ATADA News, Winter, 2008
Thomas Murray, ATADA President
From the President
To the ATADA Membership, the role of President is, in large measure, an honorary post. Nothing would get done if the responsibility for ATADA's progress were up to me.
Thankfully for the organization, it is not! Rather, to paraphrase Sir Isaac Newton, "Pigmaei gigantum humeris impositi plusquam ipsi gigantes vident," the president is more of "a dwarf standing on the shoulders of giants."
And to that end, I would like to acknowledge straight away the Herculean efforts of three of our own, Arch Thiessen, Alice Kaufman and Weston Pritts, without whom we would never bear witness to an online directory with great images, accurate addresses and an aesthetic suitable for people who are supposed to know about art! This change represents a significant advance for ATADA and is the first "proof" that we are doing something for our membership commiserate with the dues increase. Thanks to their efforts, we look good to the world and I thank them for it! With time, it is certain that we will improve and fine-tune our website, newsletter and directory but the yeoman's task is done and I call for three cheers for our Webmaster, Executive Director and Graphic Designer, Here, Here!!!
As mentioned in an earlier missive, an improvement to the ATADA News might come from a greater diversity of so called "filler images" - the visuals that take up spaces between columns of text - thus providing the opportunity for us to learn from the great pool of world experts that are among our membership. I urge you to take the time to send images of publishable resolution of marvelous objects you have now or have sold in the past, but are worthy of your name and this magazine, to either Alice or Wes directly. In addition, it would be great if people have articles they have written and would like to share for the same reason.
The first Postcard, my "Sitka, A Great Day" actually was an e-mail report I wrote to Alice last summer that she insisted others would like to read. I thank her for her encouragement and hope she is right - and that many of you will be inspired to head North and see for yourselves what a marvel the Sheldon Jackson Museum really is.
In addition, I very much want to thank Rosemary Carlton, SJM's chief curator, through whose boundless generosity not only was I able to photograph their reserve collection but was given the privilege of publication to share these great works of art with ATADA. To my reckoning, included are some of the absolute finest objects ever created, and I'm delighted to share them with you, as seen on the cover and throughout this issue. I particularly want to draw notice to how Rosemary Carlton, by this gesture, expresses a spirit of cooperation between museums, dealers and collectors, a goal ATADA seeks to foster. I propose here and now an ATADA grant to the Sheldon Jackson Museum to further their goals of education, local/indigenous and international, about the great human heritage that is Alaskan art.
Finally, a blessing on the members for the recent and upcoming shows; I hope all the dealers may find great clients and all curators and collectors may find fabulous pieces! Happy New Year!
Thomas Murray
Editor's Notebook
"That vision thing."
Although President George H. W. Bush, # 41, claims never to have had what he called "that vision thing," the same cannot be said of ATADA's president, Thomas Murray.
Tom clearly saw the need for ATADA to become a bigger part of the global market for tribal and American Indian art, and saw a way to start accomplishing that goal. The new online Directory at www.atada.org is a first and major start. Our printed 2008 Directory is Step Two, as ATADA plans to send out a copy to every subscriber of Tribal Arts magazine, thus exposing ATADA members' material to about 4000 collectors around the world.
We hope that all of you - and those other 4000 readers - will enjoy the new printed Directory, and that dealers will post new online images as often as once a month, and that collectors around the world will habitually access the website to see the new material.
A big thank you also goes out to our members, who adapted to the new technological requirements with grace, and to all of you who paid your dues so we could move ATADA towards its future in the worldwide marketplace. An equally big thank you goes to ATADA's webmaster, Arch Thiessen, and our graphic designer, Weston Pritts, who understood Tom's vision and made it happen.
Alice Kaufman
In Memoriam: Betty David, 1938-2007
To quote her family, "She is survived by her daughters, Rachel, Sarah, and Lily, and a body of Native American artwork that has contributed to the tapestry of her proud heritage." For more information, please access www.bettydavid.com.
Postcard:
"Sitka, A Great Day"
Thomas Murray, July, 2007
Dear All,
I have just had an absolutely marvelous experience. I got to see an unbelievable collection of Eskimo masks and other artifacts at the Sheldon Jackson Museum in Sitka, Alaska. The primary collection on view was already "top of the top," presented in the Victorian style of an early anthropology museum like at the Pitt-Rivers in Oxford and the Museum of South Australia in Adelaide, another World Heritage site.
Sheldon Jackson is located next to the campus of the former college of the same name that was originally started asa Presbyterian school for local Alaska Natives, Tlingit, for the most part. But the man who started the institution in 1887 (for whom it is named) realized that tribal cultures were changing rapidly and he set about collecting objects from all over Alaska, and what a job he did! Seal gut costumes, harpoons, basketry, weavings, carvings, ivory objects, totem poles, you name it, he collected it, and what is great is that every piece is early. I love this art, and believe me, it does not get better than this!
The public gallery of the museum should be enough for anyone, but the exceptionally kind and generous chief curator, Rosemary Carlton, met me on a Sunday, giving up her precious day of gardening so that I might visit the museum's back room. I was privileged to look into every drawer and photograph all the objects on reserve, each a masterpiece greater than the last; a surreal opportunity to view surreal masks. I have only had a couple of other experiences of equal transcendence, i.e. feasting my eyes on Cook Period Polynesian art while perusing the 18th Century storerooms of the Kunstkamera Museum of Anthropology of Peter the Great in St. Petersburg; and for weavings, nothing can beat the good fortune of viewing the greatest collection of Indonesian textiles in Europe whilst in the attic of the Tropen Museum, Amsterdam, with the deeply knowledgeable and charming curator Itie van Hout. But this small museum in Sitka held its own, even amongst that stiff competition!
My visit to the Sheldon Jackson Museum was the highlight of the trip to the Great North, the primary purpose of my whole adventure. This encounter more than lived up to my hopes; it went beyond my wildest dreams. I highly recommend this experience as a tonic for the spirit, an inoculation against the incursions of modern life into one's inner psyche.
Sheldon Jackson not only tried to save indigenous souls through the Christian Faith; by preserving their marvelous shamanic objects, he may well have saved our souls as well.
Wishing all the best,
-TM
Kennewick Man
Updates
Oct. 4, 2007
A Senate committee has approved a bill that could clear the way for Native Americans to claim the ancient bones of Kennewick Man.
This is the third time the change has been proposed to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. It would ensure federally recognized tribes could claim ancient remains even if a direct link to a tribe can't be proven.
Nov. 1, 2007
Federal legislation introduced in the U.S. House on Wednesday by Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash., would protect the opportunity for scientific study of ancient remains such as Kennewick Man.
For more information, please access http://www.kennewick-man.com.
Dealer's Choice:
Ramona Morris on falling in love with objects, then and now
When I first became a dealer of tribal art almost thirty years ago, it didn't take much to set my heart fluttering. Everything was new and equally wonderful. After all this time, do I still get the same reaction? Well, yes and no. I will admit that my parameters have changed. After seeing and handling hundreds if not thousands of objects, it takes something different to produce that old fluttering. There are definitely things that evoke that special reaction in me. I think it an interesting exercise to sit down and consider what does. I know that for me it is no longer simply a matter of thinking "Oh, nice pot!" or "Oh, nice basket!" or "Oh, that is waaay under-priced!" I've learned that if I don't love the object, I can't really convince anyone else to love it, and the things I love have evolved over the years. Taste changes with experience.
These are some of the criteria I find I now use, with certain caveats.
1. Elegant simplicity of form. Restraint. This, of course doesn't apply to certain marvelous objects such as Yayoi ceramics. It is simply a starting point.
2. Echoes of forms in other materials and cultures. The universality of certain shapes and motifs.
This brings up some of the aforementioned caveats. Over the millennia, the processes of tool-making have been refined to a number of basic forms that are most suited for the job, and materials will fracture or take a finish in similar ways, so there is a natural selection that produces similar results for similar functions and materials worldwide. That doesn't mean there is no place for invention or elaboration. The human mind is a wonderful thing.
Although I know I shouldn't really make such broad assumptions, it still pleases me to discover these similarities. For instance, it is interesting to compare such abstruse artifacts as Old Bering Sea "winged objects" and Archaic "banner stones" from the American Midwest. Although they are separated by thousands of miles and years, both share certain elements of design - flared ears and central boring - and are thought to have served similar usage, to give added impetus to throwing darts or harpoons. Both are beautiful objects in their own right, made from fine materials: walrus ivory and carefully chosen stone.
I find our collection has a number of pieces from different cultures that share visual characteristics, either in form or decoration. There are a couple of walls in our house filled with spirals in stone, ceramics, textiles and natural objects. (Don't visit me if you have vertigo.)3. Playfulness Playfulness may take the form of visual puns or multi layered images that change as you turn the object. The Inuit were especially adept at this, but I have also found it in other cultures. My current favorite is a small Okvik tool handle with male and female faces that share a single central eye. There is also a small Mezcala stone carving of a dancing male with a maskette on his head. He turns into a dragon-fish when laid on his back. I once had a wooden pipe bowl that I got from Ted Trotta and sold, reluctantly, to Larry Frank, that looked like a fist from behind, but when turned around, was a hand gripping a bird whose head formed the thumb.
4. Interesting use of materials.
This is always a positive attribute. I have owned two tobacco-cutting boards made from the broad section of a moose antler rather than the usual wood. That is, of course, over a thirty year period.
Which brings me to the next subject.
5. Rarity
Not everything is desirable simply because it is rare. If it incorporates some of the other criteria, that's a different story. I recently acquired a Mayan ceramic vessel from Dave DeRoche, probably a scribe's paint bowl, that is rare, elegant, and extremely playful. It is beautifully formed in the shape of the lower half of a man's head with a slight beard and an excruciatingly silly grin. Who could ask for more? It sits where I can see it every evening and always makes me smile.
The last type of object that seems to find its way into our collection is the result of purely unconscious connections that I simply can't resist making. This is personal, and wouldn't apply to most collectors or dealers. Remember the books of "Twins - Separated at Birth"? I call mine "Separated by Birth". This consists of objects that are totally unrelated to the collection, often found objects, that immediately evoke a visual image of something in our collection or that I have seen elsewhere. There is a driftwood knot that has the same oval shape and twisted grin as our Eskimo mask. A saguaro woodpecker's nest echoes the form and decoration of a double-faced Tiv ceramic. Three fossil giant armadillo armor scutes are similar in size and shape to three Anasazi worked pot shards. Weird, but wonderful, and great training for the eye and memory.
Have you given any thought to what causes that flutter for you?
Ramona Morris
John Molloy and Ron Nasser
Two New York City veteran dealers have opened a gallery together on the Upper East Side.
New York dealers John Molloy and Ron Nasser, who opened a New York City gallery together in January, 2008, have known each other for a long time. "We met around 1985," Molloy remembers, "when Ronnie had a gallery on East 78th Street. In fact, this is his third gallery on East 78th Street. Since we met, we have always been in touch, always worked with each other."
Nasser specializes in African and Oceanic material, and has become recently interested in Egyptian and Roman antiquities. "He's been a big player behind the scenes both here and in Europe," says Molloy, "and now I'm doing business in Europe too, so we have that much more in common."
Molloy says the two of them have complimentary but not identical taste in material. "I like Indian soft goods," Molloy says, "beadwork, textiles. When in comes to Indian material, which Ron does like, he prefers the hard goods, primarily Northwest Coast sculpture."
