ATADA News, Fall, 2006 Archive

ATADA News, Fall, 2006

From the President

Lifetime Achievements

".a wonderful opportunity to recognize some of the individuals who have made huge contributions to the field of Native American and Tribal Art and to promote our organization to the public."

I hope everyone has recovered from the Santa Fe experience and is looking forward to the winter activities. Hopefully, you are all aware of our planned Lifetime Achievement Awards dinner that is planned for February during the Marin Show. You will all be receiving invitations soon and we hope all members will attend. The dinner will get lots of press and many people who have been or are important to the industry will be in attendance. It is a wonderful opportunity to recognize some of the individuals who have made huge contributions to the field of Native American and Tribal Art and to promote our organization to the public.

I want to take this opportunity to remind you that ATADA does have an established process for resolving conflicts. We all know that disputes and controversies will inevitably arise at times. It is important to know that ATADA has a mechanism in place to resolve them without public accusations or legal involvement. This process is called "arbitration." We will discuss this process in more depth in the next newsletter. In the meantime, please refer to the bylaws for information concerning how the process is implemented (the bylaws are available at www.atada.org). We urge all members to adhere to this process.

Editor's Notebook

ATADA's Grand Event

ATADA's upcoming Lifetime Achievement Awards dinner is an important event, both for our organization and for the business many of us are in. But Tom Murray said it better than I can. Here are excerpts from an email Tom sent to his fellow board members following a "brainstorming session" with Kim Martindale:

"We feel that the success of this event is crucial to ATADA's credibility. We should be thinking of this a major public relations and consciousness-raising event that is intended to honor the folks involved, bring in the press and, in the process, gain a little reflected glory for our organization. It should be our effort to try to make this the equivalent in our field of what the MacArthur Genius Award or the Nobel Prize is in other fields.

"The awards dinner has the potential to be significant in bringing our 'industry' to the attention of the public in a far more favorable light than is often seen in the press. This awards dinner has the potential to offer 'bridge building' on a grand scale.

"As this is 'our' event, we must support it fully. Otherwise we bring no honor to those meritorious persons we select, nor ourselves."

Alice Kaufman

Santa Fe Meeting Minutes

ATADA Santa Fe Annual Board Meeting

The board thanks Susan and Clint Nagy and Pat and Roger Fry for hosting ATADA's board meeting at their beautiful La Fonda penthouse terrace.

At first, the discussion centered on the new Directories. Tom Murray asked that we have more copies to give out at shows. [Ed.: we did have plenty at both Santa Fe shows.] Ramona Morris wondered of we should "even the playing field" for ads by limiting the number of pages that could be purchased. Brant said that he thought the $175 per page cost of the ads was very reasonable. The outcome: ads would be limited to two pages and only Full members can advertise.

The possibility of creating a "junior" or "provisional" membership was discussed. Ramona Morris and Mike McKissick will pursue this matter further.

Merrill Domas said that the vetting had gone well at Barry Cohen's show: "There were some problems but it was a good start." Tom Murray said he found the show "incredibly cleaned up. We deserve the credit." Brant Mackley said that "fine tuning" was necessary, but that the vetting process should be continued.The board thanks Susan and Clint Nagy and Pat and Roger Fry for hosting ATADA's board meeting at their beautiful La Fonda penthouse terrace.

The possibility of creating a "junior" or "provisional" membership was discussed. Ramona Morris and Mike McKissick will pursue this matter further.

Brant Mackley nominated _________, five historical sites in Pennsylvania, to receive an ATADA grant of $1,000 for the redesign and upgrading of displays, and the board approved. The board also decided to donate $1,500 to the Crow Canyon archeological project. It is hoped that students working there will write about themselves and what they are learning for the newsletter. The money is the same $1,500 that had been awarded to another recipient in 2005 who was unable to use it, so it does not represent a new expense.

Treasurer Bob Gallegos reported that there was $10,300 in Foundation, $23,000 in the general fund and $14,000 in CDs.

The board then discussed advertising, and decided ATADA should advertise in the Maine Antique Digest, in American Indian Art magazine and in Tribal Art magazine. Wilbur Norman, Tom Murray and Alice Kaufman were named to be the advertising committee.

A motion was made and passed to make Bettie Mintz an emeritus member.

The board then discussed the Lifetime Achievement awards, which will honor a group of people who have been active in and meaningful to the American Indian art and tribal art worlds for many years. Because of timing, this year, the board will select recipients. Next year, the membership will nominate and vote on recipients. The board also thought that we could combine this event with ATADA's annual fundraising party, which always has so much competition in Santa Fe, what with parties, etc., every night, but which will not have that problem in Marin.

Merrill Domas then addressed the issue of "associating" with a promoter and what that meant. Merrill believed that it meant that both ATADA and the promoter will promote the show and the association, and that ATADA will direct the vetting, and that we cannot associate with a show that is not vetted. On the other hand, we would try to avoid exclusivity.

Barry Cohen did include in his 2006 contract that ATADA associate exclusively with his show, but as no other show asked for vetting and exclusivity, there wasn't a conflict.

When the question of compensating vetters arose, Bob Gallegos said that vetting "keeps a show's quality up," and that allowing vetters first look at everything and free entrance to the preview was compensation enough.

Brant Mackley concluded that vetting is a promoter's responsibility, but that ATADA can and will help.

ATADA Santa Fe Annual General Members Meeting

First, ATADA would like to thank Wilbur Norman for allowing us to use the space at Traveler's Marketplace for our meeting, and to especially thank him for his help in setting up the meeting.

President Merrill Domas began the meeting by addressing the issue of vetting Indian art shows. She explained that ATADA was following guidelines used by Hali and the New York Winter Antiques Show, and reported that the vetting process at Barry Cohen's show the week before went very smoothly. "There were no blow-ups, no threats to leave the show. The feedback has been nothing but praise. People appreciated ATADA's involvement." On the other hand, some members were not in favor of "associating" with any one promoter. Merrill responded that should another dealer approach us and agree to abide by ATADA guidelines, we would consider associating with that promoter as well.

Elaine Tucker remarked that some dealers bring certain things to Cohen's show, which is vetted, and other objects to Whitehawk, which is not.

Terry Schurmeier said that the membership had agreed in the past that there should only be ATADA vetting for an ATADA show, and that it "was not our job to impose guidelines on promoters."

To which Wilbur Norman responded, "But what if a promoter asks?"

"It is in our interest to continue to vet," Merrill said.

Marcy Burns pointed out that "promoters need ATADA. Barry chose to ask ATADA to recruit qualified people. Not all vetters were members. But to vet is promoter's decision."

Deborah Begner asked whether ATADA should be the agency to facilitate vetting.

George Brown said that facilitating vetting was "doing a good service to dealers and collectors."

"ATADA gets exposure," said Elaine Tucker. "These are questions for the membership: do they want vetting and should ATADA facilitate the process?"

Roger Fry said that ATADA has "the most qualified people in the country to recommend vetters. And if association is the way to achieve vetting, then we should associate. We will put this to a vote for the membership."

Len Weakley, Roger Fry's law committee co-chair, asked what is the downside to vetting and associating.

Bob Bauver pointed out that "we have done due diligence and dealers signed a contract that called for vetting."

Terry Schurmeier said that at her Albuquerque show, which she promotes, part of the contract that her exhibitors sign requires dealers to be "responsible" for their material.

"Vetting should not conflict with the role of ATADA," Elaine Tucker added.

Treasurer Bob Gallegos reported that we have $10,500 in the Foundation, $23,000 in the general account, $10,000 of which he will transfer to CDs. The new, graphically enhanced newsletter and directory are "lovely," he said, but cost two times what the old ones cost. "We can still afford it," he said, "and we are in good shape financially." Members should contact Bob Bauver to nominate future grant recipients.

Education Committee chair Bob Bauver announced that 2006 grant recipients were the Millicent Rogers Museum, ____ Museum and to the Crow Canyon archeological project, which Bob said represented "a great step forward in getting dealers and archeologists together."

Membership chair Mike McKissick proposed that ATADA reevaluate classes of membership and create an Intermediate Full membership for Associates who are dealers, and perhaps a Junior membership for young dealers. These issues will be discussed, and all members are encouraged to express their opinions.

Terry Schurmeier said that ATADA should police itself and revoke the membership of anyone who was "serially questionable."

Mike answered that "someone has to complain first," and then said we should bring in more members from the tribal art community. Perhaps, he said, we should have a second general meeting in Marin to discuss some of these issues.

Roger Fry brought up the questions of allowing auction houses to become members of ATADA: "If they comply with our guarantee principles, then I say yes." Marcy Burns agrees, "if they give a full warranty as we do and stick to our standards."

Merrill asked the membership for recommendations for the slate of officers/executive board members. She also brought up the idea of timing ATADA's long-discussed fundraiser/Lifetime Achievement awards to coincide with Kim Martindale's Marin show in 2006. Such an event, she said, would elevate the status of ATADA and would be a wonderful opportunity for PR.

Kim Martindale said that there were two options for a party venue: the Embassy Suites hotel or the nearby Sheraton, which has a ballroom. Bob Bauver said that not just members but collectors and anthropologists should receive invitations. Tom Murray said he was "skeptical" of the financial success of the event, and said we need a minimum amount of people to sign up in advance so we can estimate whether or not we will have an audience. Bob Bauver said we should invite our members first, and Marcy wanted the honorees to be "people with visibility."

Merrill had posed the question of whether ATADA should be "activists" who are more business- and PR-oriented. Wilbur Norman said that ATADA would attract more tribal art dealers if we became more active. Elaine Tucker believes we "must become activists." Tom Begner suggested one way to become more active would be to write "white papers" when important issues arise. Mike McKissick reminded members that ATADA originally was started "to clean our own house." Ramona Morris said that individual cases and issues had been presented to the ATADA board a number of times.

ATADA, Vetting and Association

Not a new question, but now in the spotlight again. At the General Meeting (see the previous minutes), Elaine Tucker said, "These are questions for the membership: do they want vetting and should ATADA facilitate the process?"

Roger Fry added that ATADA has "the most qualified people in the country to recommend vetters. And if association is the way to achieve vetting, then we should associate. We will put this to a vote for the membership." In response, an on-line poll asked Full Members to vote on these issues. The responses to both questions - vetting and association - are below.

Several members contributed to this story. First, an Introduction to the subject by Arch Thiessen:

While attending a show in 1988, a small group of independent tribal art dealers got together for dinner. The dinner conversation turned to their mutual concern for the apparent and damaging lack of ethical standards for the business at large. From that discussion and those that followed, was born the concept of a professional association of dealers that would provide education for the public and set standards for the trade. An organization of honest and informed sellers that would afford buyers a new and much needed sense of security.

That organization became ATADA, the Antique Tribal Art Dealers Association. As members, we offer buyers a guarantee that objects we sell are as represented regarding age, authenticity and extent of restoration (if any). Furthermore, this guarantee allows buyers a full refund if the object proves to be other than represented. We also ensure that objects have been properly acquired and fall within the restrictions of laws concerning cultural sensitivity.

