supernatural, who help guide us in this work.

Notes

  1. Not just smallpox but also TB, measles, and other diseases. ↩︎
  2. BC joined in 1871. ↩︎
  3. It was raised ca. 1884 by David Shakespeare for his wife, Jane, of the Saang.ahl Staastas; see Skidegate House Models chapter 3, Model Pole No. 17, for more on that pole. ↩︎
  4. The Shakespeare and Dogfish poles stood side by side for almost a decade before the Shakespeare Pole fell in 1989. The Dogfish Pole was taken down for conservation in 2014. Both now live in the Haida Gwaii Museum. The Longhouse served as the Skidegate Band Council Headquarters through the mid-1990s. In 1998 it became the HlG̱aagilda Xaayda Kil Naay Skidegate Haida Language House, home to the Skidegtae Haida Immersion Program (SHIP). ↩︎
  5. Haida Heritage Centre-6, Cheexial-1, Lydia Wilson-1, Gah Yah-1, Skidegate-1, Sk’aadGa Naay-1, Niis Wes-1, Cumshewa-1, WiiGanad-1, Unity-1, Gidansda-1. ↩︎

Robin K. Wright is professor emerita of art history at the University of Washington, Seattle, and curator emerita of the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. Her award-winning books include A Time of Gathering and Northern Haida Master Carvers. Recent books include In the Spirit of the Ancestors (coedited with Kathryn Bunn-Marcuse) and Charles Edenshaw (coedited with Diana Augaitis).

Jisgang Nika Collison belongs to the Ḵaay’ahl Laanas of the Haida Nation. She is Executive Director and Curator of the Haida Gwaii Museum at Ḵay Llnagaay and has worked in the field of Haida language arts and culture for over two decades. Deeply committed to reconciliation, she is a senior repatriation negotiator for her Nation, pursuing reparation and relationships with mainstream museums on a global scale.

Upcoming Events

Author Robin K. Wright will share more about Skidegate House Models and her community-engaged research in conversation with Nika Collison at the following events:

  • Saturday, May 11, 2024, 7:00 pm PST at the Haida Gwaii Museum in Skidegate, B.C. Details here.
  • Tuesday, May 14, 2024, 7:00 pm PST at the Burke Museum in Seattle, WA. Register here.

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In the Spirit of the Ancestors cover

The Role of the Arts and Artists in Social Justice Movements: Editor Laura Kina on the Critical Ethnic Studies and Visual Culture Series

The Critical Ethnic Studies and Visual Culture series encourages innovative interdisciplinary antiracist work that challenges and transforms our understandings of race, ethnicity, and the visual.

As we prepare for the College Art Association (CAA) annual conference, taking place in Chicago from February 14 to 17, we are pleased to announce the inaugural series publications: Resisting the Nuclear: Art and Activism across the Pacific, edited by Elyssa Faison and Alison Fields, an interdisciplinary collection featuring historians, anthropologists, artists, and activists who explore the multifaceted forms of resistance to nuclear regimes; and Queer World Making: Contemporary Middle Eastern Diasporic Art by Andrew Gayed, building on global art histories and transnational queer theory to illuminate contemporary understandings of queer sexuality in the Middle Eastern diaspora.

Below, series editor Laura Kina shares more about what critical ethnic studies brings to the study of art and visual culture and how books in the series explore the role of the arts and artists in social justice movements, as well as the kinds of projects that will be considered and how to get in touch.

I am trained as an MFA visual artist—a painter who has been working in Asian American/Asian diasporic arts communities for over thirty years where the dividing line between artist, curator, activist, organizer, and community historian has long been blurred.

My entry to writing and editing grew organically through curating shows of fellow artists and working on public scholarship and archival work with my DePaul students for the Asian American Art Oral History Project and the Virtual Asian American Art Museum. I have since had the privilege of working with the University of Washington Press for two co-edited anthologies—with Wei Ming Dariotis, War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art, and with Jan Christian Bernabe, Queering Contemporary Asian American Art.

How can we decolonize artistic practices, pedagogy, curatorial, and art history? How can we use the arts to work towards land back; rematriation; reparations; abolition; and boycott, divest, and sanction movements? What should be made visible and what must remain opaque or only shared within specific communities? . . . These are some the challenges critical ethnic studies brings to the study of art and visual culture and that we look forward to exploring in the series.

Laura Kina

Coming out of community arts that center collaboration, I began to see intersectional and interdisciplinary scholarship on art and visual culture from social justice movement building and BIPOC knowledge making its way into the academy and popular culture. For example, terms such as settler colonialism, anti-Black-racism, structural racism, and decolonization have entered our everyday lexicon through diverse political movements including the 2016–17 #NoDPL Dakota Access Pipeline Protests, the 2020 racial reckoning in the US led by Black Lives Matter, and the current protests against the occupation of Palestine and the war in Gaza. In the last few months, Palestinian symbols of resistance—like the kufiyah, watermelon, and white kite—have also entered mainstream visual vocabulary. In the art world, questions of labor rights, censorship of artists, and questions of who is behind funding art institutions and their accountability has made headlines.

How, where, when, and who tells the stories of these complex histories through the arts? How can we decolonize artistic practices, pedagogy, curatorial, and art history? How can we use the arts to work towards land back, rematriation, reparations, abolition, and boycott, divest, and sanction movements? What should be made visible and what must remain opaque or only shared within specific communities? How do we engage visibility without falling into the trap of neoliberal visibility politics?

These are some of the challenges critical ethnic studies brings to the study of art and visual culture that we look forward to exploring in the series.

The first two works in the series, Resisting the Nuclear: Art and Activism across the Pacific and Queer World Making: Contemporary Middle Eastern Diasporic Art, reflect the goal, as outlined in our 2020 call for book proposals, to focus on art, new media, art history, visual anthropology, visual culture, craft, fashion, and other forms of cultural expression that brings together works that take up decolonization and social justice with an interdisciplinary and intersectional emphasis on race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, disability, and gender.

The series is committed to featuring books that center visual arts and media by, for, and about people of color, with themes of anti-capitalism, reparations, abolition, sovereignty, and the afterlife of slavery. Books in this series will feature critical work on white supremacy, settler colonialism, land dispossession, resource extraction, and cultural appropriation.

Aligned with the dynamic character of critical ethnic studies, the books in this series engage themes of borders, migration, diasporas, and transnationalism, and the relationship of the visual to these movements.

We welcome books that highlight not only the work of artist-activists and the role of the arts in social justice movements but books that bring together art with critical work about artistic practice. We especially encourage single-authored books, including monographs and accessibly written books that cross disciplines and reach out to wider audiences, including artists, students, and other readers interested in visual topics. We will also consider well-crafted and innovative anthologies and edited volumes.

Please send book proposals to Larin McLaughlin at lmclaugh@uw.edu.