Nasser, who lives in Greenwich Village - near Molloy's downtown former gallery - decided he wanted to open a gallery (on East 78th Street, naturally) and asked Molloy to join him in the venture. "We took a space in mid-October and had our grand opening on January 12."
Molloy says he finds the gallery business has become "more demanding" in the last 30-or-so years, "certainly in terms of display."
The gallery's specialty: "Museum quality Indigenous art from Africa, Oceania and the Americas" plus, to reflect Nasser's new interest, antiquities, especially Egyptian and Roman.
Molloy says he first became aware of the beauty and the power of American Indian material while visiting the Buffalo Bill Historical Society in Cody, Wyoming, in 1971. "I saw a Cheyenne beaded bag there that opened my eyes," he remembers, "but I didn't know then that there was a market for these things."
He believes that part of his sensitivity to with Marshall McLuhan, one of his teachers at Fordham University. McLuhan, Molloy remembers, "emphasized the retribalization of society and the coming electronic culture. He was the prophet - this was 20 years before personal computers, but he saw it all, including those folks walking around with 'tribal' tattoos.
My thesis (in 1968) was about the Native Hawaiian sport of surfing and its relationship to the retribalization of our culture. I was actually thinking about this recently when I saw a young adult get off a plane with Hasidic hair curls, wearing a yarmulke and listening to his iPod, and I said to myself, 'yeah, that's it.' I believe that all of this relates to our interest in the material culture of indigenous peoples. As art dealers, we deal in aesthetics and connoisseurship. The context in which that art was created is vital to our understanding and appreciation of what we sell. Which is why I've always liked surfing!"
Molloy believes that McLuhan showed his students -- and the world -- new ways of looking at tribal culture. "What I learned gave me a different perspective and continues to affect the way I look at things." Molloy also has praise for Tony Berlant's approach to Navajo weaving. "In 'Walk in Beauty,' when he talks about textiles, you can fall in love with the material. I found the way he looks at things revelatory."
After Fordham, Molloy studied Fine Arts and Creative Writing in a graduate program at the University of Oregon in 1979, and then rented a storefront in Eugene where he sold antiques. "I used to buy material on the East Coast and drive it to the West Coast to sell. Ted Trotta and I worked on a poetry magazine together then. He made me aware of the marketplace for Indian material early on, and I started to carry some at my store."
From Oregon, Molloy moved to New York City where he worked in television production "and other freelance things," but gradually, he said, "the Native American took over." He set up at his first Whitehawk show in 1983.
Since that show, he says he has seen an evolution in the market for Indian things. In fact, he can trace the history of that market over the past few hundred years, from the Age of Enlightenment to the post-Modern art market, as an object moves from being considered an artifact, then a "curiosity," then an anthropological object, and finally, a work of art. "We've come a long way in our labeling," he says. "Today," he adds, "I continue to see the best material appreciated as fine art. But not every everyday object made by Native Americans was art, and the market must continue to make those distinctions." What, besides the first Navajo rug he ever bought ("must have been hard to sell"), has Molloy kept in his personal collection? What would he never sell? "Nothing," he replies. "I am a dealer and I aspire to sell more and ever greater objects."
Nasser first felt that entrepreneurial feeling in 1956, when he was 13 in New York City. Already a collector of arrowheads, he remembers that he bought an Indian costume at a thrift shop and took it to George Juergens, "who had a shop at 68th Street at Third Avenue, who offered me $85 for it. At that moment, I became a dealer."
Now, he says, "I want to sell everything, antiquities, African, Oceanic, the best we can find. I liked that shop on 68th Street; it was my favorite place to go. He had things from all over the world, and I never knew what he'd have. I would like to create the same kind of hope and expectation for visitors to the new gallery."
Nasser had two galleries on East 78th Street between 1980 and 1988. "I sold everyday, but my specialty was selling whole collections. At the current African art show at the Met, the best six pieces came from me." [See The New York Times review of the Metropolitan Museum of Art show in the Media File in this issue]. In the first paragraph of her New York Times review, Holland Cotter rhapsodizes about the Black Venus, "carved in the 19th century by a Fang artist in what is now Gabon." Nasser, (remember, his partner, John Molloy, called him "a big player behind the scenes both here and in Europe") says it is "rumored" that the Black Venus sold for $5,000,000.
Nasser says he retired about ten years ago, but went back to gallery work because "the life of an art dealer is the best life you can have." Asked about his partner, Nasser calls Molloy "an honest man with a fabulous eye. It is a pleasure having him as a partner."
Nasser, who is self-taught, got into the tribal art business for real in 1977, when he saw a Maori canoe prow for sale for $35,000. "I had $2500, went off to Europe and couldn't sleep, that piece had such an effect on me. I called from Europe to say I'd buy it. I borrowed, bought it, sold it. The piece finally sold for $300,000, and is in the collection of the St. Louis Art Museum."
When asked to name his heroes in the tribal art business, Nasser immediately mentions George Terasaki: "He established the Indian art business, and I have a lot of respect for him." Jeffrey Myers is another hero to Nasser: "He taught me the Eskimo business. I lived with them for five summers under his tutelage."
Like his partner, Nasser is a dealer through and through, and says there is nothing he wouldn't sell, including "my dining room table, if someone liked it. I kept some things in the beginning, but no more." You probably won't find Nasser's dining room table there, but for tribal and American Indian art, Molloy Nasser is at 49 East 78th Street, Suite 1 B, New York City, open Tuesday through Saturday. The phone number is (212) 288-0043, the website (under construction as of January, 2008) is www.molloynasser.com.
From ATADA's email:
From Kate Fitz Gibbon,
who "thought this might be of interest to ATADA's legislative watch people. Please note the enhanced penalties and 20 year statute of limitation. There is an identical bill in the Senate.
H.R.3156
Violent Crime Control Act of 2007
(Introduced in House)
SEC. 312. ARCHAEOLOGICAL RESOURCES PROTECTION ACT.
(a) Forfeiture Under the Archaeological Resources Protection Act- Section 8(b) of the Archeological Resources Protection Act of 1979 (Public Law 96-95; 16 U.S.C. 477gg(b)) is repealed.
(b) Codification of Archaeological Resource Protection Act's Criminal Provision in Title 18-
(1) REPEAL- Section 6 of the Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979 (Public Law 96-95; 16 U.S.C. 470ee) is repealed.
(2) CODIFICATION-
(A) IN GENERAL- Chapter 65 of title 18, United States Code, is amended by adding at the end the following new section: `Sec. 1370. Archaeological resources-- prohibited acts and criminal penalties
(a) Damage or Remove- No person may excavate, remove, damage, or otherwise alter or deface or attempt to excavate, remove, damage, or otherwise alter or deface any archaeological resource located on public lands or Indian lands unless such activity is pursuant to a permit issued under section 4 of the Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979 (16 U.S.C. 470aa et seq.), a permit referred to in section 4(h)(2) of the Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979 (16 U.S.C. 470aa et seq.), or the exemption contained in section 4(g)(1) of the Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979 (16 U.S.C. 470aa et seq.).
(b) Sale or Purchase-
(1) IN GENERAL- No person may sell, purchase, exchange, transport, receive, or offer to sell, purchase, or exchange any archaeological resource if such resource was excavated or removed from public lands or Indian lands in violation of--
(A) the prohibition contained in subsection (a) of this section; or
(B) any provision, rule, regulation, ordinance, or permit in effect under any other provision of Federal law.
(2) PRIOR POSSESSION- Nothing in paragraph (1) shall be deemed applicable to any person with respect to any archaeological resource which was in the lawful possession of such person prior to October 31, 1979.
(c) State or Local Law- No person may sell, purchase, exchange, transport, receive, or offer to sell, purchase, or exchange, in interstate of foreign commerce, any archaeological resource excavated, removed, sold, purchased, exchanged, transported, or received in violation of any provision, rule, regulation, ordinance, or permit in effect under State or local law.
(d) Penalty-
(1) IN GENERAL- Any person who knowingly violates, or counsels, procures, solicits, or employs any other person to violate, any prohibition contained in subsection (a), (b), or (c) of this section shall, upon conviction, be fined in accordance with this title, or imprisoned not more than 10 years, or both; but if the sum of the commercial and archaeological value of the archaeological resources involved and the cost of restoration and repair does not exceed $500, such person shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 1 year, or both. In the case of a second or subsequent such violation, upon conviction such person shall be fined in accordance with this title, or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.
(2) ARROWHEADS- Nothing in subsection (d) shall be deemed applicable to any person with respect to the removal of arrowheads located on the surface of the ground.
(e) Effective Date- The prohibitions contained in this section shall take effect on October 31, 1979.
(f) Forfeitures-
(1) IN GENERAL- The following property is subject to forfeiture to the United States:
(A) All archeological resources involved in a violation of subsection (a), (b) or (c) of this section.
(B) All proceeds derived directly or indirectly from such violation.
(C) Any vehicle, equipment, or other property used or intended to be used to commit or to facilitate the commission of such violation.
(D) All property traceable to such property.
(2) APPLICATION OF CHAPTER 46- The provisions of chapter 46 of this title relating to civil forfeitures shall extend to any seizure or civil forfeiture under this section.
(B) CHAPTER ANALYSIS- The chapter analysis at the beginning of chapter 65 of title 18, United States Code, is amended by adding at the end the following new item: 1370. Archaeological resources--prohibited acts and criminal penalties. (c) Statute of Limitations for Criminal Violations of Archaeological Resources Protection Act-
(1) IN GENERAL- Chapter 213 of title 18, United States Code, is amended by adding at the end the following new section: `Sec. 3298. Archeological resources offenses `No person shall be prosecuted, tried, or punished for a violation of, or conspiracy to violate, section 1370, title 18, United States Code, unless the indictment is returned or the information is filed within 20 years after the commission of the offense.'
(2) CHAPTER ANALYSIS- The chapter analysis at the beginning of chapter 213 of title 18, United States Code, is amended by adding at the end the following new item: 3298. Archeological resources offenses.'
Also from Kate Fitz Gibbon on a similar topic:
Re: A proposed US Embargo on Chinese & Tibetan Art
The Honorable Tom Lantos Chairman, Foreign Relations Committee Washington, DC
Subject: Art Import Restrictions: The Ongoing U.S. State Department Program
The Cultural Property Department of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the U.S. State Department continues to press ahead with renewals and expansions of country-by-country art import restrictions.
The bilateral agreements for US import restrictions on art were mandated by Congress in 1982 to be special assistance agreements lasting 5 years. In fact, because the civil servants at the State Department who control and run the program are always in favor of any and all restrictions proposed, none of the bilateral agreements is ever allowed to lapse.
The Agreement with Guatemala, initiated in 1991, has just been renewed for the second time, to extend another 5 years. The agreement with Mali has been expanded and renewed for another 5 years. The agreement with Cyprus has been expanded and renewed for another 5 years. All of these expanded and renewed restrictions have been put into effect during the last few months.
The State Department refuses to release any information about the status of the request from the People's Republic of China for the most extensive program of U.S. import restrictions ever proposed. The last meeting of the Cultural Property Advisory Committee on China was more than two years ago. Given the apparent bias of the committee, as presently constituted, it is likely that the recommendation was in favor of an embargo, since to the best of our knowledge no request has ever been rejected by the present committee.