Ever since the founding of ATADA, discussions have returned again and again to the need for a vetted show (or shows) in Santa Fe. These discussions always suffered from a lack of reality. There was no way for ATADA alone to accomplish this task. There were numerous insurmountable obstacles to be overcome. These discussions were much like the discussions of reunification in postwar West Germany. For those of us that grew up in this era, the discussions seemed unreal There was a common goal important to the country. No one doubted the goal. Discussions persisted through numerous administrations, numerous presidencies, and nothing ever happened.Then one night on Merrill Domas' watch, the Berlin wall came down. The next day, everyone was working on vetting Barry Cohen's show in Santa Fe. People of good will working together on a common goal can accomplish anything. This is a transformation as important to the antique American Indian and tribal art industry as it is to the collecting public. The future will tell whether we have succeeded.

Then, in a letter to ATADA, Gary Spratt, ATADA's first president, reminded newer members that ATADA had participated in a vetted show before 2006.

I am writing to clarify and correct the assumption and advertisement regarding the mention that this is the first Associated and ATADA-vetted show in our brief, yet stellar, history.

The first Associated and ATADA-vetted show was held one year after the association was founded. There are many members who remember this fact and there is an advertisement in American Indian Art magazine attesting to the fact. The show was produced by ATADA and Caskey-Lees in Los Angeles and was vetted by outside vetters who were in part flown in and paid by the association - it was felt at the time that a truly honest and reliable vetting process can only be accomplished by having non-competing dealers and outside authorities in various subjects doing the vetting... Sadly, the constituency has forgotten one of the original intentions and goals of our organization, and that was to have an unbiased group of experts with no potential conflicts of interest do the vetting.

Please correct the record and advertisements to reflect the history of our attempts to associate with a promoter who will participate in the true meaning and intent of having a fair and unbiased group who vet an ATADA-sponsored show

Regards,

Gary Spratt

[Gary's letter did not arrive in time to change the advertisements, which had been prepared well in advance of August by the promoter.]

After the show and the general meeting in Santa Fe, ATADA sent the following email to Full members:

As those of you who attended the Annual Meeting in Santa Fe on August 16th are aware, some of our Members raised concerns about our association with Barry Cohen and our participation in recommending people to vet the show. We concluded that two questions need resolution. They are as follows:

1. Should ATADA provide recommendations to show promoters identifying potential vetters?

Board Position: The Board believes that ATADA is in a better position than the show promoters to identify qualified vetters for Tribal and Indian material. The Board recommends we continue to assist show promoters in identifying qualified vetters when requested to do so. Vetted shows increase the quality and integrity of the shows.

The results:
Agree 27
Disagree 2

2. Should ATADA associate with or lend its name to any Tribal or Indian show?

Board Position: The Board believes that associating with show promoters for the purpose of identifying vetters increases ATADA exposure to the public and promotes support of ATADA Members. It is important, however, that all show promoters be treated equally.

The results:
Agree 20
Disagree 7
Don't know/"question too broad": 2

There were many comments along with the votes, pro and con both questions. Here is a selection:

"Vetting should only occur with a statement like 'This is a show vetted in consultation with ATADA.' "

"Let's not get into the same mess as before. We cannot sponsor nor lend our name in anyway that gives exclusivity to any one promoter."

"I feel that the perceived alliance with Barry Cohen runs contrary to our best interests."

"I am on the fence with both issues. I do not feel that ATADA should pick some shows and not others. That is quite unfair to some of the shows that have supported us over the years."

"I do have some views on vetting, specifically as to how it was handled in the HIWTA show in Santa Fe. I had an issue arise with a piece that I had at the show. When I asked to speak to the vetter to get the specifics, I was told that the vetters don't answer the charges they have made and I was never given the opportunity to the appeal process that had been described as procedural. Instead, the promoter sent over someone who was deemed to be the 'expert on the floor' to venture his opinion. It is my view that if a vetter takes issue with an item, he or she should be available to explain fully the reasoning behind their position. I am in total favor of ferreting out bad material from shows.... it is essential that we do so. That said, we all know how difficult these things can be and how many times 'experts' have been fooled. I can name one very high profile incident, just recently, but I don't think I need to. My point is that perhaps there should be at least two vetters for each category, so that some corroboration and consensus is reached between them and to help maintain a neutral balance. I know several top dealers at that show who had pieces pulled which they believed very strongly to be good pieces and so it was just one subjective view against another. The piece that I had a problem with was purchased from a long time dealer and I had been in sale negotiations for that item with another very prominent dealer. Obviously there were some differences of opinion regarding that piece. I hope this helps to add a little 'on the floor' perspective."

"I happen to believe that the only true way to vet is reliable provenance and by persons who make reproductions like the Brewers who know what to look for better than any dealer I have ever known." [The Brewers were among the vetters at the Cohen show].

"We must supervise vetting as a group. This last August vetting was a mixed bag of great experts and ones that were definitely unqualified to pass judgments on material that requires expertise! It was a great thing and an embarrassment at the same time."

"Promoters should be encouraged to loudly advertise the fact his or her show is vetted with the full cooperation of ATADA."

"Vetting should be enforced."

A reminder to members who are concerned about exclusivity: only one Santa Fe promoter, Barry Cohen, was willing to allow his show to be vetted, and asked to form a one-year "association" with ATADA to achieve that end.

ATADA Lifetime Achievement Awards Recipients

After years of discussion and planning, ATADA's first Lifetime Achievement Awards dinner is scheduled for 7 PM, Saturday night, February 24, at the Embassy Suites in San Rafael, California. The party is timed to coincide with The Marin Show: Art of the Americas, Kim Martindale's annual show. The idea, which originated with ATADA board member Bob Bauver, is to honor individuals who have been active in and contributed to the American Indian and tribal art worlds for several decades. The event is a benefit for ATADA, and will be highlighted by the appearances of luminaries from the world of American Indian and tribal art.

For the first ATADA Lifetime Achievement Awards, recipients have been selected by the Executive Board. They are:

American Indian art dealer/scholar Martha Hopkins Struever and her husband, Stuart Struever, an archeologist
Warren Robbins, who founded what has become the National Museum of African Art
Long-time ATADA supporters Quintus & Mary Herron. He has been a member of the Choctaw tribal council, and they have given their tribal art collection to the town of Idabel, Oklahoma.
John and Anne Summerfield, independent scholars (both with PhDs, in economics and nuclear physics) who formed the greatest collection of Minagkabau textiles (Sumatra, Indonesia) in the world and then gave it to the Fowler Museum of Cultural History at UCLA and wrote a catalogue for the collection.

You will learn much more about these award recipients before and at the dinner. For subsequent dinners, nominations and votes for award recipients will come from the membership.

We are planning an elegant dinner for 100-200 people. The cost will be $100 per person. You will be receiving an invitation soon. We hope to see you there! For more information, or to make reservations, email acek33@aol.com.

In Memorium
Jack Ringwalt

John Molloy remembers Jack Ringwalt

I first met Jack Ringwalt in the early 1980's when our industry was still in its formative stages and when we all had a lot to learn. In fact, Jack was directly responsible for the some of the things I did learn - namely, how to tell the old beads from the recently manufactured imitations. It's all about tonality of color as well as shape, and I remember walking through a Las Vegas gun show with Jack as he hipped me to what was old and what was new, all done surreptitiously to avoid hassles and confrontations. Jack loved to point things out discreetly while pretending not to. In fact, for me, Jack's most characteristic gesture would be for him to sidle up to me and, without really moving his mouth, say something like "don't look now but." as he would point out something going down just beyond my vision. From those early days, we developed a bond that grew as our lives unfolded from the bleak days of our bachelorhood to the joys of courtship and marriage and the fulfillment that we both found as middle-aged parents.

Unfortunately, the birth of Jack and Janice's beloved DeeDee coincided with the diagnosis of his cancer. From that point forward, Jack and his family embarked on a journey that was simultaneously an affirmation of life and a struggle, compounded by his diabetes, to maintain it. All of Jack's friends, and there are many, have been in awe of his unflinching attitude in the face of his adversity. Not that he would make anything of it - quite the contrary - it was part of his courage that insisted it was just everyday life.

Personally I have many memories to cherish from the early days of shows and parking lot deals, and Brimfield, and everybody's favorite crab restaurant in San Francisco, up to the more recent years when I would visit with Jack in Marin. David Cook, Jack and I shared one of the most magical days of my life on Memorial Day in 1989 at Badlands National Park and Fort Robinson in Jack's home state of Nebraska. Partisan that he was, Jack was wearing a tee-shirt that advocated a carnal act be done unto Iowa which was a football rival. He sensitively changed that shirt as we entered a church that lay in an open field in an abandoned part of the Great Plains. There, we encountered two elderly ladies and their chauffeur who were visiting the grave of their brother who had perished in WW I, more than 70 years earlier. The church was built more or less on the site where Buffalo Bill took his first scalp, which was the sort of historical fact that Jack loved.

Jack's enthusiasm for research, for discovery, was boundless. Remember that photo he uncovered years ago that showed the aftermath of a gunfight with one unfortunate participant lying on the ground 'leaking oil'? Jack kept on it until he discovered that it was an out-take from an early Western. More recently, he discovered a Western beaded outfit that he linked to a specific individual, somehow contacted the family and rescued that tomahawk they were about to discard. This tenacity of purpose served Jack well and by extension, all of his friends who benefited from his thoughtfulness For more than the good times, and even more than for showing me the difference between fake beadwork and real, I will always be grateful for the example that Jack gave us in how to live one's life in the face of adversity - unflinching, straight-ahead and get it all done.

He showed us how a tough guy walks. Words can not do anything more than point out facets of a person and are totally inadequate in taking the measure of someone, but suffice to say, when Jack was with us, a giant of a human being walked among us.

Thanks, Jack, for your friendship and the great example that we will hold in our hearts until the day when we walk down that road that we must all walk down.

In Memorium
Larry Frank

"Noted historian, art aficionado dies at 80: Larry Frank's collection valued at around $5 million" was the headline for an obituary by Eric J. Hedlund, reprinted from The Taos News, that appeared in the Santa Fe New Mexican, August 9.

Hedlund's story: "Historian, art collector and author Larry Frank died in his sleep Monday afternoon at his home in Arroyo Hondo. He was 80.

"His wife, artist Alyce Frank, described her husband as 'fascinating and never boring. He was very sweet to me.'

"Over more than four decades, Frank amassed what is generally considered the best collection of Spanish colonial santos, or saints, in private hands. He wrote several books on the artistic, cultural history of Northern New Mexico. He and historian Skip Miller co-authored in 2001 an ambitious and comprehensive three-volume work on the subject, 'A Land So Remote.'

"Born in 1926 in Los Angeles, Frank had degrees in English literature and philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley. He and Alyce married in L.A. in 1953, and they produced educational films before they moved to Taos County in 1962. They moved into a150-year-old penitente morada that would become their home for the next 44 years.

"Frank also wrote another major book on New Mexico santos, 'The New Kingdom of the Saints,' as well as 'Historic Pottery of the Pueblo Indians,' 'Indian Silver Jewelry of the Southwest' and a book of short stories, 'Train Stops.'

"He lectured on santos at Stanford University, the Roswell Museum, The University of New Mexico and St. John's College in conjunction with an exhibit of his collection.

"He is survived by his wife and three children.

"Secretary of Cultural Affairs Stuart Ashman said the collection, housed in the blood-stained morada, included more than 300 pieces going back to the late 18th century. It included the work of several artists known only as the A.J. santero, the Arroyo Hondo santero and the Santo Niño santero.