Laura Kina is an artist and a Vincent de Paul Professor in The Art School at DePaul University. She is the coeditor of War Baby / Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art and Queering Contemporary Asian American Art.

The Critical Ethnic Studies and Visual Cultures series advisory board includes: Iyoko Day, Mount Holyoke College; Sarita See, University of California, Riverside; Guisela Latorre, The Ohio State University; and Amy Lonetree, University of California, Santa Cruz.

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Missouri Pettway’s Gee’s Bend Quilt: An Excerpt from ‘Stitching Love and Loss’ by Lisa Gail Collins

In honor of Black History Month and this year’s theme of “African Americans and the Arts,” we feature an excerpt from Stitching Love and Loss by Lisa Gail Collins, which captures the long history of African American quilt making through a moving account of Missouri Pettway’s cotton covering—a Gee’s Bend “utility quilt.”

In 1942 Missouri Pettway, newly suffering the loss of her husband, pieced together a quilt out of his old, worn work clothes. Nearly six decades later her daughter Arlonzia Pettway, approaching eighty at the time and a seasoned quiltmaker herself, readily recalled the cover made by her grieving mother within the small African American farming community of Gee’s Bend, Alabama. At once a story of grief, a quilt, and a community, Stitching Love and Loss connects Missouri Pettway’s cotton covering to the history of a place, its residents, and the work of mourning.

Placing this singular quilt within its historical and cultural context, Collins illuminates the perseverance and creativity of the African American women quilters in this rural Black Belt community.

Excerpt from Stitching Love and Loss

Not long after her husband Nathaniel’s passing, Missouri Pettway set out to create a quilt of his worn familiar clothes with the expressed intention “to remember him, and cover up under it for love.”1 Led by her intention to find comfort in his memory, she made her way through the steps in the quilt making practice that was her birthright. Seeking sanctuary and softness, she wound her way around this healing pattern, stitch by stitch, piece by piece, with the crown of her head bowing toward her heart. Missouri Pettway’s deliberate pursuit of this path—of this sustaining resource and practice deeply rooted within her homeplace—supported the grieving quilt maker and surviving spouse in making her way from holding the pieces of her loved one’s clothes in her hands and on her lap to being held by the precious utility quilt she conceived of them. Her quilt, as remembered, was done by design. From its initial conception, the ultimate aim for her completed covering was to cover her, to wrap it around her body and being—to remember her husband and experience their love.

At the heart of Arlonzia’s enduring memory of her mother’s quilt made in mourning lies a love story. This is absolutely no surprise; love is why we grieve. As remembered by the couple’s eldest daughter, the covering’s creation and its intended use were steeped in yearning. Following the early loss of her husband of over two decades, Missouri sought to cover her body with cloth that had recently covered his own. Clothing and cloth never again to be needed by him were now needed by her. Guided by intention and desire, she turned to a most intimate of art forms—one, like a second skin, that holds the body and moves with the breath—and created and completed her yearned-for quilt.

Missouri Pettway’s daughter Arlonzia Pettway sitting on her porch in Gee’s Bend, 2003. Photograph by Linda Day Clark.

After Missouri Pettway completed her quilt—after the sackinglike backing had been brought around front to form and finish its edges—how might its presence and use have helped tend to her loss? Her extant textile and her daughter’s enduring testimony are silent on this matter. I would like to imaginatively consider—grounded by an understanding of grief as at once a profound experience of distress and a profound expression of love—some of the ways Missouri Pettway’s utilitarian quilt made of her late husband’s work clothes may have been of sacred utility.

Beds know grief and for good reason. While lying in bed, there is no longer the need to hold oneself up or carry one’s weight. As a result, effort lessens and loads lighten. As grief can be exhausting and heavy, this can feel like a welcome respite. Beds physically support and stabilize the body, enabling ease and inviting rest. Quilts can assist with this, too, offering a warm cradle or caress. Supported and held by her bed in this way, perhaps Missouri Pettway’s sage and simple act of pulling her cotton quilt over her body sent a soothing signal to her mind that it was now the time for a soft pause or rest. Once swathed by the sheltering cover of her quilt, perhaps its gentle heft furthered this calming, steadying effect. With all hope, she rested in this way: braced beneath by her bed and protected on top by her cover. The former supported the weight of her body; the latter supported the weight of her grief.

Lying under her quilt, with its familiar fabric touching her skin, may have felt something like a familiar embrace. And perhaps this felt sense, this experience of seeing and feeling her loved one’s well-worn and well-remembered clothes in this way, offered the quilt maker a tender path to feel his love, remember his presence, and closely carry his memory. As memory, emotion, and the sense of smell are linked and share wide-open doors, perhaps his lingering scent, alive within the warp and weft of the cloth, also offered an opening to cultivate and continue their connection.

Missouri Pettway’s work clothes quilt, created largely out of her husband’s worn clothing while she was newly experiencing his loss.2

With the sounds and silence of the night and the giving way of the light, grief can give way to a more private, solitary mourning. While under cover of the night—and a quilt—being in bed can provide a place for needed rest and desired communion, as sleep can serve as a site of reunion, a place where lost loved ones can be found. At the same time, lying in bed leaves us alone with our innermost self and our secretly whispered words, leaving us with little choice but to meet face to face our suffering and fears. For while the body is quiet and still—while it has nowhere to go and nothing to do—the mind continues to move, sometimes, distressingly, with increased intensity. When Missouri Pettway was engaged in the seemingly solitary step of piecing her quilt top, this purposeful task may have enabled the quilt maker to shift between processing and, mercifully, pausing the pain of her loss. By contrast, this protective pacing—direct reckoning with one’s shaken inner world paired with a respite from it—was probably difficult to come by while lying awake in bed within the thick grip of grief, where the only pause to pondering the enormity of her loss was likely the elusive release of a deep sleep.

Loss and longing might be felt especially acutely as one rests the body and tries to transition into sleep. For the long nights of mourning are a time when those who are grieving a loved one are pressed to confront what they are achingly coming to realize is true: someone they love is no longer here with them on earth. That come morning, they will still be in mourning. If Missouri and Nathaniel Pettway routinely shared a bed, his missing presence would have perhaps been especially potent and palpable while lying under the warm weight of her quilt of his clothes—the now empty space that had recently held his body figuring as stark evidence of his physical absence and his lingering scent serving as a direct door to memory.

Intimately associated with life and death, beds are bound with sickness, dying, and death as well as birth. Sites of healing and love as well as loss and remembrance, beds are where we often take our first breaths and sometimes our last ones. Following nearly a year of sickness and sorrow, Nathaniel Pettway likely died at home. Struggling for nearly a year with a terminal illness, he may have spent the very last part of his journey on earth in bed, as both caregiving and homegoing commonly happen here. Bound by bed and hopefully wrapped within a warm and comforting quilt, his shrouded body, likely weak and weary, readied for eternal rest. And during this extraordinarily difficult and delicate time—when life narrows to the four corners of the bed, while its meaning infinitely expands—Missouri Pettway may have sat bedside, caring for her husband, providing a reassuring presence and supporting his dying needs. Perhaps during his final hours, she, along with other family members, kept vigil posed in prayer.