In fact, in a number of instances it is clear that either the Committee or the State Department staffers have expanded the restrictions beyond what was asked for in the original request. We have no new information on what is being done or might be done to frame a memorandum of understanding with the PRC.
No new facts are available and the State Department has stonewalled all inquiries including a large number of special requests for information filed under the Freedom of Information Act, but there is a rumor currently circulating which suggests that President Bush might give the approval of U.S. import restrictions against Chinese art to the PRC as part of a diplomatic package of goodwill gestures when he travels to Beijing for the Olympic Games in 2008. There is no substantive information to support this conjecture, but it remains a persistent rumor.
The Chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Representative Tom Lantos (Dem. CA 12th district) has recently presided over the presentation of the Congressional Gold Medal to his holiness the Dalai Lama. There was substantial Republican support and the Gold Medal was presented by President Bush who appeared together with the Dalai Lama in public for the first time.
Attached and below is a letter to representative Tom Lantos thanking him for his leadership on this issue and asking for his help on the related issue of a proposed U.S. embargo against Chinese and Tibetan art.
Please send a copy of this letter (or any revised or edited version of this letter, as you wish) to Representative Lantos and most importantly, please urge anyone you know from his Congressional district (San Francisco/San Mateo area) to write to him immediately. These letters will make a difference. Do not delay. Write today and urge your friends to do the same.
The letter should be sent by fax to Rep. Lantos at: (202) 226-4183
Dear Congressman Lantos,
Thank you for your leadership in awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to His Holiness the Dalai Lama. It is critical for our country to stand up for human rights and freedom throughout the world. The treatment of the Tibetan people by the People's Republic of China is reprehensible.
The US State Department bureaucrats responsible for US policy on cultural issues have secured internal approval for a Memorandum of Understanding with the PRC which commits the US to impose a Customs embargo barring Chinese and Tibetan art and cultural property from entering the United States without a PRC export license. The United States Customs Service would be enforcing Chinese Government restrictions on virtually all categories of Chinese art and cultural property made before 1911, including Tibetan objects, which for the purposes of this treaty are considered to be Chinese.
There are rumors that US acceptance of China's demands will be linked to President Bush's visit to the Olympic Games, for him to deliver a diplomatic gesture. A Chinese official recently stated that awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to His Holiness the Dalai Lama will require the United States, "To make big concessions to China" for future cooperation.
Is this treaty one such "big concession"? Will Congress permit the Chinese regime to dictate whom we may or may not honor? No other country enacted such an embargo to please China, why should we? Art plays a key role in educating and engaging us with other cultures. Will we sacrifice those benefits to placate the PRC?
Please do not allow the great honor bestowed on the Dalai Lama to be turned into a hollow gesture by permitting the State Department to establish a US embargo which restricts both Chinese and Tibetan art and religious objects. It is bad public policy and it is discriminatory against America and Americans alone.
In the PRC it was illegal for private individuals to even own art until 1993, and since 1993 there has been an explosion in art auction sales and private collections. As China embraces modernity, should our country allow itself to be cowed into imposing restrictions on Americans that are not enforced by any other country, including China itself?
Efforts to impose this embargo appear to be quite advanced. It will take urgent Congressional action to convince our State Department to resist diplomatic pressure from the PRC for a treaty directing our Customs Service to take on this odious task.
Sincerely,
Media File
Excerpts from recent newspaper, magazine and Internet articles of interest to the membership. All opinions are those of the writers of the stories and of the people quoted, not of ATADA. Members are encouraged to submit press clippings or e-mail links for publication in the next issue of the ATADA News.
The New Mexican's September 22 story, "School to Return Indian Artifacts," was written by Anne Constable and had the sub-headline "Objects obtained in 1941 will be repatriated to New York state tribe." The story: "The School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe plans to return six small objects of cultural patrimony to the Onondaga Nation in upstate New York.
"The items -- four beads, a pendant and a metal 'tinkler,' or cone shaped ornament -- were acquired by Mary Cabot Wheelwright in the Finger Lakes region of New York and donated in 1941 to what was then called the School of American Research.
"The items have ongoing historical, traditional and cultural importance to the Onondaga Nation and will be repatriated under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. The notice of the school's intention was first published in the Federal Register on Sept. 13.
" 'After Oct. 13, unless we hear from any other tribe who places a claim or has an issue, we will be able to physically return the objects,' said Carolyn McArthur, collections manager and NAGPRA officer at the school's Indian Arts Research Center.
"The items originated in the aboriginal territory of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, which includes the six nations of Cayuga, Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Seneca and Tuscarora. The Onondaga Nation is the 'keeper of the central hearth and fire' where the Grand Council of the Confederacy meets and is responsible for the care of cultural patrimony of any Haudenosaunne Nation.
"The items have been stored in a vault at the School for Advanced Research, which is working with the Onondaga Nation's NAGPRA's representative on a process for returning them that respects the objects and the tribe's desires. McArthur said a courier might take them to New York.
"The original catalog cards from the early 20th century contain little information on the origin of the pieces. None of them is more than an inch wide or an inch long. One bead is a carved, Catlinite animal effigy bead. The pendant, also of Catlinite, or pipestone, resembles a human face with a drilled hole at the top. McArthur said the school has photographs of the objects but would not provide them because of the sensitive nature of the pieces.
"When McArthur came to the school a year ago, she said she wanted to verify that it had contacted all eligible tribes with an interest in objects in its collections. She got in touch with the New York tribes and provided information about the objects.
" 'It's our responsibility to comply with the law. That's very important to me,' McArthur said.
"Repatriation has had minimal impact on the school's collection, which mainly focuses on artistic works rather than sacred objects or cultural patrimony.
"In the spring of 2006, human remains and funerary objects in the school's collection were reburied. Other objects have been repatriated before and outside of the NAGPRA law, McArthur said.
"The federal law, passed in 1990, provides a process for museums and federal agencies to return Native American cultural items such as human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects or objects of cultural patrimony to descendants of the original owners.
"A new law promulgated this year requires institutions to report relevant contents in new collections that come into their possession every six months. The first summary letter is due Oct. 20. "In the last 14 years, many Southwest and Plains tribes have been represented in new collections at the school, and McArthur said, 'I am working diligently to provide as comprehensive a list as possible.'
"McArthur, who was the curator of the Colorado Historical Society in Denver before coming to Santa Fe, said she planned to send the information to the tribes as well as to NAGPRA officials.
" 'We don't know what may be of significance to tribes until they tell us,' she said. 'I feel it is appropriate for this institution to at least inform them about what we have received. Then they can determine this on their own, through consultations and visits. Even though they might not find objects of interest, it is in our mutual best interest to consult with one another,' she added."
Holland Cotter's New York Times review of "Eternal Ancestors: The Art of the Central African Reliquary," at the Met was published on October 5, 2007, with the headline, "Keeping Watch Over the Dead."
Is she an infant, a wrestler, a goddess or what?," asks Cotter.
"Sunk in thought or entranced by sounds only she can hear? Her flawless skin is dark but glows. Her body is organic but abstract, with seeds for eyes, succulents for arms, and mushroom like shoulders melting into breasts. In the perfect sleek globe of her head, her face is a scooped-out heart.
You'll find this stunner, beaming with ambiguity, in "Eternal Ancestors: The Art of the Central African Reliquary" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She was carved in the 19th century by a Fang artist in what is now Gabon. Sometimes referred to as the Black Venus, she resides in Paris today. And she's just one of many magnetic images in a gorgeous, morally and spiritually vibrant show that is sure be one of the sleepers of the fall art season.
"Why, with such attractions, is it a sleeper?
Because exhibitions of African art almost always are. Even when museums give them the luxury treatment, as the Met does here, they remain on the fringes of our awareness, in a compartment labeled esoteric, as we make our beelines to Rembrandts and Rothkos. We are the sleepers, somnambulating past extraordinary things, So, sleepers, awake. Change your habits, alter your route, see what you're missing. This African show isn't esoteric at all. Anyone familiar with Western religious art, particularly art before the modern era, will recognize its basic theme: life as a cosmic journey homeward, with parental spirits, embodied in materials and images, coddling, counseling and chiding us every step of the way.
"The opening gallery is about connecting crosscultural dots. First, and splendidly, we get Africa, in a sculptural group from Cameroon with two figures - the head of one explodes with feathers - perched atop a bark container that once held the skulls of generations of men from a single family. Next is Europe, represented by a 13th-century silver bust designed to encase the cranium of a Roman Catholic saint. Then Asia, in a miniature version of an Indian Buddhist stupa mound that in its monumental form might have held the bones of Buddha himself. The lesson: When it comes to venerating the earthly traces of the honored dead, very different cultures share common ground.
"Apparently not common enough, though, to let museum audiences easily embrace African art on its own terms. Western Modernism has seen to that. Through much of the 20th century, African art was valued primarily as source material for a European avant-garde. You know the story: Picasso sees an African mask - it doesn't matter which one - and, presto, there's Cubism, an art that really counts.
"Alisa LaGamma, the Met curator who organized 'Eternal Ancestors,' acknowledges the real investment that Modernism had in African culture. Several of the show's most beautiful items have an early-20th-century art world pedigree. A spectacular Fang reliquary figure, combative and unflinching, once belonged to the painter André Derain. (The Met owns it now.) A jocund Kwele mask from Gabon was prized by the Dada poet Tristan Tzara.
"But Ms. LaGamma also makes it clear that 'Eternal Ancestors' is based on a non-Eurocentric, postmodern model. It is intended, as far as is ever possible in a Western museum, especially one as staid as the Met, to offer a view of traditional African art as it might have been seen through African eyes. This approach is distilled in a small, enclosed space that is set apart for the display of three ancestral shrines and accompanied by wall labels of a kind seldom found in mainstream museums. It reads: 'This room is devoted to a series of intact shrines. Upon entering, we request that you show respect for these devotional works.'
"Whatever devotion may mean to you, chances are that once you read those words, the atmosphere in the space will feel, however subtly, charged, the objects alive and purposeful, awake. So they would have been for the people who created and lived with them, and who valued them at least as much for what they concealed as for what they revealed.
"All three shrines consist of alluring figures set atop, or emerging from, receptacles of some kind. Two of the figures are Fang in origin, similar in style to the Venus. The third, all face and spindly legs, was made by a Kota artist from thin strips of light-reflective copper laid over a forked wood frame.
"What's hidden is the contents of the shrines' containers: bones, ashes, bits of cloth or earth. These materials are associated with people who died but are considered to be still present through their earthly remains in the lives of their descendants.
"To the original owners of the shrine, its value lay in these relics, not in the replaceable sculptures that safeguarded them. To the late-19th-century European colonialists who first collected many of the works in this show, notable for its wealth of important international loans, the sculptures meant everything, the relics nothing. Usually they were just tossed away. The three intact shrines at the Met are rare survivals.
"Yet sculpture is, of course, the visual substance of this show. And once Ms. LaGamma has suggested the life-and-death concepts that animate it, this is what we see: a symphonic sweep of reliquary forms and traditions from across Central Africa. From Cameroon comes a carving of a crotchety looking, bent-kneed man with a cap - or is it coiffure? - balanced on his head like a meringue. This figure is a commemorative portrait of a Bangwa chief named Fosia, carved by the artist Ateu Atsa (around 1840-1910). Commissioned during the chief's lifetime, it would have stood sentinel over his skull after death.