"He also owned major work by the artist José Rafael Aragon, described as the Michaelangelo of Northern New Mexico santeros.

"Frank 'loved showing this stuff,' Ashman said. 'It was like an event. When you came there, he was waiting. He walked you through the collection and told stories. He knew so much about the traditions of the Hispanic community.' Frank was also a 'sharp' collector who bought many Spanish pieces while they were still priced low.

"The only other collections to rival Frank's are in museums such as the Taylor Museum for Southwestern Studies in Colorado Springs, Colo., the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art and Museum of International Folk Art, both in Santa Fe.

"Frank talked to a number of museums about donating his collection, which is valued at around $5 million. At one time, The University of New Mexico forfeited earnest money when it couldn't raise the purchase price. While he was working at the Smithsonian Institution, Andrew Connors, a former senior curator at the National Hispanic Cultural Center, said he talked Frank about donating a few pieces. But Frank said he wanted to keep the work together.

"Ashman said he tried to acquire the Frank collection for the museums he has been associated with and discussed the subject most recently with Frank just a few months ago. 'He knew that any day he could call Sotheby's and auction it off. But he wanted it to stay together and stay in New Mexico,' Ashman said.

"Ashman said the acquisition would most likely have been a gift/purchase in which Frank sold the artwork to the state museum at a price significantly below its appraised value.

"Now it is going to be up to Alyce Frank, to determine the future of the collection.

"Michael O'Shaughessy, Frank's publisher at Red Crane Books, said: 'He had a profound love for these pieces.'

"O'Shaughessy said Frank fell in love with medieval art as a young student in Paris but couldn't afford to buy it. The santo tradition, when he discovered it, 'came close,' and at the time, prices were reasonable.

"Today, 'the value of the collection is immense,' O'Shaughessy said.

"A private burial is scheduled for Friday at a cemetery near the Frank home."

New Mexican staff writer Anne Constable contributed to this story.

In Memorium
Sallie Wagner

"As a champion of American Indian arts and a busy philanthropist, Wagner leaves lasting impression on city"; an obituary of Sallie Wagner by Natalie Storey, appeared in The New Mexican on September 5, 2006.

The story: "When she spoke of her life's passion, Sallie Wagner often said she found it at age 13, when she first laid eyes on a set of arrowheads her brother had given her. Shortly after she received the arrowheads, she got her first grant by writing the state of West Virginia and asking for money to study a mound of dirt near her home, which she suspected contained American Indian artifacts. She was only 13 or 14 at the time, but the state gave her money to study the hill anyway.

" 'Her integrity and determination never changed throughout her life,' said her nephew-in-law, Colin Waldon.

"Wagner, a Santa Fe Living Treasure, philanthropist and anthropologist, died August 30 of cancer. She was 93.

"She changed and inspired a lot of people's lives," said Firth Waldon, Wagner's niece. 'Truly, Sallie's influence was tremendous.'

"Many in New Mexico will remember her as a champion of American Indian arts. She sponsored and befriended sculptors, painters and weavers throughout her life. Wagner and her husband - they later divorced - owned the Wide Ruins trading post on the Navajo Nation where she sold and supported Navajo weavings that used traditional vegetable dye.

"Wagner's other philanthropic activities left a lasting impression on Santa Fe. She was instrumental in establishing the Santa Fe Rape Crisis and Trauma Treatment Center and helped the School of American Research, the Santa Fe Animal Shelter and the International Folk Art Museum. She also helped establish St. John's College in Santa Fe by raising money and donating land. The first president of St. John's in Santa Fe lived in her guest house in Santa Fe's east-side foothills.

".Wagner had no children but informally adopted many. She had a near-photographic memory. Wagner was named a Living Treasure in 1990 and received the Stewart Udall Environmental Award and the New Mexico Heritage Preservation Award, among others."

Insurance Update

From Payce Louis, Vice President, AXA Art Insurance Corporation (provider of Flather & Perkins' ATADA insurance program), news about Full member rates and advice on how to minimize losses.

Ask an insurance expert to identify when most art is damaged and the answer is packing and moving. It makes little difference if the move is three feet or three thousand miles; most damage occurs when art is in the hands of humans and in motion. In 2005, losses for the ATADA Dealer Insurance Program, offered through Flather & Perkins, Inc., more than doubled from 2004. 2006 is showing less frequency in losses but three times more severe than 2005. Your insurance program is based on shared experience, so we are all partners in keeping your premiums at competitive levels. Beginning in 2007, Fine Art dealer program rates are increasing 5%, but here are some tips in reducing losses.

Packing for Shipment Before all else, be certain your art is in condition to travel. Next, select a packing and moving firm with demonstrated experience in fine arts moving. Be certain to thoroughly check references! FedEx, UPS, and DHL are overnight delivery experts, not fine art movers!

Small Objects and Small Sculpture Wrap each object in acid-free tissue paper, then in acid-free heavier paper as a secondary layer. Objects with multiple parts should have each part wrapped individually, but packed together. Clearly label all objects and parts on the secondary layer. Polished metals benefit from having the primary tissue layer wrapped in anti-tarnish cloth before applying the secondary layer. Fill any voids in the packing carton firmly with packing material to prevent movement during shipment. Archeological ceramics may also benefit from silica gel packets. Follow the instructions in the preceding paragraph. Ivories and woods can be particularly vulnerable to humidity changes.

Ethnographic Materials These are among the most fragile, vulnerable and difficult items to ship safely. Retain a conservator to develop specifications for your packer and shipper.

Crates and Containers

Today, the basic concept of packing is that of a crate inside a crate. The work is first given its primary (and sometimes secondary) wrappings, then placed inside a padded container with several inches of shock-absorbent packing surrounding the object and isolating it from the container.

This primary container is sealed and placed within a secondary container with the primary container, once again, being separated from the secondary container by several inches of shock-absorbent materials. The packing cases will be constructed of materials selected for their ability to withstand and repel the dangers of that journey. All crates should be clearly marked FRAGILE, and the top should be clearly marked both on the top and with arrows on the vertical sides pointing upward.

Packing lists indicating contents may be helpful if glued to the secondary crate.

Kennewick Man Updates

June 22, 2006
TRIBAL MEMBERS PRAY OVER KENNEWICK MAN
Members of the Wanapum Band and Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation were allowed to hold a ceremony Wednesday with the Kennewick Man bones. For more on this story, go to: http://www.kennewick-man.com

July 25, 2006
THE MAN WHO FOUND KENNEWICK MAN
Meet Will Thomas, the guy who found Kennewick Man a decade ago. If Thomas and his friend Dave had not decided to try to sneak into the annual hydroplane boat races 10 years ago, it's likely Kennewick Man would not have been found. Read this story and watch our video interview with Will Thomas now at http://www.kennewick-man.com.

Aug. 4, 2006
ASATRU LEADER VISITS KENNEWICK
Stephen McNallen, leader of the Asatru Folk Assembly, visited Kennewick on Thursday, including the Kennewick Man exhibit at the East Benton County Museum. McNallen gained fame a decade ago when his pre-Christian religious group joined the legal battle over the ancient bones, claiming Kennewick Man as a European ancestor. http://www.kennewick-man.com.

Aug. 10, 2006
HASTINGS INTRODUCES KENNEWICK MAN BILL
Congressman Doc Hastings (R-Washington) has introduced a bill that would revise the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act to allow study of ancient remains such as Kennewick Man, http://www.kennewick-man.com.

A Cautionary Email to ATADA:

Dear Sir or Madam,

I would like to know if you were interested in to purchase highest-quality American Indian Art Beadwork replica? Please find attached two fotos of a Southern Cheyenne Pipe-Bag replica ca. 1880. This item is very hard or even can not be distinguished from its original antique one.

Further offers could follow also in combination with quill-work.

I am looking forward to your hear from you soon.
Thank you.

Yours sincerely,
Hans-Peter Mertens
Bismarckstr. 53
48268 Greven
Germany
Email: hans-peter.mertens@gmx.de

Book News

"Navajo and Pueblo Earrings 1850-1945" by Robert Bauver featuring the collection of Robert V. Gallegos was published in August 2006. The book's photographs were taken by Chadwick Tanner, who was the graphic artist for the ATADA Newsletter for many years. Here are excerpts from two reviews:

A Must for Collectors
.The book opens with the history of personal adornment. Archival photographs (including an Edward Curtis on the cover) and contemporary magazine illustrations offer glimpses of what was popular at the time. Color plates of detailed, close-up photos--complemented with their history and useful information--of a progression of earrings round out the book. Endnotes and references then complete the book. Author Robert Bauver has collected Southwestern jewelry for more than three decades. As a scholar, he consolidated all existing information on the subject and added his own first-hand knowledge concerning Navajo and Pueblo artisans. And kudos to the publisher for the overall quality of the book.

Larry Greenly, AbqArts,
August 2006

.A photographic and descriptive showcase presented especially for collectors and aficionados of Navajo and Pueblo jewelry. Full-color photographs and extensive text entries for over 300 pairs of earrings allow the reader to experience the masterwork and subtlety in Navajo and Pueblo creations as surely as if seeing them in person."

Midwest Book Reviews, August 2006

The Opening of Musée du Quai Branly:
A Dealer's Perspective

Impressions of the new Paris museum by John Molloy, the owner of Molloy Tribal Art in New York City and co-owner of The Spanish & Indian Trading Co. in Santa Fe

A new museum devoted to the native arts of the world's indigenous people has opened in Paris. Musée du quai Branly has been ten years in the making and is the well-advertised legacy of President Jacques Chirac. French Presidents like to do this - hence, the Pompidou Center and Musee d'Orsay - and it's a big deal. It is meant to be the ultimate contemporary statement about this art from the cultural center of old Europe.

In anticipation of the new museum, a wing of 'arts premiers' was added to the Louvre in 2000. This exhibition of 100 objects, carefully selected for their beauty and exquisitely displayed, served to establish and in fact, institutionalize, that all of the world's art is equal and worthy of display in the Louvre.

On this, we all agree.

Designed by Jean Nouvel, the new museum is meant to replace two beloved institutions, Musée de l'Homme and Musée National des Arts d'Afrique et d'Oceanie. Both of these dusty institutions had seen attendance dwindle and the feeling was that their collections needed some Zip-Bam-Pow to bring the art to the greater public.

Set in a green enclave in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, the building is a stylish contemporary institutional structure with the quirky addition of different-sized boxes jutting out from the second floor.

Entrance to the permanent exhibition is via a very long winding uphill path that is punctuated by a light show of smiling people of different complexions. This path, which is called the river, is bordered by a wall covered with leather. This wall is called the serpent. Not only do the serpent and the river intrude upon the exhibition space, they suggest that we are going into the jungle. The dim lighting reinforces this idea. The architect understands all this but says in the "galleries des spirits," he wanted to create a disturbing sense of mystery for the objects ("creer un ecrin de mystere pour les objets.")

Excuse me, but your colonialism is showing.

The river opens up and deposits one on the shores of New Guinea, which is the most thorough and well-organized of all the sections. New Guinea leads one to the Pacific Islands display which is initially stunning but gradually peters out both in the quality of the material and its organization. For example, although they possess the finest collection of art from the Marquesas Islands in the world, there are only a handful of sublime objects on display while there are dozens of contemporary dream paintings and 1960's bark paintings from Australia. Je ne sais pas.