The bed where Nathaniel Pettway made his transition may also have been the same one where Missouri mourned his loss. As such, it may have been both the site of his dying and his passage and a place of her mourning and remembrance. Moreover, this soft space where the husband and father was cared for before passing on and crossing over may have also been the site where the couple’s children were conceived and first breathed life. This bed—their bed—was a place of passage. On it, with all hope, Missouri lay under her quilt of Nathaniel’s clothes and fully experienced what she had expressly sought: “to remember him, and cover up under it for love.” Embraced in this way by her quilt—tucked under its protective cover—she may have tended her grief, remembering her husband, who had recently lay dying and been laid to rest, processing his long illness and early death, facing her fears for their family’s future, feeling the immensity and finality of her loss. Held and supported by the quilt of her own creation, she likely sought the strength and found the faith to make it to morning and begin a new day. And ever so slowly—at the pace of healing—moving toward the time when the memory of her beloved would feel less like pain and more like peace, sustained by the love that lies here.

Nathaniel and Missouri Pettway’s children, Lovett and Loucastle (carrying pail), walking toward the cabins in 1937. This gathering of log and plank structures was previously the site of “the quarters,” the place where enslaved individuals and their families had lived on the former cotton plantation.3
Residents climbing the steps to a log and plank house.4
Arlonzia Pettway on the porch of her updated “Roosevelt house.” It was not until the late 1930s and early 1940s—as part of FDR’s New Deal programs—that a sizable number of Gee’s Bend households were able to purchase their local land and build modern homes on it. Although she took numerous trips well beyond the Black Belt, Arlonzia Pettway defined herself as a lifelong resident of this place. Photograph by Linda Day Clark.

Notes

  1. Arlonzia Pettway, quoted in John Beardsley, William Arnett, Paul Arnett, Jane Livingston, and Alvia Wardlaw, The Quilts of Gee’s Bend (Atlanta: Tinwood Books, 2002), 67. ↩︎
  2. Missouri Pettway, Blocks and Strips Work–Clothes Quilt, 1942, cotton, corduroy, and cotton sacking, 90 x 69 in. National Gallery of Art, Patron’s Permanent Fund and Gift of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation. Courtesy of Hazel Marks. ↩︎
  3. Arthur Rothstein, Footpaths across the Field Connect the Cabins. Gee’s Bend, Alabama, 1937. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, reproduction number LC-DIG-fsa-8b38853. ↩︎
  4. Arthur Rothstein, Cabin with Mud Chimney. Gee’s Bend, Alabama, 1937. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, reproduction number LC-DIG-fsa-8b35932. ↩︎

Lisa Gail Collins is Professor of Art and Director of American Studies on the Sarah Gibson Blanding Chair at Vassar College. Her books include The Art of History: African American Women Artists Engage the Past and New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement (coedited with Margo Natalie Crawford).

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Ten Essential Books for Your Native American Heritage Month Reading List

In recognition of Native American Heritage Month, we’ve collected some of the many books that provide testament to the enduring, resilient nature of that history. The books below feature Indigenous authors, contributors, and collaborators, reflecting our longtime commitment to sharing Native American perspectives on their cultures. These essential books will help you discover the rich contributions and history of Indigenous people—from the cultural teachings of Coast Salish elders and stories from the Northwest Coast food sovereignty movement to a celebration of the Cherokee cosmos and parka-making conversations in Southwest Alaska.

Jesintel: Living Wisdom from Coast Salish Elders
By Children of the Setting Sun Productions

“A rich visual feast that honors Pacific Northwest Indigenous life” (Library Journal), Jesintel brings the cultural teachings of nineteen Coast Salish elders to new generations through interviews and photographs. Jesintel—”to learn and grow together”—characterizes the spirit of this richly illustrated book, which illuminates the importance of ethical reciprocal relationships and the interconnectedness of places, land, water, and the spirit within all things.

A Drum in One Hand, A Sockeye in the Other: Stories of Indigenous Food Sovereignty from the Northwest Coast
By Charlotte Coté

Drawing from her academic and personal expertise, Charlotte Coté (Tseshaht/Nuu-chah-nulth) explores the politics of food sovereignty for Indigenous Peoples in the Pacific Northwest. Coté shares contemporary Nuu-chah-nulth practices of traditional food revitalization and offers evocative stories of her Tseshaht community’s and her own work to revitalize relationships to haʔum (traditional food) as a way to nurture health and wellness. As Indigenous peoples continue to face food insecurity due to ongoing inequality, environmental degradation, and the Westernization of traditional diets, Coté foregrounds healing and cultural sustenance via everyday enactments of food sovereignty.

Settler Cannabis: From Gold Rush to Green Rush in Indigenous Northern California
By Kaitlin Reed

Foregrounding Indigenous voices, experiences, and histories, Settler Cannabis offers a groundbreaking analysis of the environmental consequences of cannabis cultivation in California. Kaitlin Reed (Yurok/Hupa/Oneida) demonstrates how the “green rush” is only the most recent example of settler colonial resource extraction and wealth accumulation. Situating the cannabis industry within this broader legacy, the author traces patterns of resource rushing—first gold, then timber, then fish, and now cannabis—to reveal the ongoing impacts on Indigenous cultures, lands, waters, and bodies.

Cherokee Earth Dwellers: Stories and Teachings of the Natural World
By Christopher B. Teuton and Hastings Shade

Ayetli gadogv—to “stand in the middle”—is at the heart of a Cherokee perspective of the natural world. From this stance, Cherokee Earth Dwellers offers a rich understanding of nature grounded in Cherokee creature names, oral traditional stories, and reflections of knowledge holders. During his lifetime, elder Hastings Shade created booklets with over six hundred Cherokee names for animals and plants. With this foundational collection at its center, and weaving together a chorus of voices, this book emerges from a deep and continuing collaboration between Christopher B. Teuton (Cherokee Nation), Hastings Shade, Larry Shade, and other Cherokee speakers, educators, and cultural traditionalists. From clouds to birds, oceans to quarks, the expansive Cherokee view of nature reveals a living, communicative world and humanity’s role within it.

Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers
Edited by Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton

Using weaving techniques such as coiling and plaiting as organizing themes, editors Elissa Washuta (Cowlitz) and Theresa Warburton ground this anthology of essays by twenty-seven contemporary Native writers in the formal art of basket weaving. The result is “a veritable feast of First Nations and Native American writers that readers may otherwise never have discovered” (World Literature Today). These ambitious, creative, and visionary works demonstrate the slippery, shape-changing possibilities of Native stories and continue to animate the study and practice of distinct Native literary traditions in North America.