"Full-length Fang figures, taut as clenched fists, are among Africa's most familiar sculptural types, although bust-length Fang heads, also meant to top reliquary containers, are no less gripping. One of the most famous, visiting from the Ethnographic Museum in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, is in the show. Its round, mirrored eyes give it a look of blank astonishment; the palm oil with which the wood was once saturated still oozes and drips from its surface like blood, or sweat, or tears. Then, a coup de théâtre: an ensemble of dozens of Kota reliquary figures, their shovel-shape faces made of gleaming copper and brass. Ganged together, side by side in rows of display cases, they are the visual equivalent of a brass choir at full volume, a Corelli fanfare. Yet each piece, whether as smooth as a leaf or dense with ornamentation, is unlike any other.
"The show ends theatrically too, though whether with tragedy or comedy is hard to say. One of the final images is also one of the most startling: a reliquary figure from Congo. Standing six feet tall and made from layers and layers of cloth, including red European blankets, the figure is bulked up to resemble a giant female doll, all but nude, with brick-red skin and a smile of what looks like avid glee on her face.
"Who is she? What is she? Several things. She is a portrait of someone who has died and also a receptacle for that person's mummified body. She is an image of a specific category of ancestor, one recently dead. But she will fully claim status only after she has been buried with the relic she holds.
"There's a remarkable short 1926 film of such a burial playing in the gallery, and the mood of the occasion is hard to gauge. A titanic soft sculpture, like the one in the show, is being carried by a crowd out of the village. The procession stops beside a trench-size open grave. The villagers try to slide, then tip the figure into the ground, but it keeps bobbing back upright, like a Macy's Thanksgiving Day balloon that refuses to be held down. At this point, with the struggle still in progress, the film stops. The point of such burials is symbolic: The dead enter the ancestral realm below the earth, from which they will return, transformed, to attend the living, who will themselves become ancestors. That, at least, is the idea, although as enacted here it has an antic, clownish air, more carnival than funeral. The lesson: In death, as in life, ambiguity rules. The second lesson: When treated like the living thing it is, art has a mind of its own."
"Eternal Ancestors: The Art of the Central African Reliquary," the Metropolitan Museum of Art, through March 2; (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org.
From the San Francisco Chronicle, October 6: "Native Americans ask UC Berkeley to return museum artifacts" by Christopher Heredia and Kevin Fagan.
The story began: "Native American groups rallied Friday at UC Berkeley in an attempt to get campus officials to allow them to return thousands of museum artifacts to tribes from California to Alaska."A group that included university staff and tribal representatives used to decide which items must be returned to the tribes, but a reorganization at the Hearst Museum put museum staff members in charge, and tribal leaders say the new configuration shuts them out.
"The move comes as increasing numbers of tribal leaders, using a law approved nearly 20 years ago, try to get possession of human remains and cultural artifacts.
"After an hour long noon rally - during which they extolled the virtues of relinquishing to tribes the remains of 13,000 Native Americans stored at the museum - the 200 protesters marched from Sproul Hall to campus administration offices where they demanded to meet with Chancellor Robert Birgeneau.
"Assistant Chancellor Beata FitzPatrick emerged briefly from California Hall to assert that the university is abiding by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. The law, which Congress approved in 1990, ordered museums and federal agencies to return to Indian tribes around the nation as many as possible of the estimated 200,000 remains being held for study.
" 'I would like to say our chancellor has very great respect for native peoples,' FitzPatrick said. 'We believe the university is in compliance with (the law). I will take forward to him the concerns that you have expressed here today.'
"That did not please protesters, who vowed to carry their demands to the UC governing Board of Regents and the courts. They characterized the university's decision not to immediately relinquish thousands of native bones and artifacts as a sign of disrespect that perpetuates ill will among native people and prevents closure to centuries-old wounds.
" 'It's our ancestral right to bury our dead,' said Lenora Starr, 43, a descendant of Oregon's Warm Springs tribe, who traveled from Sacramento to attend the protest.
'Regardless of which nation you are a member of, I consider this our people. All the stuff here has to be brought back to the people. (It needs) to go home. You don't just go to somebody's grave site and help yourself.'
"UC spokeswoman Marie Felde said the University is restricted by federal guidelines that dictate whether and to whom to relinquish Native American bones and artifacts, many of which were excavated from construction sites around the Bay Area. Hearst Museum has the second largest collection of remains in the country behind the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.
"Felde characterized the recent change in the makeup of the museum repatriation staff - of seven full-time employees - as administrative. Felde said the reorganization, done to bring the university in compliance with national museum standards, has resulted in more tribal visits, research assistance and repatriation consultations.
" 'There's nothing unlawful about that,' she said. 'Those tribes that petition for the return of remains and artifacts, there's a clearly prescribed process outlined in federal law and we follow that law,' Felde said. 'The university can't on its own return materials to whoever asks.'
"Protesters burned sage, played drums, sang Native American songs and prayed for the university leaders to acquiesce to their demands.
" 'UC Berkeley doesn't give a damn about native people living today,' said Mark LeBeau, a member of the Pit River Nation and an organizer of the rally. 'If they did, they wouldn't be desecrating the bones of our ancestors.'
"Among the tribes throughout the West who have complained for years about the university's handling of remains is the Tlingit tribe of Alaska, which dispatched a cultural leader this week to Berkeley.
"Robert Sam, of Sitka, Alaska, spent three days teaching a workshop on ethnic sensitivity at the university's anthropology department and meeting with Hearst Museum's director, but he left on Wednesday dissatisfied - and empty-handed.
" 'The director agreed that the museum is very reluctant to even talk with us, and I appreciated the director saying that, but I want more,' Sam said.
'We've been trying to get 600 objects from the museum for many years, but the museum has never returned anything to us. It's quite shameful. They treat us like an enemy, like these objects belong to them.'
"Sam said the objects the Tlingits want include ceremonial hats and masks that mimic sea lions, sacred wands and feathers. The university does not have any of his tribe's human remains.
" 'We are a living culture, and we use these objects in our ceremonies,' said Sam, who has reclaimed items and remains for his tribe from museums across the nation, including the Smithsonian. 'They are very precious to us. In my experience, most Americans support us. It's the universities that want to keep the materials.' "
"French Debate: Is Maori Head Body Part or Art?" read the headline for Elaine Sciolino's October 26 New York Times story.
Datelined Paris, the story began: "Since 1875, the mummified, tattooed head of a Maori warrior has been part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Natural History at Rouen in Normandy.
"But when Rouen's mayor arranged recently to return it to New Zealand as an act of 'atonement' for colonial-era trafficking in human remains, the national Ministry of Culture stepped in to block him.
"The ministry contends that the head is a work of art that belongs to France and that its return could set an unfortunate precedent for a huge swath of the national museum collections - from Egyptian mummies in the Louvre to Asian treasures in the Musée Guimet and African and Oceanic artifacts in the Musée du Quai Branly.
" 'The mayor of Rouen made his decision without any consultation, and his decision is against the law,' Olivier Henrard, the legal adviser for the Ministry of Culture, said Thursday, referring to a 2002 law that states that works of art are 'inalienable. There are other Maori heads, there are mummies, there are religious relics in France,' he said. 'If we don't respect the law today, tomorrow other museums or elected officials might decide to send them back, too.'
"The authorities in Rouen insist that the Maori head is a body part, not a work of art, and that according to France's bioethics law it must be returned to its place of origin.
'This object reflects the barbaric trafficking in body parts, the belief that another race was inferior to ours,' said Catherine Morin-Desailly, Rouen's deputy mayor for culture and a senator, who proposed the return of the head. 'It belongs to the heritage of humanity, not in storage somewhere in a museum.'
"The Maoris traditionally preserved the tattooed heads of warriors killed in battle to keep their memory alive. Trade in body parts flourished in the 19th century, as contact with outsiders increased. Europeans collected Maori remains. Tattooed Maori fighters sometimes were in danger of being killed so their heads could be sold. Some Maori slaves were forcibly tattooed, then decapitated.
"Since 1992, the Te Papa Tongarewa, New Zealand's national museum in Wellington, has made requests for all Maori remains to be returned from around the globe, as part of a project to restore some dignity to the dead. The museum tries to identify and hand over the remains to the tribes and ideally to allow for proper burials.
"Museums in more than two dozen institutions have complied, but the Rouen initiative would be the first for France.
"Last month the Field Museum of natural history in Chicago returned a Maori head and other bones to New Zealand. The American Museum of Natural History in New York has more than 30 Maori heads.
"In recent days, Christine Albanel, the culture minister, won a ruling from a local court to stop the process to return the tattooed head. Calling for a process to 'guarantee the integrity of our national heritage,' she warned of 'heavy repercussions' for France's other collections. "She also devised a particularly French plan that would certainly delay any decision: a scholarly debate next year organized by the Quai Branly museum and a study of the 'special ethical problems' of human remains in public museums.
"Stéphane Martin, the director of the Quai Branly museum, agreed with the ministry that the head should stay in France.
'From my point of view, they are cultural artifacts that had a function in society,' he said. 'Sending back these artifacts to New Zealand, and destroying them by burying them is a way of erasing a full page of history.'
"Mr. Martin has refused New Zealand's request for the Quai Branly museum to send back the four Maori heads in its collection. 'They are stored in a very special area, and absolutely will not be put on public display,' he said. Access is restricted to a few specialists, he said, adding that he did not know the heads' value.
"The issue of the Maori head at the Rouen museum arose early this year when the museum re-opened after a 10-year renovation. The head has been in the museum's collection since 1875, but there was no record of its provenance and no listing in the official inventory.
"Museum officials have not displayed the head, and they decided that its mere possession did not fit the spirit of the new museum. Because the museum is a local institution governed by the city, the mayor decided he had the authority to arrange for the head to be returned. The museum has issued a sketch of the head in its possession, but has prohibited taking photographs.
" 'This is an ethical gesture based on respect for world cultures and dignity that every human being deserves,' Mayor Pierre Albertini, who is a lawyer and a member of Parliament, wrote on his blog last week.
"On Tuesday, a high level New Zealand delegation, including a senior Maori tribal chief, visited Rouen for a symbolic transfer ceremony. Mr. Albertini and New Zealand's ambassador to France, Sarah Dennis, signed the document agreeing to the return - if the French state approves.
" 'We in New Zealand have a longstanding policy of repatriating Maori human remains wherever it is possible around the world,' Ms. Dennis said. 'We responded to the very respectful and sensitive gesture of Rouen with appreciation.'
"Ms. Morin-Desailly, the deputy mayor, cites an important precedent in France concerning the return of human remains: those of Saartjie Baartman - the 'Hottentot Venus' as she was pejoratively labeled in her day. A farmer's slave born in 1789, she was sold to a British Marine surgeon and presented in public in London and later in Paris as a freak because of her oversized buttocks and genitalia.
"After she died, her remains were displayed at the now-defunct Musée de l'Homme until 1976, and then kept in storage. In 2002, after years of resisting, France sent her remains home to South Africa."
Ken Johnson's review of "Pacific Overtures From Mystic Spirits," a "soul-stirring display" of Oceanic art and a "curiously modest" exhibit of Native American objects at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was published on November 16.