One enters the Americas through the pre-Columbian exhibit where there are dozens of objects displayed in rows on the wall of a vitrine. The vast majority of these objects are commonly available in the marketplace for a few hundred dollars. Within such a group, there may be one or two fine objects which would be worth five figures or more. No explanatory text is provided. Such is the over-all approach to the exhibitions - jewels hiding amidst the mundane. There are ten katsina dolls on display - four Hopi from the 1930's, five Hopi from the 19th century and one Zuni circa 1900. No explanation given. A group of Eskimo souvenirs - ivory knives, forks and napkin rings from the 1920's - share a vitrine with two fine 19th century masks which at their best are the pinnacle of artistic achievement.

Mystery, please, but in the art, not in the presentation.

What about those boxes that jut out from the display areas? Meant to be thematic installations separate from the rest of the exhibition (why?), it appeared that some of the rooms were not finished as they were only partially filled with material. One such room appeared to be featuring objects that were available last week in a Christie's New York house sale. A house sale contains a mixture of objects characterized as not important enough for the specialty sales and indeed, the entire African section is a hodge-podge of works of varying merit inadequately presented. It's as if an anti-art attitude informed some of the exhibits.

When they do try to get arty, they miss the boat entirely. For example, one of the side rooms contains an African fetish made by the Bamana people and another unidentified work. Both objects sit in a partially obscured display case, in a room whose entrance is also partially obscured. Bamana fetishes are animal form sculptures nearly one meter in length made of blood, straw and mud. In their traditional context, they are left in caves and out-of-view. Again, there is no explanatory text, just a display meant to mimic another reality. It's silly.

Not that there aren't masterpieces on view. There are many, including a couple of the incomparable painted buffalo robes collected by Champlain when there were buffalo in Buffalo. Larger-than-life reliquary figures from Vietnam are impressive. There are many high-quality items in the Pacific Islands section. You just need to know where to look and what you are looking at.

In one way, the museum will be a huge success. So much hoopla surrounds the new museum, it will become, like d'Orsay and the Pompidou, a stop on the cultural tour. Expectations are that a million people per year will visit the museum, which is many times more than the visitors that the former museums would have received. One can only hope that the curators will eventually find a way to overcome the pretensions of the building and its misguided approach to mount a permanent exhibition that reflects the artistic achievements of the world's indigenous people. What we have now is a 21st century form of cultural colonialism as silly as it is disappointing.

Member Close-Up

In a new feature in each issue, we will print a story about one of our members, focusing on career and collecting. For this issue, we spoke to Steve Elmore. His gallery, Steve Elmore American Indian Art, is at 839 Paseo de Peralta in Santa Fe. His nephew, Paul Elmore, is gallery manager.

Steve Elmore feels that he came to his career in American Indian art through a surprising maze of twists and turns over a lifetime. "I grew up in Carlsbad, New Mexico," he told the ATADA News. "As a Boy Scout, I hiked the canyons looking for arrowheads, but I did not understand Indian material seriously as art." After teaching college English in Northern California, he moved to Italy for two years and taught himself photography before ending up in New York City, working first as a travel photographer and then as an architectural and corporate photographer. Everywhere he went, he says, he visited museums and looked at everything. The upshot of all this exposure to art? "I realized the Indian art was a lot better than I had assumed in my youth and that it was somehow important to me personally, and that, as a Westerner, the art and the culture began to merge with my own artistic growth."

What he calls "my revival" happened in the mid 1980s, while he was working as a commercial photographer in New York City. "I bought an old Indian art collection in a used motorcycle shop in Carlsbad, brought it back to New York and started to figure out what I had. There was not huge interest in Indian art then in New York City, and I learned there was a ton of stuff in the east that had been brought back from the both the railroad era of the 1880s and the automobile Route 66 era of the 20s and 30s. I haunted flea markets and antique shops, buying and learning. I did my first pier show as a dealer in 1992, and then gradually started becoming more professional about dealing."

One of the first pieces Elmore remembers buying was a "beautiful polychrome Acoma jar from Marjorie and Irwin Goodman that I bought at their furrier's studio in New York in the late 1980s. My Indian art career has always been about pottery," he added. "Every weekend, I chased the regional auctions advertised in the Newtown Bee. I ran my own classifieds in The New York Times and drove out to Long Island, sometimes to see a 'Navajo rug' from the El Paso Import Company. I often bought in the east and drove to Santa Fe to sell to other dealers like Ray Dewey, Dick Howard, and Andrea Fisher. Over time, my life became predictably nomadic, with two round trips to Santa Fe from New York winter and summer. Buying wasn't that difficult until the late 1990s, after eBay and the Antiques Roadshow, when all antiques became scarce. Almost overnight, everyone knew the material, and the advantage to buying in the east declined."

Elmore was "a show animal" in those years "because it was easy to do part time. There was a great circuit of shows then, not just Marin and Santa Fe, but St Louis, Chicago, Washington, D.C. and they were all cash cows. Now shows are expensive, and are not the guaranteed cash cows they used to be. Before, I would total up my show expenses in advance, sell wholesale until I reached that figure, then raise my prices back to retail. I started this business with a $6,000 credit card charge. Now, like most dealers, I use a line of credit."

Until 1999, Elmore continued to work full-time as a photographer while he built his collection, connections and knowledge. "The more you see, the more you learn, the more you want," he said.

It took a decade of learning the business, of "riding two horses, photography and Indian art," and of saving to buy a house before he moved to Santa Fe in 1999. "I felt lucky I was able to use Indian art as a way to return to New Mexico. After almost 20 years in New York City, I began to feel cut off from nature, which is the source of creativity, and I felt I needed to leave to regain touch with myself. But it was not easy, at first, to walk away from a successful photo career, which had taken me years to build, but I felt strongly about representing Indian art as art and continuing to work with it."

In Santa Fe, Elmore dealt privately and exhibited at shows. "From studying Hopis, I realized the importance of being an uncle, and started working with my teenage nephews at shows. My nephew Paul decided he wanted to join me in the business after college, so I opened a gallery in 2001 to grow the business. He has done a terrific job."

"We are mostly a destination. I have no real complaints, my business is still growing."

At Steve Elmore American Indian Art, the specialty of the house is Hopi pottery, which is no coincidence: "I probably have one of the largest personal collections in the country, with most of the pieces dating from 1880-1930." He put the collection together to research the work of Nampeyo, as his way to figure out the trajectory of her career. "In 1994 or so, I started buying most of the Hopi pottery I found at shows - I once bought 28 pieces at a Marin show. By doing that, I established myself as a major sucker for Hopi pottery, but I also got offered a lot. And Hopi pots all seemed way undervalued as compared with Rio Grande pottery, so I bought all I could." He still believes Hopi pottery is undervalued, "except obviously for large Nampeyo seed jars." More importantly, by living with the pieces and by visiting Hopi to see potters and kachina dances, his understanding and appreciation of Hopi art grew. "At first, the sheer power of their drawing ability amazed me," he said. "Their aesthetics are so modern and abstract, more sophisticated to me than Picasso. I always felt something transcendent in their expression, from the discus form to the beautiful drawings of bird and flight itself. Also the religious belief of birds as messengers to the spirits is a perfect metaphor for human imagination. The flight of our imaginations is a powerful concept for all of us, and the beauty of the Hopi expression of that truth moved me." If he could add any one piece to his collection, no matter who owned it, he would pick a Sikyatki bowl with a bird from the University of Pennsylvania Museum.

Now, Elmore buys "very selectively." He has also examined 21 museum collections, photographing and doing research on Hopi pottery. "I have four more museums to go before I've seen most of the Hopi pottery collections. It has become an obsession, but that's my nature." He has also started to write on Hopi pottery, "one article at a time."

Elmore is now working with contemporary Hopi potters. "I show them the photographs from the museums and they use those images as they wish. After all, Nampeyo said that she was creating her many designs for her descendents to use, so they would never go hungry.

"Although I have a business side, I also have an artistic side," Elmore added," and this summer, I began showing some of my own paintings, and was fortunate to sell several. After years of not showing my paintings, I decided I wanted the Indian art people to be the first to see them and acquire them, because many of the paintings are inspired by my love of Indian art. I'm trying to connect the modern with the ancient."

Elmore feels "very grateful to the Indian art community, a superb group of people to know and work with. Now I am trying to give something back, both through my own paintings and my research on Hopi pottery. I'm the son of an electrician in a potash mine from Carlsbad, New Mexico," he concluded. "I was born with this curiosity about the world, and it has all led me back where I came from.

I feel lucky."

Media File

Excerpts from recent newspaper, magazine and Internet articles of interest to the Membership. All opinions are those of the writers of the articles and of the people quoted, not of ATADA. Members are encouraged to submit press clippings or email links for publication in the next Newsletter.

"Gene Autry's Legacy and an Indian Museum Merge (and Collide)" was the headline for Edward Wyatt's June 28, 2006, story in The New York Times.

Datelined Los Angeles, the story began, "When one of the country's premier collections of American Indian artifacts joined forces three years ago with the collectibles of the Singing Cowboy, Gene Autry, the move was officially billed as a merger of equals.

"This being Hollywood, however, the storyline was re- duced to something simpler: the cowboys were once again battling the Indians.

"Guess which side won.

"Instead of celebrating the 100th anniversary of its founding next year, the Southwest Museum of the American Indian will lock its doors here on June 30. Over the next three years, the 240,000 objects in its collection, many of which have not been out of storage for decades, will be cleaned, cataloged and prepared for a move to a proposed new building next to Autry's Museum of the American West, in Griffith Park.

"That is where the Autry National Center, as the merged museum complexes are now known, will celebrate another 100th anniversary next year: the Gene Autry Centennial, a birthday exhibition that, according to the museum, will explore 'the Singing Cowboy's influence on myth and history in the American West.'

"For many residents of the neighborhoods surrounding the Southwest Museum, the museum's plans to move its collection smack of a bait-and-switch. From the time the merger was first discussed in 2001, both sides stressed that the Southwest Museum - whose identity is embedded in the landmark white adobe building that towers over the Arroyo Seco northeast of downtown - would remain separate and apart from the Autry.

" 'I grew up visiting the museum,' said Ed P. Reyes, a Los Angeles city councilman whose district contains part of the Southwest Museum's grounds. 'I don't want us to lose a cultural landmark that has had a tremendous impact on our community in terms of education and culture. I was always under the impression that they were not going to close it down.'

"Autry officials say there is no alternative. 'We looked for a way to resurrect this campus as a museum,' John L. Gray, the president and chief executive of the Autry National Center, said of the Southwest's location. 'We couldn't figure out a way to make it work.'

"The dispute illustrates a continuing issue in the museum world. When cash-poor but collection-rich institutions are forced into partnerships with their opposites, often no one is left happy.

"The Autry museum, opened in 1988 by the Autry family, was backed by a large fortune but had a collection that tended toward movie memorabilia and less distinguished Western paintings.

"The Southwest, by contrast, suffered from a small endowment and declines in membership and visitors. But since its founding by Charles Lummis, an explorer and collector, it had built an extensive collection of Indian artifacts, including 13,500 Indian baskets, perhaps the largest such holding in existence, as well as thousands of objects, ranging from the sacred - including human remains - to the mundane.