We Are Dancing for You: Native Feminisms and the Revitalization of Women’s Coming-of-Age Ceremonies
By Cutcha Risling Baldy

This deeply personal account of the revitalization of the women’s coming-of-age ceremony for the Hoopa Valley Tribe uses a framework of Native feminisms to locate this revival within a broad context of decolonization. Rooted in Indigenous knowledge, Risling Baldy, a member of the Hoopa Valley Tribe, brings us the voices of people transformed by cultural revitalization and considers how this renaissance of women’s coming-of-age ceremonies confounds ethnographic depictions of Native women; challenges anthropological theories about menstruation, gender, and coming-of-age; and addresses gender inequality and gender violence within Native communities.

Painful Beauty: Tlingit Women, Beadwork, and the Art of Resilience
By Megan A. Smetzer

For this first dedicated study of Tlingit beadwork, Megan A. Smetzer worked with museum collection materials, photographs, archives, and interviews with artists and elders to reframe this often overlooked artform as a site of historical negotiations and contemporary inspirations. At a time when Indigenous cultural practices were actively being repressed, beading supported cultural continuity and gave Tlingit women the freedom to innovate aesthetically, assert their clan crests and identities, support tribal sovereignty, and pass on cultural knowledge. This thoughtful and accessible book demonstrates Tlingit women’s resilience, strength, and power and contributes to the expanding literature addressing women’s artistic expressions on the Northwest Coast.

Sharing Honors and Burdens: Renwick Invitational 2023
By Lara M. Evans, Miranda Belarde-Lewis, and Anya Montiel
Copublished with the Smithsonian American Art Museum/Renwick Gallery

Based on the exhibition of the same name, this richly illustrated catalog features the work of six artists from Indigenous Nations: Joe Feddersen (Arrow Lakes/Okanagan), Erica Lord (Athabascan/Iñupiat), Geo Neptune (Passamaquoddy), sisters Lily Hope and Ursala Hudson (Tlingit), and Maggie Thompson (Fond du Luc Ojibwe). Their craft speaks to the responsibility of ushering forward cultural traditions while shaping the future with innovative works of art. Through these works, the artists share the honors and burdens that they carry. The exhibition is on view at the Smithsonian American Art Musuem’s Renwick Gallery through March 31, 2024.

The Tao of Raven: An Alaska Native Memoir
By Ernestine Hayes

Weaving together strands of memoir, contemplation, and fiction, Ernestine Hayes (Tlingit) articulates an Indigenous worldview in which all things are connected, in which intergenerational trauma creates many hardships but transformation is still possible. Using the story of Raven and the Box of Daylight (and relating it to Sun Tzu’s equally timeless Art of War), Hayes expresses an ongoing frustration and anger at the obstacles and prejudices still facing Alaska Natives in their own land, while also recounting her own story of attending and completing college in her fifties and becoming a professor and a writer. Now a grandmother and thinking very much of the generations who will come after her, Hayes speaks for herself but also has powerful things to say about the resilience and complications of her Native community.

Tengautuli Atkuk / The Flying Parka: The Meaning and Making of Parkas in Southwest Alaska
By Ann Fienup-Riordan, Alice Rearden, and Marie Meade

Parkas are part of a living tradition in southwest Alaska. Based on nearly two decades of conversations with Yup’ik sewing groups and visits to the National Museum of the American Indian and the National Museum of Natural History, this volume documents the social importance of parkas, the intricacies of their construction, and their exceptional beauty. Featuring over 170 historical photographs and contemporary images, full bilingual versions of six parka stories, and a glossary in Yup’ik and English, this book is a celebration of the vitality of these culturally important garments.

Not Native American Art: Q&A with Janet Catherine Berlo

The faking of Native American art objects has proliferated as their commercial value has increased, but even a century ago experts were warning that the faking of objects ranging from catlinite pipes to Chumash sculpture was rampant. Through a series of historical and contemporary case studies, Janet Catherine Berlo engages with troubling and sometimes confusing categories of inauthenticity in Not Native American Art: Fakes, Replicas, and Invented Traditions.

Based on decades of research as well as interviews with curators, collectors, restorers, replica makers, reenactors, and Native artists and cultural specialists, Not Native American Art examines the historical and social contexts within which people make replicas and fakes or even invent new objects that then become “traditional.” Berlo follows the unexpected trajectories of such objects, including Northwest Coast carvings, “Navajo” rugs made in Mexico, Zuni mask replicas, Lakota-style quillwork, and Mimbres bowl forgeries.

In the foreword to the book, Joe Horse Capture (A’aniiih), Vice President of Native Collections and Ahmanson Curator of Native American History and Culture at the Autry Museum of the American West, calls Not Native American Art “a must-have for those interested in the complexity of the creation of Native art by both Native and non-Native artists.”

Berlo shares more about the book in the Q&A below.

First, can you touch on your background and share some of your first encounters with fakes, replicas, and forgeries of Native art?

While my PhD is in pre-Columbian art and archaeology of Mesoamerica, I fell in love with Native North American art soon after I started teaching in 1979. When I first encountered nineteenth-century Plains ledger drawings, which were just beginning to be talked about then, I knew immediately I had to learn more about these. Pretty soon, Latin America was in my rearview mirror, and I was fully engaged in studying and writing about Indigenous arts of North America.

In the 1980s scholars of pre-Columbian art were seeing a lot of fakes on the market, but it wasn’t until the 1990s that we fully began to recognize that the field of North American Native art was full of them too. One drawing book, alleged to be “rare Hidatsa drawings,” was offered for sale at a major auction house in 1997, even after I—and other experts—warned them that these were not authentic nineteenth-century drawings. This was a real eye-opener for me. The aims of the art market and the aims of scholars and Native people are very often at odds. The market often cares less about authenticity than about profit.

For several decades now, Northwest Coast carvers have been trying to educate the general public about the value of their work, and that to carve particular clan images is a privilege and a right. It is not available to just anyone, whether they are making a one-of-a-kind object or putting a crest on a manufactured T-shirt.

Janet Catherine Berlo

How did your research for this book take shape?

Because of my experience with the “rare Hidatsa drawings,” which I am sure were drawn by a twentieth-century Mexican collector and artist purely as an entertainment, not as a forgery, I decided to organize a panel on fakes and forgeries, called “Not Native American Art,” (which came to be the title of my book) at a meeting of the College Art Association in 2008. After the panel, I asked the then editorial director of the University of Washington Press if she would be interested in a volume of edited essays on the topic, to which she replied, “No. I would be interested in a book written by you on the topic.” That put the idea in my head, and I kept throwing interesting information in a file for future use. By 2012 this became one of my main research projects, though it took me a long time to finish the book. Everywhere I looked, there were more objects and issues to write about. My colleagues have been teasing me for years that surely there will be volumes one through four of this book!