As an object of Western fascination," Johnson's story began, "Oceanic art has come a long way. Christian missionaries tried to eradicate it. Scientific explorers anthropologized it. Modern European artists mined it for new expressive possibilities, which led Western sophisticates to revere it as real art, worthy of the same appreciative attention they would pay to Rembrandt.
In the 1970s and '80s postmodernists objected to viewing so-called "primitive" art strictly formally and, in effect, ethnocentrically. So Oceanic art was reanthropologized: reframed in accordance with what it meant to the people who produced it and how they used it.
"The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Oceanic galleries closed three years ago for redesign and refurbishment and for conservation work on the art itself. Now the spectacular, beautifully reinstalled rooms have opened. Occupying 17,000 square feet in the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, most in a great hallway open to natural light through a slanting glass wall, the New Galleries for Oceanic Art present more than 400 works of art and craft from a vast, watery realm of more than 25,000 islands, including those of Melanesia, Polynesia, Micronesia and Southeast Asia, as well as from Australia. It is a wonderfully expansive, soul-stirring display.
"Though relatively sparsely populated, the Pacific islands have been home to an amazing number of different cultures. Eric Kjellgren, the associate curator for Oceanic art who oversaw the reinstallation, notes in a new catalog for the collection that about 1,800 different languages have been spoken and hundreds of distinct artistic traditions practiced by peoples of the Pacific islands.
"Dating mostly from the 18th to the early 20th century, works in the Oceanic collection range from miniature to monumental, and they are made of wood, stone, fiber, turtle shell, oyster shell, bone, hair and metal among other materials. Realism is nowhere to be found, and bright colors are rare, but vividly graphic, more or less abstract symbolic representations are everywhere. Human and humanoid mythic beings are most common, and they are joined by lots of animals, including crocodiles, turtles, fish and birds.
"Some works are powerfully simple. A double- ended wooden dance paddle made by the Rapa Nui people of Easter Island represents a human being with an almost purely abstract elegance that Brancusi would have died for. Elsewhere you'll find examples of terrific expressionistic vigor like the Asmat people's ancestor poles called bis: totemic stacks of life-size human figures roughly carved from single trees and towering up to 25 feet.
"Throughout the galleries are works of astounding decorative refinement and invention. Among the most impressive are Maori woodworks covered by sumptuous, intricate geometric patterns, and a perforated ceremonial board made by New Guinean Sawos people that has sinuous, viny forms carved in smooth, low relief on both sides and a big, flat human face presiding at the top. Hovering over a wide area of the main exhibition hall, the gallery for Melanesian art, is an infectiously lively, 80-by-30-foot ceiling made of more than 270 semiabstract panels exuberantly painted by artists of the Kwoma people of New Guinea.
"As readily engaging as all this material may be esthetically, it sometimes intimates ways of living and thinking that Western viewers may find quite foreign. Take for example the agiba, a type of object made by the Kerewa people of New Guinea. The Met's has a cheerfully smiling, big-headed figure carved onto an oval board. Internal cutouts create prongs for hanging and displaying human skulls. Headhunting, a museum label explains, was integral to the Kerewa people's religious practices. Even a die-hard multiculturalist might balk at that.
"The reopening of the galleries is an apt occasion to ponder not how we ought to view and think about Oceanic art but how we actually do experience it, which is to say - contrary to ideologically one-sided accounts favored at different points in history - complexly. Your grown-up side may act the discerning connoisseur or the dutiful student of art history and anthropology who reads all the information- rich labels, while the child in you, oblivious to politically correct prohibitions against exoticizing 'the other,' thrills to the fantastic weirdness of Oceanic art. You may also have a New Ager's attraction to the mystical dimension, as it often seems that Oceanic artists are tuned into wavelengths of intuitive consciousness that Western culture has worked for centuries to extinguish in itself.
"A centerpiece of the gallery for Melanesian art is a 14-foot-tall drum, or 'slit gong,' carved from a massive tree trunk in the 1960s by an Ambrym islander named Tin Mweleun. Among the few pieces in the exhibition whose maker is known, it is in the traditional form of a figure with big, goggle eyes, braided hair, little arms and a hollowed-out, cylindrical body with a long, vertical slot cut into it. Struck with mallets by drummers, slit gongs make deep sonorous notes.
"Because their sounds could carry great distances, they were used for communication as well as for dance music. And because the vertical slot was conceived as the figure's mouth, the sounds it produced also were thought of as the voice of the divine. The Met's slit gong is formally imposing, and, like many other works on view, it exudes a hair raising pagan allure. It's a breathtaking marriage of the Apollonian and the Dionysian.
"Adjacent to the Oceanic galleries is another newly reopened permanent exhibition, that of Native North American art. With about 90 objects, mostly small and behind glass, it is curiously modest by comparison to the tremendous Oceanic display. That said, there are many fine pieces on view, including masks, beaded shirts, pipes and weapons. An 18thcentury Northwest Coast wooden rattle has an arrestingly fierce, finely wrought human - or perhaps demonic - face carved on it. Also from the Northwest is a wooden whale mask that the wearer carried on his back and activated by pulling cords that make its hinged flippers, tail and jaw move."
"The exhibition's earliest works are three smoothly carved and precisely shaped 'banner stones' dating from the fifth to the second millennium B.C. While scholars continue to debate exactly what banner stones were for - they were somehow involved in spear hunting - today's viewers may appreciate them for their graceful, minimalistic forms.
"The big question about the Native North American section is why it is so meager. It comes off as little more than a token gesture, which, one would hope, the Met someday might rectify with the kind of passionate conviction it has invested in the collection and display of Oceanic art."
New Galleries for Oceanic Art and Native North American Art in the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, Metropolitan Museum of Art; (212) 535- 7710 or www.metmuseum.org.
"Norval Morrisseau, Native Canadian Artist, Is Dead," read the headline for Randy Kennedy's obituary in The New York Times on December 8.
The obituary: "Norval Morrisseau, also known as Copper Thunderbird, one of Canada's most celebrated painters and an important influence in the development of North American indigenous art, died Tuesday in Toronto. He was thought to be 75, though his birth year has been listed as both 1931 and 1932. The cause was complications of Parkinson's disease, said the Assembly of First Nations, which represents Canadian Native tribes.
"Mr. Morrisseau, an Ojibwa (also called Anishnaabe or Chippewa) shaman, was one of the first native painters to adopt modernist styles to convey traditional aboriginal imagery and to have a crossover career in contemporary art. His style, which became known as Woodland or Legend painting, evoked ancient etchings from birch-bark scrolls and often used Xray-like motifs: skeletal elements and internal organs visible within the forms of animals and people, and black spirit lines emanating from them.
" 'Saturated with startling, often contrasting colors, such paintings appear to vibrate under the viewer's gaze,' said the National Gallery of Canada, which organized a retrospective of Mr. Morrisseau's work in 2006, the first solo show for a native artist in the institution's history. It is now on view in Lower Manhattan through Jan. 20 at the George Gustav Heye Center, part of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian.
"Of a 2001 New York show at the Drawing Center of Mr. Morrisseau's drawings, made on sheets of paper towels while he was in jail in Canada in the late 1960s, Holland Cotter of The New York Times wrote: 'The results aren't ingratiating or beautiful. Like visionary work in many cultures, they're aggressive, sometimes violent, as much about fearfulness as about transcendence.'
"Born Jean-Baptiste Norman Henry Morrisseau in northern Ontario, he was the eldest son in a family of seven and was raised, according to tradition, by his maternal grandparents. His grandmother was Catholic, and his grandfather, whom he described as his most important influence, was a shaman. Their discordant views formed the background for much of his early life and his development as a self taught artist working between two worlds.
"He was believed to have been given his native name in his teens, when he became seriously ill. He said his life was saved by a medicine woman who renamed him, calling him Copper Thunderbird; a thunderbird is a powerful symbol in Ojibwa folklore.
"Mr. Morrisseau, who dropped out of school at a young age and lived much of his life in poverty even after becoming established, was known as a charismatic, often unpredictable figure in the art world. He frustrated dealers, sometimes calculating his paintings' worth not by their quality but by the square inch ($3.55 at one point, according to a gallery owner). He battled alcoholism his whole life, and at a low ebb in the 1980s, living on Vancouver's streets, was known to trade his work for liquor money.
"But after the tremendous success of his first exhibition in Toronto in 1962, he was also often prolific and showed his work around the world. Marc Chagall, who met him in Paris when both artists were having exhibitions there, compared him to Picasso.
"He is survived by numerous children and grandchildren. In his later years, as accolades piled up, his life became more orderly, and he continued to paint until 2002, when Parkinson's left him unable to do so. In 2005 he was elected to the Royal Society of Canada. He was also awarded honorary doctorates from McGill and McMaster universities and received the highest honor awarded by the Assembly of First Nations, the eagle feather.
" 'Why am I alive?"' he said in a 1991 interview with The Toronto Star. "To heal you guys who're more screwed up than I am. How can I heal you? With color. These are the colors you dreamt about one night.' "
"An Island in the Hudson, Plundered in Search of Indian Artifacts," was the headline for Anthony DePalma's December 12, 2007 in The New York Times.
Datelined Magdalen Island, N.Y, the story read: "For more than 3,000 years, this alluring isle of stone in the Hudson River north of present-day Kingston has beckoned strangers. Over the millennia, Indians stopped at its graywacke shores - and at least one was laid to rest here. They took shelter in a west-facing sandstone rock shelter. They pulled mounds of shellfish from the river. And they shaped countless arrowheads in the high, flat belly of the island before setting out to hunt or fight.
Strangers still come to Magdalen, but now they arrive with shovel in hand to dig up arrowheads and other prehistoric artifacts illegally. Because Magdalen is half a mile from the Dutchess County shore, they work undetected and largely undisturbed, shoveling up great chunks of earth, even chopping through the roots of huge oaks and hickory trees, hoping they topple in a strong wind to reveal a new trove of treasure.
"The quarter-mile long island is so pockmarked with looters' holes that parts look more like a bombing range than a state-owned parcel of land listed on the national and state registers of historic places.
"Magdalen's defenses now consist of about a dozen white signs warning 'Don't Dig.' They are routinely ignored. There are holes at the bases of some trees to which the signs have been nailed. Months and months go by, and the only watchful eyes are those of Mary Gregorie Burns, a 58- year-old resident of nearby Rhinebeck, N.Y., who admits that she has grown obsessed with the island, its history and the need to protect it from looters. It is a site that was used on and off by different Indian groups from the Late Archaic period dating from 3,000 to 6,000 years ago. Archaeologists believe that after the natives made contact with arriving Europeans, Magdalen was primarily used as a seasonal camp and a tool-making workshop.
" 'There are little clues to the subsistence strategy of people who lived here thousands of years ago, and that's something we don't know a whole lot about,' said Ms. Burns, who first set foot on the island in 1994 as she began work on a master's thesis in environmental studies at Bard College, which is a few minutes away in Annandale-on-Hudson. Hudsonia, a research institute at Bard's field station in Annandale, has supported Ms. Burns's work.
"Professionally surveyed by archaeologists in 1939, Magdalen - also called Goat Island - has proved to be a productive site. Hundreds of projectile points and ceramic pieces from the island are stored in the State Museum in Albany, and archaeologists found human bones at a burial site from the early Woodland period at the back of the rock shelter, a 45-foot-long overhang of graywacke, a local sandstone.