"Most of that collection is now being put into storage as the Southwest strives to deal with long-festering problems. Severe damage from the 1994 Northridge earthquake, which caused the partial separation of the Southwest's tower from the main building, has never been repaired. Heavy rains last year resulted in extensive leaks, with water pouring into some of the museum's cramped storage spaces and damaging some displays. Insect infestations have threatened some artifacts, Southwest curators say.

"To remedy the problems, all of the building's exhibition space must be given over to storage and restoration work, Autry officials say. They expect the work to take three years.

"Mr. Gray stressed that the historic Southwest site, built by Mr. Lummis in 1914, was not being abandoned. A small, rotating exhibition featuring artifacts from the museum's collection is likely to be put in place once the conservation work is finished. But he said that the location must add other uses, both educational and commercial, to remain viable.

"During the restoration, the building's gift shop and a lobby display about the project will be open on weekends. No artifacts from the collection will be on display, although tours of the conservation work will be available to museum members, and the museum's scholarly library will remain open by appointment.

"Some neighborhood leaders say that plans to transfer the collection are unacceptable. 'It needs some work, but everything is in place for the museum to be successful where it is,' said Nicole Possert, co-chairwoman of the Friends of the Southwest Museum coalition, which characterizes itself as an IMBY group - one that wants new development 'in my back yard.'

" 'Look at the Disney Concert Hall,' Ms. Possert said. 'It changed how people viewed downtown and the communities near it. We're open to expansion of the Southwest Museum, as long as it is creatively done and looks good. We would trade that off in return for being able to have a real destination here.'

"Not everyone is opposed to the Autry's plans to move. Kathleen Whitaker, a former chief curator at the Southwest Museum who is now director of the Indian Arts Research Center at the School of American Research in Santa Fe, N.M., applauds the Autry's efforts.

" 'For those of us who grew up in Los Angeles, it's very disappointing that this very historic institution has suffered so much,' Dr. Whitaker said. 'But the Autry has in essence rescued a collection of national importance. The people in the neighborhood and the city of Los Angeles haven't offered any real viable support for keeping the museum open.'

"To build the new museum that it hopes will house the Southwest collection, the Autry National Center must get city approval to expand.

"Councilman José Huizar, whose district includes the Southwest's main building, noted that the city had made accommodations to serve the Southwest Museum at its current site. For example, the city built a stop on the Gold Line light-rail service at the museum, partly because the hilltop site lacks enough parking.

" 'You don't abandon a site like this just because of parking issues,' Mr. Huizar said. "The city has organized a series of public hearings on the museum's future. While Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa said during his election campaign last year that he wanted the Southwest to stay where it is, more recently he has not sided either way. The mayor's press office did not return four phone calls seeking comment on the issue.

"Mr. Gray, a former banker who, with his cropped hair, rimless glasses and white shirt, could have played an Old West banker in one of Autry's cowboy films, admits that while he is a museum executive, he is not a curator or an expert on American Indian cultures.

" 'I'm a total dilettante,' he said. 'But when we came in, the museum didn't have enough money to pay its bills. It didn't have security guards. It didn't have conservators. It never had the public support that the collection warranted.' "

Grace Glueck's New York Times review of the Museum of American Indian's, " 'Born of Clay' Explores Culture Through Ceramics," was published July 1.

The review: "One of the great cultural gifts bestowed by the Indians of North and South America is their ceramic tradition, the making of pots that express the vitality of the Native American civilizations. Its treasures are abundant in 'Born of Clay: Ceramics From the National Museum of the American Indian,' which offers a small but engrossing glimpse of the huge collection - some 60,000 works covering more than 6,000 years - amassed by the museum.

"The show's 300 or so examples cover four areas of the hemisphere where the practice of pot-making developed particular strength: the Andes, Mesoamerica and the Eastern and Southwestern regions of the United States. Each, of course, has its own mode of expression, from the lively, often playful human and animal figures of the Andes and Central America to the striking abstract designs of the Southwestern United States.

"One thrust of the show is to demonstrate the continuity of works by present-day Native American artists with those produced by ancestors. An example is 'Imprisoned Clown' (about 1999) by Roxanne Swentzell of Santa Clara Pueblo, N.M. A seated figure with a horned head and gray stripes covering its entire body, except for its huge hands, pulling at its face, it represents a Kossa, a being who might teach behavior by making fun of others. But it also implies imprisonment by stereotype. Its humorous persona is not inconsistent with that of a fat, standing singer from Cochiti Pueblo, N.M., made in 1880. His arms flung wide, his mouth open to let the melody fly out, the singer wears a painted-on black vest composed of corn and water symbols.

"The most animated sections of the show are those devoted to the Andes and Mesoamerica, a region that includes parts of Mexico and Central America. The oldest ceramics known in the Americas - made from 5,000 to 6,000 years ago - are found in the Andean region, along the Pacific coast of Ecuador and in the San Jacinto Valley of Colombia; objects from 3,800 to 4,000 years old have been discovered in Peru. Some archaeologists believe that ceramics know-how found its way by sea to Mesoamerica, the second great cradle of civilization in the Americas.

"The earliest Andean work here is a tiny female figure (3000-1500 B.C.) from Valdivia, Ecuador, an armless woman with prominent breasts and genital area, but neither arms nor feet. Thought to be an offering to Pachamama, or Mother Earth, she might be an equivalent of the Paleolithic Venus of Willendorf, the fertility figure of Old World culture.

"A later people, the Paracas (600-100 B.C.) on the southern coast of Peru, are noted for their technique of polychroming ceramics after firing. Their lively works include a bottle in the shape of a spotted feline with ominous teeth, modeled on a cat that lived in the coastal rocks and is significant in Andean mythology.

"One of the show's most engaging objects is from the Moche culture of Peru's northern coast (A.D. 1-800), whose ceramists were known for their artistic and technical skills. Among their achievements are sharply modeled portrait vases, in which human faces express different emotions, like the spouted bottle in the form of a small, squatting man, painted a sickly white. He wears a loincloth and a hat, and on his face, decoratively scarred with representations of birds and abstract motifs, is a very modern expression of anxiety as he squints at the viewer.

"Mesoamerica was home to advanced cultures like the Olmec, the Maya, the Toltec and the Aztec, whose genius is apparent even in their small ceramics. Standouts among their immensely varied works are the Mayan Jaina-style figures of A.D. 400 to 800.

"Mostly made for the tombs of nobles on Jaina, an island necropolis off the coast of what is now Campeche, these small, extraordinarily lifelike figures of modeled and painted clay depict human beings in every kind of activity. Two shown here depict a drunkard and a weaver. The weaver sits absorbed in his loom; the drunkard stands, head cocked to one side, his mouth open, holding two jugs under his left arm.

"In North America, ceramic production in the Eastern region - defined here as the northern and southern woodlands, from the Great Lakes and Oklahoma eastward, reaching up to maritime Canada and down to Florida - covers the last 4,500 years, preceding that of the better-known Southwest. The earliest documented pottery was produced along the coast of what is now Georgia around 2500 B.C., spreading to New York and southern Ontario by 600 B.C.

"Eventually, basic principles of technology and decoration became somewhat fixed: smoothing the clay, mixed with auxiliary materials, with a paddle or scraper, to form relatively unassuming pots (compared with others in the show) durable enough to be used for lengthy cooking. For decoration, the damp clay was pressed with textiles or sticks wrapped with cord, or a pattern of lines was cut into the clay.

"More striking vessels, made after A.D. 900, come from the Caddoan tribes who farmed along riverbanks in what is now Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas. Prosperous from their produce, they fostered artistic talent, looking to Mexico for new ideas. They are best known for Caddoan bottles, with patterns incised into the clay while it was still wet, or with fine lines engraved after firing, with red or white pigment rubbed into the design. One beauty is a squared bottle (A.D. 1000-1300) from Louisiana, its roundness gracefully countered by four deeply incised arches that partially cover the bottle's bulging belly.

"The Pueblo people of the Southwest, devoted to clay as an almost sacred material, have for centuries produced pottery whose design motifs - stylized rain clouds, feathers, mountains, bird beaks - offer prayers for rain in the dry desert habitat. Most of the ceramic pieces shown here are of relatively recent vintage, yet their designs are not all that different from work made a millennium ago.

"Compare the bold, overall geometrically stylized embellishment of beaks and feathers in an ancestral Zuni water storage jar (A.D. 1400) with one made in 1965 by Lucy M. Lewis of the Acoma people. (She died in 1992.) Its stunning overall black-and-white geometric design has the same bold thrust and freshness of the earlier piece, yet nearly 600 years lie between them.

"Although the show handsomely displays only a fraction of what the museum owns, visitors couldn't ask for a more engaging introduction to the seemingly infinite universe of Native American pottery."

"Born of Clay: Ceramics From the National Museum of the American Indian" runs through May 30, 2007, at the National Museum of the American Indian, at the United States Custom House, 1 Bowling Green, Lower Manhattan, (212) 514-3700.

Michael Kimmleman's take on the Musée du Quai Branly, "A Heart of Darkness in the City of Light," was published in The New York Times on July 2, 2006.

Datelined Paris, the story began, "The other day Stéphane Martin, president of the new Musée du Quai Branly, was in his wedge-shape office with the picture window overlooking the Seine. Dapper, charming, with the weary politeness of a busy executive who has better things to do, he fetched the latest salvo against his institution, a book by Bernard Dupaigne, and casually tossed it across the table.

"The most ambitious museum to open in Paris in 20 years, dedicated to non-European cultures, Quai Branly provoked a ruckus from the instant President Jacques Chirac came up with the idea for it more than a decade ago. It was his monument to French multiculturalism and, perhaps, to himself.

"Two beloved Paris institutions had to be dismantled, the Musée des Arts Africains et Océaniens and the ethnographic department of the Musée de l'Homme, France's sublime natural history museum. Anthropologists, not to mention more than a few people who loved going to those museums, were furious. The familiar aesthetics-versus-ethnology question came up: Will religious, ceremonial and practical objects, never intended as art in the modern, Western sense, be showcased like baubles, with no context?

"Given the current political climate, Quai Branly's eventual opening, after years of delay, seemed almost as if it had been scientifically calculated to ignite the maximum debate.

"I couldn't tell whether Mr. Martin was being helpful or if he actually enjoyed the fuss. What did he think of his museum? I asked. He thought it was a 'neutral environment' with 'no aesthetic or philosophical line.' I thought he was kidding.

"He wasn't. If the Marx Brothers designed a museum for dark people, they might have come up with the permanent-collection galleries: devised as a spooky jungle, red and black and murky, the objects in it chosen and arranged with hardly any discernible logic, the place is briefly thrilling, as spectacle, but brow-slappingly wrongheaded. Colonialism of a bygone era is replaced by a whole new French brand of condescension.

"The dismay was obvious when I met museum directors, curators, anthropologists and art historians at a conference in Quai Branly, just before the museum's opening. For about an hour everyone on a panel talked about the need for better, more flexible museums, which seemed to me an obvious euphemism for the problem here, which nobody mentioned - until a scholar, Christian Feest, smiled, raised his eyebrows and tilted his head slightly.

"He couldn't help, he said, pointing out the elephant in the room: How would Quai Branly overcome the obstacle of its own design? That shifted the atmosphere, as if tension had been released, and during the break I intercepted several African and American curators and a French art historian who all shook their heads and confided, as if revealing a private embarrassment, that Quai Branly was a missed opportunity and an inexplicable enterprise. An Australian architecture critic then sidled over and nodded toward Jean Nouvel, the museum's architect, who had been mobbed the day before at the press opening. Now he was standing alone. Everyone was passing him by on the way to hors d'oeuvres.