You note in the introduction that the book isn’t a polemic against non-Native makers of Native-style art. Rather, as a historian, you’re seeking to understand the social contexts within which these objects are made. Can you share examples from the book that touch on the motives of non-Native makers?

I write about a married couple in southern Arizona who used to make exact replicas of ancient Mimbres pottery, using the same clay and firing methods of ancient potters. They were motivated by love of the materials and by trying to solve certain technical problems of how such vessels were formed, painted, and fired. They sold their work as replicas, but they also created a body of very specific knowledge about the technical aspects of this work to be kept in a museum in southern Arizona.

I also write about a European man who married into a Lakota family and became intensely interested in the quillwork and beadwork made by elderly women he came to know quite well. In neither case were these makers trying to fool anyone or present their work as Native-made. But they were deeply interested in the materials, the meaning, and the artistry of such works.

Replica of Mimbres bowl re-assembled by author from potsherds provided by Paul and Lauren Thornburg, 2011. “Over the decade that this book was in progress, this bowl became a metonym for the entire project and the many layers of artifice, talent, research, and yearning that underpin so much of what is ‘not Native American art,'” writes Berlo.

What are some questions and considerations unique to Native art that arise from replication?

More than in most areas of the world, many Native North American cultures have strict customs—or even rules—about who may make certain images. “Copyright,” so to speak, may be held by an individual, a family, or a clan. There are protocols to follow if others seek to use particular images. Some images are sacred and are not for use by outsiders at all.

How has tourism impacted the global appropriation of Native art?

Tourism, globalization, and the internet have had a huge impact on everything that is made in one culture for sale in another, be it West African masks, Indonesian textiles, or Native North American beadwork. Copies abound, and these range from machine-made replicas to hand-carved or hand-woven versions made half a world away.

Just last month I was shopping for a Middle Eastern carpet, and as I was looking through the stacks, the shop owner said to me, “This one is a copy of a Navajo design. It is made in Nepal by Tibetan weavers.” In fact, it did not look very Navajo at all! I didn’t tell him that I have a passage in my book about that very thing, but I did say, “Designs go all around the world, don’t they? You may know that at the end of the nineteenth century, some Navajo weavers were making their own versions of Middle Eastern carpets, because traders thought those designs would sell well in urban areas of the eastern United States.”

So these issues are not new. I was surprised to find in my research how often an expert in 1910, for example, would say about catlinite pipes or ancient pottery: “Of course there are so many fakes now; it is hard to know what is authentic.”

With an increase in cultural awareness around questions of authenticity, as well as the rise in value of Native objects in the arts marketplace, you say in your book that there is more urgency today around issues of forgery or misattribution. What do you hope readers take away from your book?

First of all, I hope that the very different examples that I discuss in-depth will show readers that there is no one-size-fits-all answer to these issues. A Northwest Coast mask made by a carver in Indonesia in 2010 who has been given one book to copy from and told that the middleman will buy as many as he can carve is quite different from a mask made by an expert non-Native carver in Washington State who has worked side-by-side with Native carvers for decades. These two situations should be understood as different phenomena. For several decades now, Northwest Coast carvers have been trying to educate the general public about the value of their work, and that to carve particular clan images is a privilege and a right. It is not available to just anyone, whether they are making a one-of-a-kind object or putting a crest on a manufactured T-shirt.

The role of historians and art historians is to look at actions and objects made and used in very particular ways at different moments in time. And it is important for us to understand the diverse meanings that accrue to actions and objects in varied times and places.

Janet Catherine Berlo is professor emerita of art history and visual and cultural studies at the University of Rochester. She is editor of The Early Years of Native American Art History and coauthor of Native North American Art, along with many exhibition catalogues over the last four decades.

Don’t Miss These Exhibitions on View and Accompanying Catalogs Available through UW Press

The University of Washington Press is proud to co-publish and distribute a number of catalogs in conjunction with key exhibitions currently on view or forthcoming at art museums in the Pacific Northwest, United States, and around the world. These books bring extraordinary exhibitions to the page through high-quality reproductions and illuminating essays by curators, academics, and artists. We hope you’ll have a chance to see some of these exhibitions in person, and we invite you to explore the accompanying catalogs below.

Renegade Edo and Paris: Japanese Prints and Toulouse-Lautrec

Both the Edo period (1603–1868) in Japan and the late nineteenth century in France witnessed a multitude of challenges to the status quo from the rising middle class. In Edo (present-day Tokyo), townspeople pursued hedonistic lifestyles as a way of defying the state-sanctioned social hierarchy that positioned them at the bottom. Their new pastimes supplied subject matter for ukiyo-e (pictures of the floating world). Many such pictures arrived in France in the 1860s, a time when French art and society were undergoing substantial changes. Fin-de-siècle Paris, like Edo before it, saw the rise of antiestablishment attitudes and a Bohemian subculture. As artists searched for fresh and more expressive forms, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901) and his contemporaries were drawn to novel Japanese prints.

While ukiyo-e’s formal influences on Toulouse-Lautrec and his peers have been well studied, the shared subversive hedonism that underlies these artworks has been less examined. Drawing from the Seattle Art Museum’s Japanese prints collection and from one of the most extensive private holdings of Toulouse-Lautrec prints, the catalog offers a critical look at the renegade spirit inhabiting the graphic arts in both Edo and Paris, highlighting the social impulses behind a burgeoning art production.

The exhibition is on view at the Seattle Asian Art Museum through December 3, 2023.

Barbara Earl Thomas: The Illuminated Body

A talented visual storyteller, Barbara Earl Thomas has drawn from history, literature, folklore, mythology, and biblical stories over her forty-year career to reflect the social fabric of our times. Thomas’s figural and narrative imagery has a deeply philosophical and emotional force, and light and dark have been especially potent concepts in her work.

This book of new works meditates on the visual experience of the body within a physical and metaphorical world of light and shadow. Based on real people, the portraits “elevate to the magnificent” her family, friends, and neighbors, as well as cultural icons of the African American literary landscape. Thomas’s illumination of the human figure through her light-filled artworks and portraiture encourages the viewer to reflect on how we communicate ourselves to the world and how we perceive those among us.

The catalog also examines the conceptual, visual, and processual links Thomas makes between various media, contextualizing the artist’s newest body of work in light of her personal artistic path, and also in terms of her larger creative influences and art historical connections. Significantly, this is the first time the artist’s glass artworks will be brought into dialog with her works on paper and sculptural media.

The exhibition is on view at the Chrysler Museum of Art through August 20, 2023; the Wichita Art Museum, October 7, 2023–January 14, 2024; and the Arthur Ross Gallery at the University of Pennsylvania, February 17–May 21, 2024.