"But hundreds, perhaps thousands of artifacts have been taken by amateur pothunters, whose activities can disturb the soil and ruin the chance of serious research. In the past 13 years, Ms. Burns has spent hundreds of hours surveying and numbering looter holes in a one-acre section of flat ground known as the 'campsite' in the island's center. She has found 217 pits, and new ones show up all the time.
"Ms. Burns plots the location of each hole and uses the information to make the case repeatedly to state and local officials that the island must be protected.
" 'I'm not saying that this is the most important archaeological site around,' she said during a snowy morning hike around the island this week. The persistent looting in itself indicates that there are still artifacts to be found, she said. 'People are not coming out here digging for nothing,' she said.
"Protecting archaeological sites is a long-standing problem, one for which professionals say there is no easy answer. Erecting a fence can call more attention to the sites, potentially drawing more looters. Even a 'Don't Dig' sign can backfire by piquing the curiosity of looters.
" 'We've wrestled with the whole issue of protecting sites and not drawing attention to them,' said Nina M. Versaggi, president of the New York Archaeological Council, a professional association. The council has not taken a policy position on site protection but handles the issue case by case. In some instances, Ms. Versaggi said, it makes sense to post signs that are not tempting.
" 'We might use other types of markings, like "Environmentally Sensitive Zone: Do Not Enter," that neutralize the site without making it attractive to looters,' she said.
"New York has laws against digging on state land without permits, but penalties are small (a few hundred dollars) and the laws are imprecisely worded and in need of updating. The list of known archaeological sites kept by the State Museum in Albany exceeds 5,000, and the locations of the most sensitive ones are kept secret, said Christina B. Rieth, the state archaeologist.
"The Department of Environmental Conservation, which has owned Magdalen Island since 1985, controls about 400 archaeological sites sprinkled across the state, and officials say people are tempted to explore them.
" 'People often think that things found on public lands are like raspberries on a bush and it's O.K. to take a few,' said Charles E. Vandrei, the department's historic preservation officer. Mr. Vandrei said the state tried not to draw public attention to archaeological sites on state land, but sometimes it tries a different tack. In Lake George, a few underwater wrecks from the French and Indian War are clearly marked with buoys. Divers are allowed to explore them, but only after reviewing rules designed to protect the artifacts.
" 'But preserving a site like Magdalen Island is more complicated, Mr. Vandrei said. 'The bad guys already know where it is,' he said. The department has considered filling in looter holes because the appearance of so much damage could encourage more vandalism.
" 'But realistically, the only way to stop the looting is to catch the people who are doing it,' Mr. Vandrei said. Other states have experimented with a stewardship program where volunteers monitor sites and notify authorities of problems. New York has a similar program, the Archaeological Site Preservation Initiative, which has had limited success. Mr. Vandrei said he has not hiked Magdalen Island since Ms. Burns invited him there more than a decade ago. But now that he is aware that the situation there has not improved, he said he was willing to reconsider the way the state protects the site. Ms. Burns considers this a hopeful sign. Although she has scrambled over the island's rocky outcrops uncounted times, each visit is a voyage of discovery for her. The telescoped sense of time, the echo of forgotten voices, the deep emotion of knowing that this is a place where people lived and died, long, long ago, energizes her.
"She said she had a dual purpose for spending so much time there. She is mapping the looter holes because she wants to protect what is left of people long gone. And she is doing it for the sake of people who have not yet been born.
" 'If any archaeologist 100 years from now wants to know what the state of this site was in 2007, this would be the baseline,' Ms. Burns said. New technology is constantly being developed to pry open more secrets, she said, and the site should be protected as well as it can possibly be.
" 'I love the past,' she said, 'but I'm very concerned about the future.' "
"More Questions for the Smithsonian" was the headline for The New York Times story by Sarah Abruzzese on December 29, 2007.Bonus coverage: From New York magazine's weekly Approval matrix, at the #1 convergence of Highbrow and Despicable, "The Washington Post reports on more than $250,000 in unauthorized travel spending by Smithsonian honcho W.Richard West Jr."
The story: "W. Richard West Jr., the founding director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, spent a quarter of a million dollars of institution money on transportation and hotels over four years, the Smithsonian confirmed on Friday. The money was spent on more than 500 days of travel between 2003 and 2007. The dozens of trips, first reported in The Washington Post on Friday, took him to Europe, New Zealand, Indonesia, Singapore and a number of other destinations for speaking engagements, work for other nonprofit organizations and fundraisers. Linda St. John, a Smithsonian spokeswoman, said that all Mr. West's travel was approved. 'He brought in $51 million in fund-raising' during that period, she said. 'While it may seem shocking that he spent $250,000 on travel, realize what the tradeoff is and what he gave to the Smithsonian and Native Americans.
"Mr. West, in a telephone interview, said, 'The fact is that the strategic aims of the Museum of the American Indian required that I had these connections to the international community.' Mr. West, 64, a lawyer and historian who is a citizen of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes, oversaw the opening of the museum on the National Mall in 2004, as well as the creation of the George Gustav Heye Center for the museum in New York and the Cultural Resources Center in Suitland, Md. He recently retired as director, but remains on the payroll until the end of the year. Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, chairwoman of the Senate Rules and Administration Committee, said she had asked for an accounting of Mr. West's activities from the Smithsonian's board of regents, as well as from the Government Accountability Office. Smithsonian officials have been under scrutiny since spending abuses by the institution's secretary, Lawrence M. Small, came to light this year. Mr. Small resigned in March; Sheila Burke, his deputy, did so in September."
From The New York Times on December 29, 2007: "Aztec Pyramid Found"
Archaeologists have discovered the ruins of an 800-year-old Aztec pyramid in the heart of Mexico City that could prove that the city is at least a century older than previously thought, Reuters reported. Mexican archaeologists found the ruins, which are about 36 feet high, in the central Tlatelolco area, once a religious and political center for the Aztec elite.
Since the discovery of another pyramid at the site 15 years ago, historians have thought Tlatelolco was founded by the Aztecs in 1325, the same year as the nearby twin city of Tenochtitlan, the capital of their empire, which the Spanish razed in 1521. The pyramid, found last month, may have been built as early as 1100, signaling that the Aztecs began to develop their civilization in central Mexico earlier than believed.
'The timeline is going to need to be revised,' the archaeologist Patricia Ledesma said. In August archaeologists in the city's Iztapalapa district unearthed what they say may be the main pyramid of Tenochtitlan."
"In an Ancient Culture, a Team Takes Root" was the headline fro Greg Bishop's January 12 New York Times story on a group of unlikely and devoted Dallas Cowboys fans, some of whom are Indian Market stars in their own right.
Datelined Acoma Pueblo, the story began: "To the north, the Sky City casino draws truckers off Interstate 40 with its billboard advertisements promising loose slots and low limits.
"To the south, the towering sandstone mesa attracts tourists to a reservation without electricity or running water, with houses made from adobe clay and a church built in 1629.
"Gilbert Concho, a 60-year-old master potter and spiritual elder of the Acoma tribe here, navigates these worlds. In his house, halfway between the traditions on the reservation and the new economy of the casino, he has transformed a spare bedroom into a shrine to the Dallas Cowboys.
"It appears to have been designed by the team's owner, Jerry Jones, himself: 40 Cowboys T-shirts, 15 pairs of socks, a dozen hats, 10 jackets, 2 blankets, a wine bottle bearing Mel Renfro's likeness, a pennant, an ashtray and a tortilla warmer, all awash in blue and silver.
"Even here, in what the Acoma describe as the oldest continuously occupied village in the United States, the Dallas Cowboys connect a community fighting to maintain ancient traditions while adapting to the modern world.
"Concho worries constantly. He frets about losing the next generation to drugs and alcohol and teenage pregnancy. He dwells on his declining health. And he wonders, like much of America, if the pop starlet Jessica Simpson is messing with the confidence of Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo.
" 'I worry we're losing our traditional ways,' Concho said, sitting on a bed in his shrine, his feet tucked into Cowboys socks and moccasins. He abruptly switched topics. 'And tell Romo to stay away from Jessica,' he said. 'We have a game to win this weekend.'
"Concho's ancestors settled in Acoma Pueblo around 1150. They built their village on the mesa, 367 feet above the valley, positioned strategically to defend against raiders. (Presumably, not the ones from Oakland.)
"The pueblo looks like a set for a Western movie. In fact, John Wayne made several films here. A Tim McGraw video and two Toyota commercials were also shot on the mesa.
"Inside the church, which was built without nails but with beams carried 30 miles from Mount Taylor, the tour guide Fred Stevens carries a knit stocking cap with Romo's name stitched across the front.
"He pointed to the oldest confessional and oldest classrooms in the United States, to the candles that spiral 25 feet up from the altar - red to represent their native religion, white to represent the Catholicism of the Spanish who enslaved the people here. Outside the mission is a cemetery, measuring 400 feet by 400 feet, and 40 feet deep. The tribe prefers the term replanted, instead of buried, because members believe they came from the earth and will eventually return to it. Humps of clay surround the cemetery, with eyes, noses and ears carved into them. They are soldiers guarding the dead.
"The tribe has about 3,600 members, and 10 to 15 families live year-round in the pueblo. Theirs is a matriarchal society. The women own the houses on the mesa, each inherited by the youngest daughter in a family.
"The Acoma practice a religion heavy on song, ritual and ceremony. They grow corn, beans and squash in the valley below. They infuse pop culture influences with Spanish, Mexican and Indian traditions.
"The best example is the Cowboys, America's team, their favorite in all of football. And like anywhere else, the Cowboys inspire strong feelings.
" 'I hate them,' said Gary Keene, another guide who lives on the pueblo. 'Too many Cowboys fans around here. The only good thing to come out of Texas, in my opinion, was ZZ Top.'
"Everything in Acoma connects - the people and the traditions, the ancestors and the spirits, the animals and the plants and the soil. Even football. Concho discovered the game in seventh grade. He played defensive tackle, fullback and middle linebacker in six seasons for the varsity.
"Before games, he painted stripes on his face, a red one from dark clay on top and a shiny purple stripe on bottom. This served as a blessing from a higher power, he said, and a reminder of his ancestors. It kept him healthy, kept him safe. 'I always wanted to be that warrior,' said Concho, whose black hair is now flecked with sun."
" 'I used to think, What was it like back then? When we were fighting the Spanish and all that.'
"The Battle of Acoma started in 1598, when warriors killed 13 Spanish soldiers. The conquistador Juan de Oñate and 70 men retaliated by killing hundreds in the tribe. Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá described the battle in a poem, with its descriptions of the mangled dead, pierced flesh and quivering bodies.
"After the three-day battle ended, de Oñate cut the feet off the remaining adult men and enslaved the entire pueblo. The history of Acoma is defined by this kind of tragedy and sadness. The people here learn of persecution, prosecution and genocide. A resiliency remains, born from traditions passed from one generation to the next.
"Concho knows that resiliency, that sadness. He worked the graveyard shift in the nearby uranium mines for 20 years, 2,500 feet deep inside the shaft. He said he beat alcoholism, only to wake up 10 years ago with an unfathomable pain in his stomach.
"Two of his siblings died from Hodgkin's disease, but tests and scans have revealed nothing so far. In his shrine, he keeps a Cowboys bag with his medication: the insulin for his diabetes, the morphine for his pain, the 20 pills he swallows every day.