"The place simply makes no sense. Old, new, good, bad are all jumbled together without much reason or explanation, save for visual theatrics. Quai Branly's curator of Asian collections, Christine Hemmet, who was furious about the dismantling of the Musée de l'Homme, took me to find a Vietnamese scarecrow, circa 1970s, on the back of which was painted an American B-52 dropping bombs. She said she had wanted to install a mirror in the display case, behind the work, so the scarecrow's back would be visible. But she was told it would spoil the mise-en-scène.

"Think of the museum as a kind of ghetto for the 'other,' a word Mr. Chirac has taken to using: an enormous, rambling, crepuscular cavern that tries to evoke a journey into the jungle, downriver, where suddenly scary masks or totem poles loom out of the darkness and everything is meant to be foreign and exotic. The Crayola-colored facade and its garden set the stage for this passage from civilization. "

After a couple of circuits around the galleries my heart sank. I also started to feel something else: that the debate has missed the point. The dichotomy between ethnology and aesthetics is too simple. It's not possible to draw a line between form and function, which are inseparably mixed in ways that constantly shift.

"Museums, whether they call themselves art museums or not - and Quai Branly at least rejected loaded words like primitive or art for its title - classify what they show to give objects particular meanings, to fix their relationships to viewers. If you're in the Metropolitan Museum, you know that an Italian altarpiece or an African mask is supposed to be visually striking, beautiful even. If the same objects are across Central Park at the American Museum of Natural History, they illustrate points about religion or ritual or handicraft or materials.

"This doesn't mean that the artists or artisans who made altarpieces and masks weren't aiming for something aesthetically potent or pleasing, even if potency (and beauty) meant one thing to a Renaissance Italian, another to a Dogon craftsman, and it means yet another to an Aboriginal artist who comes to Paris to paint Quai Branly's gift shop.

"Paintings and other objects, like people, have careers, lives. These objects have meanings to those who brought them into the world, other meanings to those who worked with or used them, yet others to historians who try to explain them, to curators who organize exhibitions around them. They exist in as many different forms as the number of people who happen to come across them. Objects are not static; they are the accumulation of all their meanings.

"Claims of cultural patrimony and calls for the repatriation of antiquities (Italians wanting back ancient art dug up in Italy, Greeks wanting back Greek art) stem from nationalist politics and legal disputes, but they're fundamentally about who gets to assign meaning. A British anthropologist on the panel at Quai Branly mentioned a show of Polynesian art and religion in England. He said the question had arisen, should modern-day Polynesians have say over the show's content?

"But which Polynesians? The political activists who might want their idols returned? The religious fundamentalist who might want them burned? They're both native voices. Which gets authority over what the artifacts mean?

"John Mack, the British professor who moderated the panel, added that good museums 'destabilize the idea of a singular meaning,' whether it's 'beauty' or 'ritual.' The implication was that they shouldn't do what Quai Branly has done, which is for the museum to make itself the meaning of everything in it.

" 'Everything in a museum gets beautiful,' Mr. Martin told me. 'The priests of contextualization' - he was talking about those people who think Western-style aesthetic appreciation is another form of colonialism, obscuring history and ethnography - 'are poor museographers.' That was right. Endless wall texts, films and digital gizmos either bore visitors to tears or treat them like idiots with short attention spans.

"But context is necessary at places like Quai Branly - objects need to be explained somehow - so in the end it all comes down to tact, which is the measure of a museum's judgment.

"At Quai Branly, half the time it was impossible for me to find out what an object was. Some of the labels weren't finished yet, but the ones there were hard to find, obscure or comically vague. The Asian displays are 'based on geographical and cultural sequences,' one label said, whatever that meant. Computer touch-screens, embedded into odd leather-covered pods with benches, are often far away from the objects (lest they disturb the architectural effect). I tried to learn more about a bunch of kachina dolls, some 19th century, some mid-20th, one Zuni, the rest Hopi. (I picked up that much only because a friend identified them for me; there was no label.) But no luck. Everything about the place gradually discouraged the desire to find out more.

"The legacy of Duchamp has turned everything in a museum into a readymade. It's no longer possible to look at a Yoruba voodoo object as purely functional, rather than also (perhaps) terrific looking, or to see a Michelangelo as merely beautiful, rather than also as a product of a moment, a society, a religious tradition. Even if it were possible, it would be terribly unfashionable.

"The day after we spoke, I spotted Mr. Martin at the back of a photograph on the front page of The International Herald Tribune. In it Mr. Chirac and Kofi Annan, the secretary general of the United Nations, both tall and snappy in blue serge suits, were greeting Chief Laukalbi from Vanuatu and his nephew, Jerry Napat, shirtless in straw skirts. Mr. Chirac, leaning down, looked as if he was pointing at the chief, or maybe he was shaking his finger. His posture was exactly the top-down one that the museum's galleries take.

"Georges Pompidou had his center. François Mitterrand left behind I. M. Pei's pyramid, the Bastille Opera and the new National Library. So Mr. Chirac's grand projet is this $300 million megamuseum-cum-cultural-center, aspiring, as he put it during the museum's inauguration, to the notion that 'there is no hierarchy among the arts just as there is no hierarchy among peoples.'

"No hierarchy, except that at the Pompidou you find Western artists like Picasso and Pollock; at Branly, it's Eskimos, Cameroonians and Moroccans. No hierarchy, but no commonality either. Separate but equal. What links Vietnamese textiles with contemporary Aboriginal paintings with pre-Columbian pottery with Sioux warrior tunics with Huron wampum? Only the legacy of colonialism and the historical quirks of French museum collecting, which Quai Branly's design blithely plays for entertainment.

"Mr. Nouvel says he used the conceit of a 'sacred wood,' where people would discover objects 'liberated from Western architectural references such as barriers, showcases, railings.' A spiral ramp, light and open, segues into a darkened tunnel that delivers visitors to a realm where the walls are black, the floors red, and everything's very, very dark, except the objects, installed by global region willy-nilly, under spotlights. Windows are scrimmed with photographs of trees to evoke the underbrush. A pathway (Mr. Nouvel calls it the 'river') meanders between curvy leather walls, a motif continued in those leather-clad pods with the touch-screens and the benches. He calls this motif the 'snake.'

"Jean-Pierre Mohen, the director of collections, has explained that the jungle theme is meant to seem mysterious and chaotic, but, like the jungle, to slowly reveal its logic, symbolizing the complexity of non-European societies that are closer to nature than we are. It is the old noble-savage argument. Heart of darkness in the city of light. Whatever. The atmosphere is like a discothèque at 10 a.m. The critic Walter Benjamin, who remarked that 'there is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism,' said he could not 'contemplate without horror' the works we call 'cultural treasures.'

"That was going too far. Cultural treasures are souvenirs of conquest but they are also occasionally souvenirs of exchange. Souvenirs are objects whose value derives from the narratives we assign them, stories we tell ourselves and others to explain where they came from and why they matter to us.

"Quai Branly's story is the spectacle of its own environment. Spectacle becomes its attraction. I have no doubt that, as an attraction, it will be very popular. The museum is expecting more than a million visitors annually.

"But I stopped into the Louvre after the conference. Several years ago Mr. Chirac overruled objections from Louvre officials that their museum was for European art, not a universal museum, and he ordered the Louvre's Pavillon des Sessions turned over to 100 historic works of African, Asian, Oceanic and American art. They were installed in a setting of pure aesthetic bliss.

"The galleries, nearly empty the day I went, are spare, serene and beautifully lighted, enshrining each object behind almost-invisible sheets of glass. Every work is given the dignity of its own space, which seemed to me a metaphor for how to treat all civilizations. There were amazing Eskimo masks and Cameroonian and Nigerian maternity figures, nothing quite like what I'd recalled at Quai Branly. I lingered over a 19th-century Zulu spoon from South Africa, slender, abstracted into the shape of a woman, its rim blackened by fire, with an arched neck and graceful little cones and half-circles for breasts and buttocks. An 18th-century Mbembe sculpture, from Nigeria, of a squatting man, hands on knees, gazing out with his chin up, made me want to learn more.

"I discovered it was part of a drum made from a hollowed tree, according to the large plasticized text panel that visitors are invited to pick up near the entrance to the gallery and carry around. This drum had spiritual powers, the text said, and would announce great events or warn villagers when trouble was coming.

"After I left the Louvre, I could picture nearly everything I had seen there, but Quai Branly, except for the architecture, was a blur. The Pavillon, prizing aesthetics above all, clearly isn't the only way to show things, but it's true to its purpose, and it works. Quai Branly doesn't - if success means something beyond novelty and theatrics."

"Looters Still Ravaging Ancient Arizona" was the headline for Thomas Ropp's July 6 story in The Arizona Republic. The sub-head: "Two people patrolling 9 Million acres can't stop treasure hunt."

Datelined St. John's, Ropp's story began "An Arizona State Land Department investigator and an Arizona State University archaeologist looked intently out the windows of the small aircraft as it circled a desert wash above ancient gravesites.

"Soon, the two men saw the telltale signs: makeshift roads, heavy equipment, a series of linear cuts.

" 'Look at all those holes; they weren't there before,' archaeologist Keith Kintigh said. 'That's where they're digging.'

"Experts fear looting of ancient Native American burial sites in Arizona is on the rise, though Land Department investigator Brad Geeck said there are no hard statistics to track those trends. 'Every year, the calls seem to increase.'

"The rewards, experts say, outweigh the risks. A single intact pot can bring as much as $75,000. Desecrating human remains to get to the pot is a misdemeanor, with a fine of less than $500.

"Federal and state antiquities laws can bring looters serious prison time - on a second offense!

"But there is no law against excavating pots on private land unless it is associated with a burial site.

"Despite numerous recommendations to the Legislature during the past decade, there still are only two investigators to police nearly 9 million acres of state trust land in Arizona.

"To help even the playing field, Geeck has turned to aerial surveillance and partnering with non-profit archaeological groups.

"Last week, Geeck hired a pilot friend at Deer Valley Airport to fly him to the St. Johns area after receiving a tip that looting was turning up human remains and that bones were scattered everywhere. Kintigh accompanied Geeck because he was familiar with the area and had worked at nearby sites. The area is rich in archaeological artifacts of ancestral Zunis dating back to A.D. 1200. Geeck needed to know whether the looters were digging on state land.

Sophisticated searches

"Pothunters today are sophisticated, well organized and good at discovering archaeological sites and graves, he said.

" 'They use a steel rod with a steel point and shove it into the ground,' Geeck said. When the pole moves freely, detecting an open space, they likely have found a burial site, he said.

"John Madson, associate curator of archaeology at the Arizona State Museum in Tucson, called in the St. Johns tip to Geeck after hikers in the area had come across the fresh looting.

"Madson said the thefts from the St. Johns area are among the hundreds of thousands of Arizona artifacts that likely have been lost.

" 'These bulldozers just take and erase 2,000 years of information from the landscape,' Madson said. 'We know little about northeastern Arizona sites. And the way it's going, we'll never know much because it's all going to be ripped apart.'

"He said that in the past, looted pots have primarily been sold through Western stores and other retail outlets. More recently, pots and shards are being auctioned off on eBay.