Sharing Honors and Burdens: Renwick Invitational 2023

Featuring all Native American and Alaska Native artists for the first time in the invitational’s history, Sharing Honors and Burdens focuses on fresh and nuanced visions by six artists from Indigenous Nations. Their craft speaks to the responsibility of ushering forward cultural traditions while shaping the future with innovative works of art. Through these works, the artists share the honors and burdens that they carry.

The exhibition and accompanying catalog feature the work of Joe Feddersen (Arrow Lakes/Okanagan), Erica Lord (Athabascan/Iñupiat), Geo Neptune (Passamaquoddy), sisters Lily Hope and Ursala Hudson (Tlingit), and Maggie Thompson.

While the artists’ contemporary craft is rooted in tradition, their art exemplifies responsibilities and relationships shared by everyone today. Contributions from Lara Evans (Cherokee), Miranda Belarde-Lewis (Zuni/Tlingit), and Anya Montiel (Mexican/Tohono O’odham descent) contextualize how Indigenous worldviews are shaping the art world.

The exhibition is on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery through March 31, 2024.

Myrlande Constant: The Work of Radiance

A retrospective of the groundbreaking 30-year-long career of Myrlande Constant, an artist renowned for her monumental, hand-beaded textiles, The Work of Radiance is the first solo show of a Haitian woman in a major U.S. museum. Similarly, the accompanying catalog is the first monograph devoted solely to a Haitian woman artist. In an interview with NPR, co-curator Jerry Philogene noted how it will continue to advance the study of Caribbean art.

Constant’s intricately beaded pieces build on the drapo Vodou tradition, depicting the lwa (spirits) as well as scenes of everyday life conducted in their company, unabashedly visualizing the permeable boundaries between spirits and humans. Few drapo artists have been as influential or ambitious as Constant. Her introduction of the tambour stitch to the drapo genre added narrative and history to the art form and enabled her to create densely detailed imagery.

Essays in the book written by curators, academics, artists, and literary specialists examine Constant’s oeuvre through interdisciplinary lenses; situate her hand-made, beaded textiles within Haitian Vodou practices and contemporary art of the African diaspora; spotlight the evolution of her artistic vision and innovative techniques; and reflect on her impact on art making in Haiti and beyond.

The exhibition is on view at the Fowler Museum at UCLA through August 27, 2023.

China’s Hidden Century

In a global first, the resilience and innovation of 19th-century China is revealed in a major new exhibition at the British Museum, lauded as “atmospherically designed” (The Guardian) and a “revelation” (The Observer).

Cultural creativity in China between 1796 and 1912 demonstrated extraordinary resilience in a time of warfare, land shortages, famine, and uprisings. Innovation can be seen in material culture (including print, painting, calligraphy, textiles, jewelry, ceramics, lacquer, arms and armor, and photography) during a century in which China’s art, literature, crafts, and technology faced unprecedented exposure to global influences.

Until recently the nineteenth century in China has been defined as an era of cultural stagnation. Built on new research, this “superlative” book (The Observer) sets out a fresh understanding of this important period and creates a detailed visual account of responses to war, technology, urbanization, political transformations, and external influences.

The narratives are brought to life and individualized through illustrated biographical accounts that highlight the diversity of voices and experiences contributing to this fascinating, turbulent period in Chinese history.

The exhibition is on view at the British Museum through October 8, 2023.

Park Dae Sung: Ink Reimagined

Contemporary Korean artist Park Dae Sung works in the traditional medium of ink painting while transforming familiar Korean landscapes with his modern and imaginative interpretations of the natural world. Park, who lost his left arm and both parents at the age of five and is entirely self-taught, has said, “Nature is my teacher.” He devoted sixty years to mastering traditional brush and ink techniques and established his own innovative landscape style, broadening his knowledge through extensive global travel and endless practice. His visually striking paintings are gigantic in size yet contain an aesthetic sensibility.

Ink Reimagined illuminates the artist’s paintings through 150 full-color images, an interview with Park, and six scholarly essays exploring his diverse subjects, such as calligraphy, landscape, animals, and still life. In addition to telling the artist’s remarkable life story, the contributors trace the rich history of Korean ink painting from the 1950s to today. This book will enlighten Western readers, deepen the understanding of Park’s modernized style of Korean ink painting, and inspire interest in the long tradition of East Asian ink painting, as well as contemporary Korean art and culture.

The exhibition will be on view at the Charles B. Wang Center at Stony Brook University, September 14–December 10, 2023; and the Ridderhof Martin Gallery and duPont Gallery at the University of Mary Washington, October 26–December 10, 2023.

Image of book, Spatial Dunhuang, stood up at an angle to show spine

Experiencing the Mogao Caves: Excerpt from Spatial Dunhuang by Wu Hung

Constructed over a millennium from the fourth to fourteenth centuries CE near Dunhuang, an ancient border town along the Silk Road in northwest China, the Mogao Caves comprise the largest, most continuously created, and best-preserved treasure trove of Buddhist art in the world.

Previous overviews of the art of Dunhuang have traced the caves’ unilinear history. In the newly released Spatial Dunhuang, renowned Chinese art historian Wu Hung examines the caves from the perspective of space, treating them as physical and historical sites that can be approached, entered, and understood sensually. The book includes more than 100 photographs as well as diagrams that further illustrate the actual experience of the people who built and used the Mogao Caves. Here, we feature an excerpt and share a look inside the book.

The scholarship of an era must have new materials and new questions. Utilizing these materials to explore questions gives rise to new trends in the scholarship of the time. Scholars who can participate in these trends are said to be yuliu (“entering the currents,” to borrow a phrase from Buddhism). Scholars who cannot participate in these trends are said to be buyuliu (“not entering the currents”). This is a constant principle in academic history past and present. It is not something that cloistered scholars would be able to comprehend.

—Chen Yinke, “Chen Yuan Dunhuang jieyu lu xu”

Written nearly a century ago, Chen Yinke’s words can still be considered a “constant principle in academic history past and present,” but they require us to rethink the relationship between “materials” and “questions” in academic research.1 It must be noted that, when we invoke this passage now, “the time” no longer refers to 1930, when he wrote that text; it is the present, ninety years later. In the intervening time, Dunhuangology, or Dunhuang studies (Dunhuang xue), has grown from an obscure sideline into a broad field of knowledge, and the art history of Dunhuang has matured out of virtually nothing into a distinct branch of scholarly research.2

When Chen wrote that passage, scholars around the world had just recognized the historical value of the hidden manuscripts discovered in the Library Cave at Dunhuang. People saw only the tip of a vast iceberg, the rest of which was still waiting to be explored and understood. The state of Dunhuang studies is decidedly different today. Most of the Dunhuang manuscripts held in institutions all over the world have been reproduced and published, and the beautiful sculptures and wall paintings of the Mogao Caves have been repeatedly presented in massive, gorgeous catalogs. Without leaving the house, people can now use the internet to enter the virtual caves that the Dunhuang Research Academy has replicated with 3-D technologies. Are these still “new materials”? My answer would be both yes and no; the key is whether there are new questions leading us to explore the unknown dimensions of this data. Chen’s idea that “the scholarship of an era must have new materials and new questions” should thus be reinterpreted: whereas the newly discovered Dunhuang manuscripts and artworks led to new research questions a century ago, today new questions compel us to re-excavate these materials. Without research there would be no new questions, but if there were no new questions, any materials, even if previously unknown, could only support the existing view.