Diabetes, alcoholism and the effects from the uranium mines are common on the reservation.
"The pain subsides for a few hours most Sundays in the fall, when the Cowboys are on the satellite dish and Concho rests in his comfortable green easy chair. 'Sometimes I feel down about my illness and my stomach,' he said. 'I'm scared. But I always love the Cowboys. They are my favorite team.'
"With the energy he still has, Concho makes the intricate pottery that line shelves in his living room. He leads prayers. He writes songs performed on sacred holidays. He speaks in schools and wonders, he said, if children 'really believe anymore.' He wants to ensure the traditions are passed on. 'Just like beating the drum, you know,' Concho said. 'Everything must be passed down.' Including this obsession with the Cowboys.
"Tina Torivio, a 36- year-old tribe member, swears she has been a Dallas fan since birth. In high school, she dreamed of becoming a Cowboys cheerleader. On a trip to Dallas in 1983, she begged relatives to drive her around the empty stadium. She watched games with her father before he died. Years later, she said, it feels as if he is sitting next to her, shouting in spirit at the television.
"Children at school never understood. They used to ask Stevens, the guide, Shouldn't you like the Redskins or the Chiefs? 'I didn't think Indians liked Cowboys,' he said.
"As the tour continued, Stevens pointed to huts where Cowboys fans live, to stands of pottery made by women who swoon over Romo. He told stories of catching people in cars during sacred ceremonies, listening to games. Of villagers bringing generators to the mesa to catch the Cowboys on TV. Of being unable to contain his excitement after the Cowboys won the Super Bowl and his boss sending him home from work.
"Of all the fans here, only Concho has made the pilgrimage of about 700 miles to Texas Stadium for a game. He went on Thanksgiving two years ago, with tickets from a friend, the former Cowboy and author Pat Toomay. Sheryl Crow sang the national anthem. Broncos cornerback Champ Bailey signed his book. Cowboys guard Larry Allen, his favorite player, stopped to talk. 'One of the best days of my life,' Concho said.
"On Wednesday, he rested on a bench at the scenic viewpoint. Several miles behind him, the casino continued to churn out the money with which the tribe built new schools and civic centers. Front and center, the old village rises in the distance, a postcard in sandstone.
"Caught between these worlds, Concho stared in silence across the valley. His leather Cowboys jacket glistened in the sun."
On January 18 there was a review in The New York Times of the Winter Antiques Show in New York City.
In her review, Roberta Smith mentioned Conru Primitive Arts' "impeccable display of objects from Africa, Papua New Guinea and Asia, including a pair of boxy, staring horsemen from 19th century Afghanistan" which were illustrated in the story.
"Equally rewarding," Smith continues, "the Donald Ellis booth brings together North American objects, including Yu'pik masks, Plains Indian shields and Mississippian Period ceramic (1200-1400)."
January 21, 2008 "Undaunted Director at Indian Museum," was the headline for Robin Pogrebin's January 21 New York Times story on the museum's new director.
Datelined Washington, the story began: "It was not exactly a welcome mat that greeted the new museum director. When Kevin Gover left his quiet life teaching American Indian law among the cactuses of Arizona to lead the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian here, he arrived during a storm of publicity about spending by his predecessor, W. Richard West Jr.
"But in his first in depth interview since settling into his new office, Mr. Gover, 52, seemed unconcerned about the scrutiny he might now encounter about his own spending habits, or about the long term effects on the museum. 'This isn't my first rodeo,' he said last week. 'I took a few poundings in the past.'
"Spending by Mr. West, the institution's founding director, who retired last month after 17 years, has provoked two senators to call for independent investigations. Mr. West spent more than $250,000 on travel and hotels during his final four years in office and paid $48,500 to a New York artist to paint his museum portrait.
" 'I felt bad for Rick,' said Mr. Gover, who practiced in two of the same law firms as Mr. West. 'I felt that it was unfair.'
"The Smithsonian said in December that all of Mr. West's travel had been approved and that he had raised $51 million in that period. In a Jan. 11 letter to Indian Country Today, a weekly newspaper, Mr. West disputed reports first published in The Washington Post, calling them mischaracterizations of travel that was within the scope of his duties. 'I traveled as required by the job I had to do,' he wrote.
"Referring to Mr. West's trips in Europe and Asia, Mr. Gover said: 'I understand the visceral reaction some people have to what looks like living the life of Riley. But the fact is, the museum has to be present in those places. This is the museum world. This is how it's done.'
"But Mr. Gover, a member of the Pawnee tribe of Oklahoma, described himself as a conservative person and less of a public figure. He said that he expected to conduct a more low-key operation at the museum.
" 'We took a little hit on our image,' he conceded. 'I worry about that in connection with the tribes. But in a very few months I think very few people will remember this.' Most recently a professor of Indian law at the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law at Arizona State University, Mr. Gover is no stranger to the rough and tumble of this political town. He spent three years as the assistant secretary for Indian affairs at the federal Interior Department, overseeing the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
"That agency is responsible for the federal government's relations with Indian tribes, and Mr. Gover said he was regularly pummeled over issues like tribal recognition, land trusts and casino ownership. Though at times constrained by a lack of funds or authority, he said, more often he needed to negotiate between two reasonable but opposing views.
" 'This being Washington, disappointment often turns into cynicism and accusations about the motives of the decision maker,' he said in a follow-up e-mail message.
"Mr. Gover - his Pawnee name is Shield Chief - remains connected to his background, which includes Comanche ancestors. In anticipation of a nephew's return from fighting in Afghanistan, for example, he is helping his family determine 'how they welcome back a warrior,' he said. 'There is a lot of well-developed protocol around who cooks, who serves, where we sit, how the drum is handled, how the food is handled,' he said. 'So much of this ritual survives. Only a few things are part of our daily lives. But the ceremonial life is very rich. I call it knowing your manners.'
"At the Smithsonian Mr. Gover (rhymes with clover) also oversees the Indian Museum's George Gustav Heye Center in Manhattan and the American Indian Cultural Resources Center in Maryland.
"Indians should feel that the museum belongs to them, Mr. Gover said. He wants the collection not only to reflect their history and culture, he said, but also to develop into a hub of Indian scholarship. 'I would love for this to be a place where the very best scholars on native issues wanted to work,' Mr. Gover said. 'We're not there yet. We're not anywhere close to that. But I think we can get there.'
"When the museum's building here opened in 2004 - the institution was founded in 1989 - Edward Rothstein in The New York Times criticized its 'studious avoidance of scholarship.' Mr. Gover suggested that the exhibitions could be more topical, more daring and interactive. He plans to visit tribes around the country and ask what they want to see in the museum, he said, and hopes to expand the contemporary art collection. 'It's time for this museum to renew and strengthen its relationship with its primary constituents, which are the Indian tribes in this country,' he said.
"The museum has institutionalized this kind of input with its system of 'community curators,' Indians who help shape exhibitions. Recently, for example, the Blackfeet Nation of Browning, Mont., and the Chiricahua Apache of Mescalero, N.M., added their stories and artifacts to a continuing exhibition called 'Our Peoples: Giving Voice to Our Histories.'
Mr. Gover also sees Indians as potential donors. 'Tribes have begun to have resources they never had before - disposable income,' he said, referring partly to casinos. 'I would like to see if it's possible to get the Indian community to adopt this museum.'
"The museum's annual operating budget is $40 million, with $32 million provided by the federal government. But last year the Smithsonian's secretary, Lawrence M. Small, resigned after revelations about his extravagant personal spending, and Congress has recently pressured the Smithsonian and its museums to raise more of their own funds. Mr. Gover says that he will have to do his share. 'It's not my favorite thing, but I'm comfortable with it, and it has to be done,' he said. 'I think we have a fabulous case to make to the philanthropic world.'
"The Smithsonian has asked the Museum of the American Indian to increase its endowment to $100 million - from the current $18 million - by 2018. Because its building on the Washington Mall opened only three years ago, it does not yet face the repair needs that plague other Smithsonian buildings.
"A tall man with a regal bearing, Mr. Gover grew up in Oklahoma, received his bachelor's degree from Princeton University in public and international affairs and earned his law degree from the University of New Mexico. After practicing law for 15 years in Washington and Albuquerque, Mr. Gover joined the faculty at Arizona State University in 2003. 'I thought I had found my place,' he said, 'that I was going to ride it out until I retired.'
"If the next stage of his professional life promises to be less tranquil, Mr. Gover said he was energized by the tasks ahead and unperturbed by the museum's recent controversies. 'I'm glad that I can play a role in navigating these difficulties,' he said. 'I have no concern for the future of the Smithsonian. I never make apologies for things I didn't do.' "
"Four California Museums Are Raided" read the cops-and- robbers headline of Edward Wyatt's January 25 New York Times story.
And indeed, federal agents raided LACMA and more, looking for "looted" tribal and American Indian art. Los Angeles dealers Jonathan Markell and his wife, Cari Markell, and Robert Olson were "at the center of the investigation."
The story, which was datelined Los Angeles, began: "Federal agents raided a Los Angeles gallery and four museums in Southern California on Thursday, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, as part of a five year investigation into the smuggling of looted antiquities from Thailand, Myanmar, China and Native American sites. The other institutions searched were the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, the Mingei International Museum in San Diego and the Silk Roads Gallery in Los Angeles.
"At the center of the investigation are the owners of the Silk Roads Gallery, Jonathan Markell and his wife, Cari Markell, and Robert Olson, who is said in the search warrants to have smuggled looted antiquities out of Thailand, Myanmar and China.
"In affidavits supporting the warrants, federal agents said the Markells had imported looted antiquities provided by Mr. Olson and then arranged to donate them to museums on behalf of clients who took inflated tax deductions for the gifts.
"No charges have been filed in the investigation, which was described as continuing by a spokesman for the United States Attorney's Office in Los Angeles. The inquiry is being conducted by the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement office, the National Park Service and the criminal investigation division of the Internal Revenue Service.
"Even though looted antiquities have been the subject of recent investigations here and in a high profile prosecution in Italy of a former curator at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the raids were a startling development. Most recent investigations involving museum collections have involved objects excavated in Italy or Greece.
"The affidavits accompanying the warrants detailed meetings between an undercover agent for the National Park Service, who for years posed as a collector, and the Markells and representatives of some of the museums.
"In cases involving at least two institutions, the Bowers and the Pacific Asia museums, the affidavits say curators appeared to be aware that the objects that they were accepting as donations had been looted or illegally imported.
"The affidavit describes a process in which objects were smuggled after being painted or affixed with stickers reading 'Made in Thailand' to make the pieces look like replicas.
Several of the museums have objects in their permanent collections that were donated by the Markells or their clients, according to the affidavits. Michael Govan, the director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, said at a news conference that the museum had about 60 objects related to the investigation that had been donated by the Markells or other museum members over the last decade.
"Mr. Govan said the museum was fully cooperating with the authorities. He also defended the museum's process for reviewing potential donations, noting that in the affidavit Mr. Markell is quoted as warning the undercover agent away from a donation to the museum because officials there 'were sticklers for having good provenance.'
"Yet the affidavit also cites a statement by Mr. Markell that the museum had been able to get around the ban on imports of Thai artifacts because it 'had found a loophole' in the law. One such discussion involved a vessel from the Ban Chiang culture in Thailand that the museum was interested in acquiring, according to the affidavit.