" 'You can assume anything you're buying from the private sector is stuff that's looted from archaeological sites,' Madson said.

A century of spoilage

"Hunting artifacts in the Southwest is nothing new. Ancient people, including the Anasazis, Sinaguans and Hohokams, built thousands of structures throughout Arizona during the past 2,000 years.

"Some, like the multistory ruins that are the namesake of Casa Grande, have been protected as national monuments. Others are in various states of protection, and archaeologists haven't studied most.

"Looting a century ago at New Mexico's Chaco Culture National Historic Park, the center of the Anasazi empire, helped prompt Congress to pass of the 1906 Antiquities Act, which has been used by nearly every president since to protect Western archaeological sites.

"Prompted by a developer's plans to dig up a 100-room, 14th-century Sinaguan site near Cornville, about 10 miles northwest of Cottonwood, the Arizona Legislature in 1990 passed emergency legislation to stop grave robbers from unearthing Indian burial grounds.

"The bill made it illegal to knowingly disturb any buried human remains or burial artifacts without permission of the state, but the law is difficult to enforce.

Burial sites for sale

"Madson said the changing of ranch ownership in communities like St. Johns has also contributed to the problem. He said that for more than 100 years, many ranchers protected the sites and kept people away.

"But their children, who inherited the ranches, don't care about that, he said, and are dividing their parent's property into ranchettes and often leasing them to pothunters.

"Geeck said looters also are putting minimum down payments on properties with known archaeological sites. 'After they've raped the land, they vanish,' he said.

"But Geeck said an even bigger problem is convincing people in communities like St. Johns that pothunting is a crime. Madson said many people in that area believe pothunting is recreation.

'Families have been doing it for 100 years, and they're not about to stop,' Madson said.

"After touring the St. Johns site from the air, Geeck determined there was sufficient evidence that the looting was new and taking place on state land. He said he would return, this time on the ground.' "

In her July 21 art review, "Summer in Washington, Where Image Is All," Holland Cotter discusses her visit to the National Museum of the American Indian and its exhibition titled "Listening to Our Ancestors: The Art of Native Life Along the North Pacific Coast," a show that Cotter says "really works."

Cotter calls NMAI "an institution that has itself radically changed its self-image over the past decade. In its original home in Upper Manhattan," she continues, "the museum kept the line between ethnology and aesthetics somewhat hazy, and for many devotees of its glorious collection, it was, first and foremost, an art museum. With a change in leadership and a move to the United States Custom House in Lower Manhattan in the early 1990s, a new institutional identity was defined. The museum was recast as a broad-spectrum cultural center, designed by Indians for Indians. The concept of 'art' was de-emphasized; objects were presented as spiritually and socially functional, valued more for what they did and the stories they told than for how they looked. Many critics had complaints about the inaugural installations. I did. I was looking for an art museum, and what I found was something different. In its permanent home on the Mall, where it opened last year, the museum has sustained its rethought identity. And I have become more comfortable with that identity. I still have gripes, but my expectations have changed. For one thing, I've seen that when the revised model works, it really works, as it does in the Pacific Coast show.

"It was organized by a team of Indian curators, representatives from 11 Pacific Coast communities in the United States and Canada. They also produced the catalog, which is in the form of oral history rather than conventional scholarship. The objects they chose - call them art, artifacts, ceremonial utensils, whatever - are utterly riveting, and none more so than the masks.

"Carved in wood, sometimes vividly painted, many of them are basically symbolic portraits of animals, birds, or natural forces - sky, wind, air - associated with specific ethnic groups. Others represent mythical heroes and ancestors, or revered living people, such as elders and shamans.

"One early 19th-century Nisga'a mask from British Columbia, of a woman with creased skin and a distended and shell-ornamented lower lip, is exacting enough in detail to have been carved from life. An even older Tsimshian mask feels comparably personal, but also more abstract: with its parted lips and half-shut eyes, it may be the face of a shaman entering a state of trance. In such a state he will become superhuman, near-divine. Wearers of spirit-masks are similarly transfigured: they assume the identity of the being depicted. Here portraiture literally comes to life. It makes the ineffable visible. It erases the line between art and the real."

On August 10, The New York Times published Hugh Eakins' story, "Museums Set Guidelines For Use of Sacred Objects."

The story: "When the Blackfoot Nation approached the Denver Art Museum about borrowing a horse shawl for a ceremony a few years ago, the museum faced a quandary. Curators were eager to oblige, but they worried that the ritual would expose the early-20th-century relic to the damaging effects of horse sweat. After a delicate negotiation, a compromise was reached: The tribe would use the object in the ceremony without actually putting it on the horse.

"The story is not unusual. As American Indian and other groups have become increasingly assertive about guarding their cultural heritage, museums have struggled to strike a balance between the traditional practice of collecting indigenous objects as art and the often competing interests of the people whose ancestors produced them. In many cases federal laws have enabled tribes to reclaim works outright.

"Now the issue has become pressing enough that the leading association of art museums is asking its members to take 'special consideration' when dealing with what it terms sacred objects. In guidelines be released today, the Association of Art Museum Directors calls on museums to consult with indigenous groups to determine what works might fall into this category and to accommodate the wishes of these groups as far as possible in displaying, conserving and even discussing these works on museum labels and in catalogs.

"The guidelines, which have been approved by the association's membership but are not binding, are intended to apply to indigenous and other religious groups both inside and outside the United States, including American tribes that have not been federally recognized. An advance copy was provided to The New York Times.

"The recommendations exceed the requirements set by the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, known as Nagpra. That law, which specified the criteria under which groups could reclaim burial remains and objects deemed to have special sacred or cultural value, applies only to federally recognized tribes. And in cases when objects did not have to be returned, museums did not have to collaborate with tribes on their care.

"Although the most prominent cases under the law have focused on natural history and ethnographic museums, some art museums have also faced claims, including the Seattle Art Museum, the Denver Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

"Dan Monroe, director of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., and a co-author of the sacred objects report, said the museum association was motivated to issue the guidelines not in response to a specific case or demands but in an effort to encourage greater dialogue with indigenous groups. ''We wanted to go beyond the technical, narrow provisions of Nagpra,' Mr. Monroe said.

"Some museums with large indigenous collections have already done so. The Peabody Essex has an agreement with native Hawaiian groups to allow ritual offerings to be made before a rare 19th-century Hawaiian temple image in the museum's collection.

"The Denver Art Museum, which houses one of the nation's oldest collections of Indian art, a pioneer on the issue of collaborating, has met with 100 different tribal delegations about works in its collection.

" 'Its a whole new way of doing business for us,' said Nancy J. Blomberg, the museum's curator of native arts.

"It was not immediately clear how the new recommendations will be viewed by indigenous leaders, who were not consulted on the report. Joe Watkins, an anthropologist at the University of New Mexico who has mediated between museums and tribal groups, said, 'It's a sign of maturity that museums are looking at the ethics of collecting and maintaining' indigenous material.

"But Mr. Watkins, who is a Choctaw Indian, cautioned that sacredness has widely different meanings among American tribes. The report acknowledges that drafting a broad definition of a 'sacred object' would 'create immensely difficult problems for art museums as secular institutions.'

"In an effort to restrict its definition, the report draws a distinction between works that merely 'express religious ideas, values and feelings' and those that are 'created for use in ritual or ceremonial practice of a traditional religion.' Some curators acknowledge privately, however, that such a distinction might be difficult to draw in reality.

"The report comes amid a broader movement for indigenous rights in the collection and interpretation of cultural objects. Controversy arose in 2004 over the new permanent galleries at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, which generally forgo a scientific and historical approach in favor of indigenous traditions like oral history and storytelling.

"This spring a group of archivists and librarians began working with a committee of indigenous leaders to establish Protocols for Native American Archival Materials, sweeping new principles for dealing with 'culturally sensitive' materials in university collections and archives. The draft protocol, which has not yet been formally adopted, calls for a cautious, collaborative approach, but also states that Indian communities have 'primary right' for all 'culturally sensitive materials' that are affiliated with them.

"The museum association report, in contrast, identifies ritual objects more narrowly and does not address directly the issue of ownership or control. 'We are aware of the potential risks,' Mr. Monroe said.

"Still, by embracing indigenous notions of what is sacred, some scholars say, art museums are taking a bold step.

" 'Sacredness is very elastic,' said Michael F. Brown, an anthropologist at Williams College. 'It can easily be stretched to include all kinds of things that wouldn't to outsiders be sacred or religious. And because of the nature of American society, it is a very potent term right now.' "

As both John Molloy and Michael Kimmelman predicted in stories in this issue, the new Musée du Quay Branly is very popular. "Immigrants Flock Proudly To New Museum in Paris," was the headline of Caroline Brothers' story about the museum in The New York Times, published August 21.

"When Patricia Mavoungou, a municipal employee from the suburbs of Paris, took her son to the Musée du Quai Branly, France's new museum of non-Western art, the first thing they did was search for works from the Congo Republic, where she was born. And they found them: two beautifully displayed Punu masks," the story began.

" 'It makes me think about my child, who doesn't know about these things, and about the children born here who have never left,' said Ms. Mavoungou, 35, during a recent visit to the museum. 'It will help them know where they are from.'

"Ms. Mavoungou is not alone. Even as debate continues over the museum's novel architecture and exhibition design, word is getting out in immigrant communities throughout France that the space celebrates the patrimonies of their cultures as art. And so far, people who typically might not set foot in a museum are coming in unexpectedly large numbers.

"Stéphane Martin, the president of Quai Branly, makes a point of speaking daily to visitors. He said he is convinced that his institution is attracting a new audience.

" 'All you have to do is walk through the museum' to see that this is true, he said. 'There are also lots of young people in couples who have not come with a club or an institution or an association, but on their own initiative, and it is very moving to see their response to the collection.'

"The diversity of the visitors also struck Emmanuelle Messika, a museum employee of Tunisian, French and Polish descent. 'I have the impression that there are more people from other backgrounds here than at the Louvre or the Pompidou Center,' she said. 'You could almost say that something is starting to shift in France.'

"For many, the museum is a revelation and an emotional journey to places left behind. Strolling its winding walkways, they say, stirs a quiet pride in their origins, an impulse to pass that along to the next generation and amazement that the fragile, handmade objects on display have managed to survive at all.

" 'It reminds me of my childhood in the countryside near the Senegal River -- all the musical instruments, the clothes,' said Amadou Achard-Sy, 40, who left his village in the north of Senegal and came to France 23 years ago.

" 'It is important for our son to know this too,' he added, walking slowly through the collection with his French wife and their 8-year-old son. 'This museum, it's the proof that this culture is being taken into account.'

"Kahina Boudaa, a 19-year-old wearing a headscarf, was given permission by her parents, Algerian immigrants, to take the train from Nanterre, a Paris suburb, to come to Quai Branly with seven friends.

" 'We don't usually do this, come up to Paris and go to a museum,' Ms. Boudaa, said, adding that she was amazed by an intricately carved Algerian chest on display. 'You see things from the Incas, from southern Africa, but we are not used to seeing things from the Maghreb in a museum.'

"Mr. Martin estimates that about one-quarter of visitors to his institution are 'a new public who are coming because the museum speaks especially to them.'

"He says visitors are attracted both by Jean Nouvel's design, 'which avoids the idea of the museum as a neo-Grecian temple on the top of a hill' and by the dramatic exhibitions, which show off each item -- whether masks and costumes suspended at different heights or aboriginal totems overhead - to max- imum effect.