When people visit the Mogao Caves, the place they see is certainly not arranged in chronological order. Rather, caves of disparate sizes are laid out unevenly and often overlap, transforming a one-kilometer-long cliff face into a magnificent yet disorienting honeycomb.

Wu Hung

In this book, I have chosen to re-excavate materials related to the art of Dunhuang through the perspective of space, in the hope that this perspective will help reveal new layers of meaning for these materials. I say this because, although there are countless overviews of the art of Dunhuang, the framework is generally temporal. Guided by the dynasties of China’s past, these accounts present a linear history of the Mogao Caves and the other cave complexes at Dunhuang. Of course, this is an effective, and one might say indispensable, method. But we should also note that its foundation is history, not art; the latter encompasses the synchronic presence of architecture, sculpture, and painting in actual space, not diachronic events and biographies in a history book. When people visit the Mogao Caves, the place they see is certainly not arranged in chronological order. Rather, caves of disparate sizes are laid out unevenly and often overlap, transforming a one-kilometer-long cliff face into a magnificent yet disorienting honeycomb. This “undigested” spatial experience is what conventional art historical narratives want to overcome: by classifying and dating heterogeneous caves according to content and style, and then reorganizing them into a linear historical progression, conventional art history creates a neat sequence out of the Mogao Caves. This sequence exists only in texts, however. Having “absorbed” the tangible yet chaotic caves into an orderly chronological development, this sequence supplants the actual place and hinders perceptions and explorations of space.

In an essay on the relationship between time and space, the psychologist and art theorist Rudolf Arnheim wrote: “The time dimension possesses no sensory medium of its own,” but space “is directly embodied in the visual world.”3 In this sense, this book’s proposition to reinvestigate the art of Dunhuang from a spatial perspective entails two basic methods. First, we will take the caves as they actually are as the focus of sustained art historical investigation and elucidation. Second, we will attempt to understand the caves’ historical meaning beginning with visitors’ experiences. These two methods fuse with and complement each other in the concept of space, because space is humanity’s perception of the objective world, rather than the objective world itself. As Arnheim defined it: “What we call Space, then, is the perceptual system that controls the relations between independent object systems.”4 With regard to the Mogao Caves, this perceptual system transforms the caves into features such as dimensions, shapes, directions, distances, proportions, areas, borders, and centers. It also connects the appearances of the caves seen from different distances into the continuous experience of space—from the mountain range on the horizon, to the cliff face covered in caves, to the thousands of deities emerging from the darkness inside the caves. The instruments used to sense space are, first, the body and, then, the eye. Reinvestigating the artistic materials of Dunhuang from the perspective of space requires activating the body’s key role. When recently discussing how to look at a work of sculpture, the art critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote: “Clear your mind. Let your body tell you what’s happening. Then your mind may start up again, pondering the work’s significance.”5 This provides an appropriate explanation of this volume’s title—Spatial Dunhuang: Experiencing the Mogao Caves.

Notes

1. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
2. Zhao Shengliang, Dunhuang shiku yishu jianshi, 37–41.
3. Arnheim, “A Stricture on Space and Time,” 653.
4. Arnheim, “A Stricture on Space and Time,” 649.
5. Schjeldahl, “Richard Serra Will Jolt You Awake,” 74–75.

Wu Hung is Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor in Chinese Art History at the University of Chicago. He is the author of fifteen books and anthologies, including Story of Ruins: Presence and Absence in Chinese Art and Visual Culture and Contemporary Chinese Art: A History.

Attending CAA? Save 30% on UW Press Books

We look forward to connecting with everyone at the 2023 College Art Association annual meeting, taking place in New York City on February 15-18.

Be sure to visit UW Press in the Book and Trade Fair at booth 221 for a 30% discount on new and notable titles. We have a rich and varied catalog in Asian art, Native American and Indigenous art, visual culture, and more. Our virtual exhibit is now open, and you can take early advantage of the conference discount with code WCAA23 at checkout. The code will be valid for CAA members through March 15, 2023.

Discover New and Notable Books

Learn About Our Art and Visual Culture Series

Native Art of the Pacific Northwest: A Bill Holm Center Series

Publishing important new research on the Native art and culture of the greater Pacific Northwest, this series aims to foster appreciation of the dynamic cultural and artistic expressions of the Indigenous peoples of the region. Grounded in art history, the series encompasses investigations of historical productions and contemporary manifestations of cultural expression as well as the important intersections between time, place, technique, and viewpoint.

Critical Ethnic Studies and Visual Culture

This new book series engages insights from critical ethnic studies and visual culture, and encourages innovative interdisciplinary antiracist work that challenges and transforms our understanding of race, ethnicity, and the visual. Focusing on art, new media, art history, visual anthropology, visual culture, craft, fashion, and other forms of cultural expression, the series brings together works that engage decolonization and social justice with an intersectional emphasis on race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, disability, and gender.

See What’s New and Forthcoming from Our Publishing Partners

Black History Month Book List

In celebration of Black History Month, we invite you to check out recent books as well as select titles from our backlist in Pacific Northwest, African American, and Black Diaspora historical studies that speak to the profound legacy of Black Americans and this year’s theme of Black resistance.

Black Lives in Alaska: A History of African Americans in the Far Northwest

Centering the agency and diversity of Black Alaskans, this book chronicles how Alaska’s Black population, though small, has had an outsized impact on the culture and civic life of the region. Alaska’s history of race relations and civil rights reminds the reader that the currents of discrimination and its responses—determination, activism, and perseverance—are American stories that might be explored in the unlikeliest of places.

The Forging of a Black Community: Seattle’s Central District from 1870 through the Civil Rights Era

University of Washington Emeritus Professor of American History Quintard Taylor’s meticulously researched account is essential to understanding the history and present of the largest black community in the Pacific Northwest. The second edition features a new foreword and afterword.

Revolution to Evolution: The Story of the Office of Minority Affairs & Diversity at the University of Washington

Born from a national movement in the late 1960s seeking to address structural and cultural racism, the Office of Minority Affairs & Diversity (OMA&D) started as a core group of Black Student Union leaders at the UW who demanded changes in how the school served students of color. In a new book releasing February 21, legendary founding member Emile Pitre shares deep insight into the making of the institution through candid interviews, letters, and reflections of those who participated across decades.