"Mr. Govan denied that the museum knew of such loopholes or had looked for them. 'There is no loophole that we know about,' he said. 'If anybody can identify one, we would be the first to close it.'
"Mr. Govan said no objects had been removed from his museum on Thursday by the investigators, who in the warrant said their intent was to review and copy computer records regarding donations by the Markells or their clients. But search warrants for some of the other institutions included artifacts that were to be seized.
"Heidi Simonian, a spokeswoman for the Bowers Museum, said that it was cooperating with the authorities but that no officials were available to comment. Peter Keller, the director of the Bowers Museum, and Armand Labbé, a former curator of the museum who died in 2005, were said in the affidavits to be aware that some of the donated objects had been illegally acquired. Ms. Simonian said she was not aware whether agents had removed any artifacts from the Bowers Museum.
"Rob Sidner, the director of the Mingei International Museum, said in a statement that if the investigation showed that any of the artifacts in its collections had been improperly donated, 'we will return them to the rightful owners.'
"Representatives of the other institutions and the Markells did not return calls seeking comment on Thursday.
"According to the affidavits, the undercover agent made as many as 10 purchases of items stolen from Thailand or illegally imported from Myanmar. The Markells also showed the undercover agent a collection of antiquities that they said had been stolen from China, the authorities said.
"In more than 120 pages of search warrants and affidavits, the authorities described one typical transaction as follows: The Markells would acquire an object from Mr. Olson and then offer it for sale to the undercover agent for about $1,500. They would provide an appraisal valuing the object at close to $4,990, an amount calculated to get around tax regulations requiring more documentation for bigger donations. The appraisals sometimes falsely stated that the estimated values were prepared at the Southeast Asian Museum in Bangkok. The Markells would then arrange for the donation of an object to a museum.
"In addition to the South Asian antiquities, objects taken from the Chaco Culture National Historical Park and El Malpais National Monument, both in New Mexico, were also cited."
The plot thickens! The next day, January 26, the headline for Edward Wyatt's New York Times story on the troubles at the Los Angeles museums read "Museum Workers are Called Complicit."
The story was illustrated with a photograph captioned, "The Dalai Lama with the gallery owners John and Cari Markell." Datelined Los Angeles again, the story began: "Appraisal forms, import applications, reference materials. To that usual array of tools a museum might harness in assessing donated artifacts, some museums in Southern California appear to have added one more, according to investigators' affidavits: a wink and a nudge.
"Affidavits related to search warrants executed at four Southern California museums on Thursday say that staff members at two of the four museums worked closely with the main targets of the investigation, visiting a storage locker maintained by a smuggler of stolen antiquities and meeting with the sellers of stolen goods - even while acknowledging that the artifacts headed for the museums might be tainted.
"All the activity is said to have taken place even after the emergence of high-profile investigations into the sale and acquisition of stolen artifacts to museums around the world, including the J. Paul Getty Museum here. The picture painted in the warrants suggests that none of this deterred the participants in the transactions, which were the subject of a five-year undercover investigation by federal investigators before being made public this week.
"On Friday the directors of two of the museums that were searched denied knowledge of any questionable circumstances surrounding the acquisition of artifacts by their museums.
"Joan Marshall, the executive director of the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, said in a telephone interview that the museum was conducting its own investigation and questioning staff members over allegations laid out in the search warrant. That document claims that the museum's former director, David Kamansky, who retired in 2005, visited a warehouse maintained by Robert Olson, who investigators say illegally smuggled large numbers of artifacts out of Thailand and arranged for their sale or donation to museums, including the Pacific Asia Museum. The document also describes a deputy director of collections at the museum telling an undercover agent that she was supposed to put up 'token resistance' to accepting antiquities without proper paperwork. The artifacts, a collection of materials from the Ban Chiang culture in Thailand, were soon accepted anyway.
" 'That's not the usual process, and not something the museum condones,' Ms. Marshall said.
"In March 2006, that affidavit says, two other senior curators at the museum met with the undercover agent and with Jonathan Markell. Mr. Markell and his wife, Cari, owned the Silk Roads Gallery, which is at the center of the investigation. That gallery was also raided this week. At that meeting, the document says, curators raised questions about where the artifacts had come from, but accepted the donations without requiring documentation of their origins.
"Officials from the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana were also described in the court papers as having extensive contacts with Mr. Olson.
"Armand Labbé, a former curator at the Bowers Museum who died in 2005, had extensive contacts with Mr. Olson, meeting with him regularly to choose Thai and American Indian artifacts that Mr. Labbé wanted donated to the museum, the papers say. At one point, Mr. Labbé's secretary told the undercover agent, Mr. Olson called the museum's offices every day.
"Peter Keller, the director of the Bowers Museum, said in an interview on Friday that he had met Mr. Olson only once, in 1991, shortly after he took over at the museum, when Mr. Labbé took him to meet some museum donors. He also said he had seen Mr. Olson 'in the halls' of the museum on occasion.
"Although the museum has extensive collections of Ban Chiang artifacts, Mr. Keller said, 'We honestly did not know this material was illegal.' He added that his researchers had been unable to find evidence of the Thai antiquity law forbidding their export, passed in 1961, in the databases they regularly consulted.
"According to an affidavit attached to the search warrant for the museum, the undercover agent discussed the law with Mr. Labbé in 2004 and with Mr. Keller in 2005. The agent was also said to have mailed Mr. Keller a copy of the Thai antiquity law that month. 'I don't recall ever seeing that correspondence,' Mr. Keller said.
"The museum has never required proof that artifacts it accepts have been obtained legally, Mr. Keller said. Donors are required to sign a statement saying that they are the rightful owners of an artifact and that it is in the United States legally, he said, but they are not asked to provide documentation.
"Mr. Keller said it was a 'very difficult thing to prove' where an artifact has come from or how long it has been in the United States. 'I don't know how you prove it,' he said.
"One specialist in cultural heritage law said that ignorance of the law was no defense for museums. 'Museums are in a sense just turning a blind eye to what everybody knows in their heart of hearts is going on,' said the specialist, Patty Gerstenblith, a professor of law at DePaul University. 'By not thinking about what they buy, they are putting money into an international network of smugglers, looters, thieves and destroyers. As educational institutions, museums have a responsibility to look beyond that particular object' that they may be acquiring.'
"Since Mr. Labbé's death, Mr. Keller said, the museum has stopped acquiring new materials of that sort and now mostly plays host to traveling exhibitions from larger museums. 'I personally don't see any need to have material in the collection if we are not going to research it or display it,' he said.
"The undercover agent described meetings with Mr. Labbé in which the two discussed that some of the Thai artifacts the agent was donating to the museum had recently been dug up in Thailand. At one meeting, in March 2004, Mr. Labbé purchased some beads from Mr. Olson that had just been received from Thailand. According to the affidavit, 'The beads were filled with dirt and had obviously just been dug up.' The agent also showed Mr. Labbé pictures of a new dig site where the artifacts had been obtained - an indication that they would have been acquired in violation of Thai law.
" 'Mr. Labbé smiled and said he did not want to see them,' the affidavit states."
"An Investigation Focuses on Antiquities Dealer," Part Three of Edward Wyatt's story, ran in The New York Times on January 31.
The focus of the story, Robert Olsen, dealt in American Indian material as well as Asian. Datelined Cerritos, CA, the story began, "Robert Olson hardly looks like the head of a smuggling ring specializing in Asian antiquities.
"On Wednesday morning, barefoot, dressed in a white T-shirt and stained, fraying black slacks, with receding white hair and a gap where his lower front teeth should be, Mr. Olson, 79, still appeared stunned that a dozen federal agents showed up early one morning a week ago to search his apartment here in this suburb southeast of Los Angeles.
"The agents took files, photographs and reference books from the apartment and more than 2,000 bronze and terra cotta artifacts, mostly imported from Thailand, Vietnam and other South Asian countries, from two storage lockers rented by Mr. Olson, an antiquities dealer.
"Other agents searched the homes of his middle age son and daughter, four Southern California museums, two Los Angeles area art galleries and a Chicago-area private art collection as part of a five year undercover investigation into the illegal importation and sale of antiquities. According to affidavits and search warrants filed in federal court in Los Angeles this month, much of the activity appeared to be centered on Mr. Olson and his clients. The agencies involved are the United States Attorneys Office, the National Park Service, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Internal Revenue Service.
"In an interview in his apartment, Mr. Olson said he knew that some of the people in Thailand from whom he bought antiquities might have been breaking that country's laws with their procurement practices, but, 'I would never, ever do anything illegal.' Over 30 years and more than 100 trips to Thailand, he said, 'I was told and told and told that everything I was doing was legal.'
"Federal authorities paint a different picture. They allege that Mr. Olson spent years traveling to archaeological sites in Thailand, where he sometimes watched as artifacts were illegally dug up. He then had the artifacts disguised as replicas and shipped to the United States in more than three dozen shipments.
"Federal agents declined to comment, saying the investigation was continuing. The court papers describe Mr. Olson as selling items to an undercover agent, guiding the agent to an appraiser who valued the artifacts at four times their sales price and then arranging for the agent to donate the items to museums, producing fraudulent tax deductions.
" 'I didn't do that,' Mr. Olson said on Wednesday, sitting in a recliner that was covered with a green beach towel in the living room of his cluttered, small apartment, redolent of the cats kept by his 11-yearold daughter, strewn with children's videotapes and full of tennis trophies.
"Mr. Olson, who said he did not want himself photographed because of the lasting effects of a stroke he suffered in July, said he has been buying and selling antiquities for more than 30 years.
"In the 1960s, while traveling throughout the western United States selling filters for truck engines, Mr. Olson said, he would often stop at curio shops to examine turquoise jewelry. After rejecting a job transfer to Chicago in the early 1970s, he began dealing in turquoise, buying it from miners in Arizona and selling it to dealers and to American Indians throughout the West.
"Once, he said, a collector of American Indian artifacts told Mr. Olson that he had found many of the objects he owned. Mr. Olson said he persuaded the man, whom he would not name, to take him to a site where such artifacts could be found. Together, he said, they discovered a large ceramic jar and a ladle, both more than 1,000 years old.
"According to federal documents, those finds were made on protected federal land. 'I didn't know that then,' Mr. Olson said. 'It was a great big expanse of empty land.' That was the only time he found pieces, he said. The remainder of his collection of more than 70 American Indian ladles was bought in stores, he said.
"His entry into the Asian antiquities business was accidental. He said that he had been invited to a wedding in Thailand and in a shop there he saw a bronze bracelet that the owner told him was roughly 2,000 years old.
" 'I went to put it on and it broke, so I had to buy it,' he said. 'And that got me started collecting artifacts.'
"Soon he was importing Asian antiquities, selling many of them to Armand Labbé, a curator at the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art in Santa Ana, Calif., and to Barry L. MacLean, a Chicago businessman and collector. Much of that business ended, Mr. Olson said, after Mr. Labbé died in 2005 and Mr. MacLean hired a curator who cut back on such purchases. More recently, Mr. Olson's elder daughter sold some of his Thai artifacts on eBay, he said.
"Now, agents have seized Mr. Olson's entire collection, including $40,000 worth of artifacts that he bought in the last six months. 'I have no money,' he said. 'My business is just nothing now.' "