Emerald Street: A History of Hip Hop in Seattle

In this rich narrative, Daudi Abe draws on interviews with artists and journalists to trace how hip hop flourished in the Seattle scene. He shows how Seattle hip-hop culture goes beyond art and music, influencing politics, the relationships between communities of color and law enforcement, the changing media scene, and youth outreach and educational programs.

The Portland Black Panthers: Empowering Albina and Remaking a City

Combining histories of the city and its African American community with interviews with former Portland Panthers and other key players, this long-overdue account adds complexity to our understanding of the protracted civil rights movement throughout the Pacific Northwest.

Black Women in Sequence: Re-Inking Comics, Graphic Novels, and Anime

Beginning with the 1971 appearance of the first Black female superheroine in a comic book—the Skywald Publications character “the Butterfly”—artist, curator, and writer Deborah Elizabeth Waley examines the representation, production, and transnational circulation of women of African descent in the sequential art world.

Migrating the Black Body: The African Diaspora and Visual Culture

How is the travel of black bodies reflected in reciprocal black images? How is blackness forged and remade through diasporic visual encounters and reimagined through revisitations with the past? This volume brings together an international group of scholars and artists who explore these questions in visual culture for the historical and contemporary African diaspora.

Love for Liberation: African Independence, Black Power, and a Diaspora Underground

Through interviews with activists, extensive archival research, and media analysis, Robin Hayes reveals how Black Power and African independence activists created a diaspora underground, characterized by collaboration and reciprocal empowerment. Together, they redefined racial discrimination as an international human rights issue and laid the groundwork for future transnational racial justice movements, such as Black Lives Matter.

Louisiana Creole Peoplehood: Afro-Indigeneity and Community

Over the course of more than three centuries, the diverse communities of Louisiana have engaged in creative living practices to forge a vibrant, multifaceted, and fully developed Creole culture. Engaging themes as varied as foodways, queer identity, health, historical trauma, language revitalization, and diaspora, this volume explores vital ways a specific Afro-Indigenous community asserts agency while promoting cultural sustainability, communal dialogue, and community reciprocity against the backdrop of ongoing anti-Blackness and Indigenous erasure.

Barbara Earl Thomas: The Geography of Innocence

Artist Barbara Earl Thomas’s body of work collected here offers a reexamination of Black portraiture and the preconceived dichotomies of innocence and guilt and sin and redemption, and the ways in which these notions are assigned and distorted along cultural and racial lines.

Gifts from Their Grandmothers: Megan Smetzer on “Painful Beauty”

A common thread running through the contemporary artworks included in my book, Painful Beauty, is the deep respect for the tangible and intangible gifts received by the artists from their mothers and grandmothers through the beadwork they created. Two ephemeral fragments—a family snapshot of a mother and daughter beading moccasins and a paper beadwork pattern stored in a fruitcake tin—inspired the poignant and powerful artworks by Larry McNeil and Tanis S’eiltin that are critical to my own consideration of the histories of Tlingit beadwork.

Tlingit mothers and grandmothers in Southeast Alaska and elsewhere have known the power of beadwork to feed their families and also affirm thousands of years of connections to the land and its bountiful resources. Yet throughout the twentieth century, their beading has been dismissed by many scholars and collectors as derivative and inauthentic. Tlingit communities, however, have long recognized the strength and resilience of these women through the overt racism and discrimination brought to bear by the institutions of settler colonialism. Through the generosity of the descendants of these beaders, who are telling their stories through contemporary artistic production, the historical significance and impact of these powerful Indigenous women is being shared more widely with the public.

I was first drawn to Larry McNeil’s photographic collage, Once Upon a Time in America, because of the 1943 snapshot at its center depicting his mother Anita McNeil (kaajee seidee) and grandmother Mary Brown Betts (kah saa nák) holding and sewing beaded moccasins. Here was a beautiful illustration of the intangible intergenerational knowledge that fueled so much beading in the mid-twentieth century. I knew, from archival research, that around five hundred women had beaded moccasins and other work for sale through the Alaska Native Arts and Crafts Cooperative from the 1930s to the 1970s. Many contemporary artists I have spoken with shared memories of watching or helping their grandmothers with beaded work. In this print and in his writing, McNeil foregrounds the power of these women through a seemingly mundane activity, which, in fact, was central to their fight for equal education as well as perpetuating intangible Tlingit ways of knowing in a difficult and discriminatory era. I am deeply grateful to Larry McNeil and his sisters, Helen and Patty, for sharing stories of their mother and grandmother with me.

Larry McNeil, Once Upon a Time in America from Fly by Night Mythology series, 2002. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Over the years Tanis S’eiltin and I have discussed octopus bags—distinctive pouches with four pairs of “tentacles” made from wool and beaded with seaweed and floral designs—and how they express historical trade relationships with interior peoples as well as the ways in which Tlingit women transformed them aesthetically to better represent local knowledge. When I first saw photographs of S’eiltin’s untitled armor-like floor-length coat featuring an oversized beadwork pattern depicting an octopus, I was thrilled to see how she had transformed the idea of an octopus bag into a life-size work celebrating Tlingit women.

During my visit to see her coat, Tanis mentioned that she had a fruitcake tin filled with beadwork patterns that dated to her great-grandmother’s era. I was nearly brought to tears when she brought it out. I had been told of these tins filled with patterns, but this was the first time one was shared with me. We pulled out hundreds of delicate pieces of paper, cut from old envelopes and cookbooks, and Tanis shared stories of the women, including her great-grandmother Mary Barries and her mother Maria Ackerman Miller (Ldaneit), who filled the tin over the years. These patterns and others like them adorned hundreds, if not thousands of pairs of moccasins made for sale throughout the twentieth century. The oversize octopus pattern on the coat foregrounds those powerful Tlingit women and their centrality to trade in all its forms, including the relationships that brought octopus bags and other treasures to Southeast Alaska. S’eiltin has drawn inspiration from this battered “box of treasures” to create work for her own children and grandchildren to teach them about their matrilineal legacies. I am so grateful for the opportunity Tanis has given me to write about her work.

Tanis S’eiltin, Untitled, 2017. Photo courtesy of the author.

Tanis S’eiltin’s fruitcake tin holding three generations of beading patterns. Photo courtesy of the author.

Tanis S’eiltin, Untitled, 2017. Photo courtesy of the author.

I extend my gratitude to all Tlingit people, past and present, who have always expressed longstanding cultural practices through the incorporation of new ideas and materials in innovative and creative ways. The histories and stories shared in Painful Beauty are a testament to the power of their art and the strength of their resilience.

Megan A. Smetzer is lecturer of art history at Capilano University.