"There are many small, dimly lighted rooms, like tiny theaters; some look like a Middle Eastern souk with jewelry on display, others, contain especially fragile or sacred items, which are partially screened behind curtains. A glass-walled, cylindrical storage area displays musical instruments, while snatches of the indigenous music play from hidden speakers.

"Many of the objects themselves are extraordinary. Life-size costumes for funeral rites from New Guinea stand up as if of their own accord, a whole wall is covered with Australian aboriginal bark paintings, African masks are positioned at different head heights, and some stone carvings have no barrier around them at all.

" 'This has nothing to do with the way Degas's statue of the ballerina, or the Venus de Milo, are presented on a pedestal or at the top of a staircase,' Mr. Martin said.

"The museum, he added, was intended as a kind of bridge between the West and the rest of the world. 'We eat Thai, our tattoos are Polynesian, we dress African and do our hair in Antillais style,' he said of Westerners today. 'All that means that the notion of cultural purity on which many former ethnological museums rested makes no sense today.'

"The Musée du Quai Branly supercedes two ethnographic museums in Paris that have now been closed: the Musée de l'Homme, and the Musée Nationale des Arts d'Afrique et Océanie (which, famously, kept live crocodiles). The new museum has combined their collections, added new acquisitions and offended some visitors by emphasizing the aesthetic value of the objects over their anthropological meaning and use.

"Mr. Martin said that while the museum has shunned the 'sand in the bottom of the display case' of natural history and anthropological institutions, it was also careful to avoid the 'Disney or ghost-train effect' that modern technology makes possible in devising its displays.

"The desire is to induce visitors first to marvel at the artistry of the work on display and then to move to the video consoles in the center aisles to learn how they were created or used. Claire Ayedzame, 24, a student from Gabon, said that people of her generation knew about the pillars of Western culture, but that 'this place is an adventure into the unknown.'

" 'Everyone knows the "Mona Lisa," but they don't know what a Fang mask is from West Africa,' added Ms. Ayedzame, who was visiting the collection with Herbert Mitch Ogouma, 27, a friend who also comes from Gabon. Other visitors, however, expressed sadness at seeing some of the spoils of France's colonial past.

" 'Whether for beauty, value or curiosity, all of the objects that belonged to us and to our ancestors were pillaged,' said Khady Senghor, 57, who runs a gallery for African art in Dakar. 'What is positive is that they have assembled all that in once place.'

"Fato Bidaye, an architectural designer from Senegal, living in Tunis, was visiting the museum with her three children. She said it was impossible to see such objects in Africa now. 'It makes me realize that on the African continent there is nothing left,' she said, 'and that everything that was a treasure can be found in this museum.' "

"Looted" by Ron Russell appeared in the September 5 issue of SF Weekly. The subtitle: "How an Eccentric Architect with a Penchant for Pre-Columbia Relics Rocked the Antiquities World and Became the de Young Museum's Most Mysterious Donor."

The story: "When the renovated de Young Museum reopened amid much fanfare over its architecture last October, a new gallery devoted entirely to its collection of spectacular wall murals from the ancient city of Teotihuacan - Mexico's most revered archaeological shrine - garnered relatively little attention.

"Renowned as the finest collection of its kind outside Mexico, the more than two dozen ancient wall fragments had been locked in storage during the five years that the de Young was being rebuilt. For decades previously, most of the pieces had been exhibited only rarely, if at all.

"The murals, whose surfaces bear striking images of priest-deities, animals, warrior-birds, feathered serpents, and flowering trees in hues of red, blue, green, and gold, are one of the most unlikely gifts of antiquities ever tendered to a major American museum. Looted in the early 1960s from the pre-Aztec ruins near Mexico City famous for their sacred pyramids, the frescoes were the unsolicited gift of an eccentric San Francisco architect named Harald Wagner.

"Wagner had kept the precious adobe frescoes - some still in crates - in a three-story commercial building downtown, where he lived with only a rudimentary kitchen, no bedroom, and sparse furnishings other than fine antiques, those who knew him say. Stunned art experts, summoned by the executor of his estate, encountered the frescoes there along with a trove of other art objects from around the world after his death in 1976 at the age of 73.

"He lived alone and had no close relatives."His handwritten will stipulated that the purloined collection - which was later determined to have been stripped from an underground chamber near the famed Pyramid of the Sun - be donated to the de Young. No one was more surprised than museum officials, who knew nothing of Wagner or the murals, and whose acceptance of the gift triggered a legal skirmish with the Mexican government over the frescoes' ownership.

"That struggle ended amicably and with the de Young winning kudos from the arts establishments of both countries after voluntarily repatriating to Mexico nearly two-thirds of the 70 pieces that were originally part of the Wagner cache.

"With the opening of the 'new' de Young, the murals - long considered to be among the museum's most underappreciated treasures - 'are finally receiving the attention they deserve,' says Kathleen Berrin, its chief curator for the arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas.

"But 30 years after his death, the man presumed to have smuggled the frescoes into the United States and whose generous gift took the de Young and the rest of the museum world by surprise, remains something of a riddle. Few people outside museum curators and academics concerned with pre-Columbian artifacts have ever even heard of him.

" 'To a lot of people he's probably just a name on a wall,' says Paul Newman, 70, the attorney who helped settle the estate three decades ago, referring to a plaque that accompanies the museum collection.

"Part of why so little is known about Wagner is that he appears to have wanted it that way. Aside from a few crude receipts, he left almost no papers concerning the relics, no word on how they were acquired, and no clue as to how he got them to San Francisco - topics that have long fueled speculation among those with an interest in the murals.

"Probate records and interviews with people who knew Wagner, including some who have never spoken publicly about him previously, reveal a complex, generous man who rose from relatively humble beginnings in Oregon to find prosperity as an architect and businessman in San Francisco. Fascinated by art and artists of many stripes, Wagner counted the late renowned California muralist Arthur Mathews and his wife, Lucia, among his closest friends.

"Considering the newfound prominence afforded the murals at the museum, one of those former friends says she would like to set the record straight on Wagner's behalf.

" 'To the extent that people have heard of Harald at all, he is probably misunderstood,' says Georgia Dunlavy, 79, who knew Wagner from the time she was a young artist working on Treasure Island in the 1940s. 'One thing he was not, was an art thief.'

"When Tom Seligman first saw the murals, he was astonished. 'It was mind-boggling,' recalls the de Young's former assistant director, who is now director of the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University. Seligman was among a contingent from the museum summoned by the estate's executor to the late architect's residence at the edge of the city's historical Jackson Square district after his death.

".There were artifacts everywhere, including precious Korean wooden figures, a Chinese Wei Dynasty pottery horse, bronze buddhas from India and Thailand, scroll paintings, antique furniture - even a turquoise-encrusted skull from Latin America. 'There was so much stuff there was hardly a place to sit; you could barely walk around it,' recalls Paul Newman, the attorney, who ushered the de Young troop through the premises for their first glimpse at the museum's gift.

"Most astonishing of all were the Teotihuacan murals. 'They were all over the place,' says Kathleen Berrin, the de Young curator. 'I remember my first reaction was, "Can these be real?"'

"What the museum team encountered were 70 pre-Columbian mural fragments, ranging in size from a few inches to 14 feet in length and whose collective weight was almost 3,400 pounds. Wagner had affixed small pieces to corkboard frames and hung them on the walls. Larger pieces were sprawled across the floor. In the basement, where he had begun to 'restore' some of the relics, pieces were laid out on plywood tables supported by sawhorses.

"The fragments, about three to five inches thick, are segments from ancient walls fashioned from volcanic material and covered with a thick layer of lime painted in fresco, similar to the technique used by the Italians. Among the images are elaborate priest-deities juxtaposed with feathered serpents spewing water from their mouths and flanked with flowering trees.

"Karl Taube, an anthropologist at UC Riverside and a leading expert in decoding the symbols of Teotihuacan imagery, calls the Wagner fragments 'some of the best examples of their kind' in depicting what he and other scholars describe as a precursor to Quetzalcoatl, the rain god of the ancient Aztecs.

"Although associated with the Aztecs, who occupied it beginning about 1300 and performed ritual human sacrifice there, Teotihuacan was founded by a civilization that predated them. It flourished between 200 and 600 A.D. before being mysteriously abandoned. Nestled in a once-remote valley about 40 miles northeast of Mexico City, the ruins have long been among Mexico's most popular tourist attractions.

"Teotihuacan began to be excavated in the 1880s. But, incredibly, much of the sprawling archaeological zone remains unprobed and its artwork undeciphered, which is why the unexpected emergence of the Wagner murals - regarded as priceless by art experts - created such a stir.

"For the de Young, the bequest was all the more amazing considering the circumstances. No one at the museum had ever had any dealings with Wagner and thus no one knew of his intent to leave the museum such an important gift. Perhaps not expecting much, museum officials exhibited such little enthusiasm after being told of the bequest that Newman, the estate's attorney, says he was annoyed. 'In fairness, looking back on it, until they actually came to see it, no one at the de Young could have imagined how significant it was,' he says.

"That changed the day of the Jackson Square visit. 'After we looked at it and sort of composed ourselves, our attention immediately turned to getting [the murals] to a secure location,' says Seligman. The city attorney's office, representing the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, of which the de Young is a part, quickly arranged to have the frescoes transferred to a museum warehouse while the estate's affairs were being settled in probate court.

"The frescoes languished in sealed crates for nearly three years while the legal struggle ensued between the Fine Arts Museums and the Mexican government. Under a 1934 Mexican law, pre-Columbian art of the kind the murals represent - chunks of adobe wall paintings removed from ancient dwellings that the law defines as 'immovable' objects - was decreed to be the property of the Mexican government.

"The law is unenforceable outside Mexico, and its intent was conveniently ignored by museums in the United States for decades, until 1971, when the U.S. and Mexico ratified a bilateral treaty calling for the repatriation of such art objects. (That same year, UNESCO, the United Nations' cultural arm, approved a similar treaty.)

"After word of the Wagner murals spread, the Mexicans, with support from the Carter Administration, pressed hard for their return. At one point, a U.S. Customs official insinuated that his agency might seize them. 'My recollection is that's when I said something like, "Over my dead body," ' recalls former deputy City Attorney Judith Teichman, who spearheaded the legal effort on behalf of the de Young.

"No one has ever denied that the frescoes were looted from Mexico. But the 1971 treaty with Mexico was not retroactive. In the end, the museum was able to prove to a Superior Court judge's satisfaction that Wagner indeed possessed the murals in the United States prior to the treaty's taking effect.

"The de Young's voluntary repatriation occurred in 1985 following a joint effort by conservators from the museum and Mexico to restore the murals. Some of the returned pieces are housed at the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City; others are in a museum at Teotihuacan. Although there are still occasional rumblings within Mexico's contentious cultural establishment for the return of all the frescoes, the repatriation has widely been hailed as a model for how museums should deal with treasures smuggled from other countries.

"Teichman had obtained affidavits from Wagner friends and associates attesting to having seen the artwork at the Jackson Square residence before 1971. Wagner's records, such as they were, were of little help. The former city attorney acknowledges that 'the three or four receipts that turned up weren't very impressive. They were basically scribbles on small pads, the kind that you could buy at a five-and-dime store.'

"The scribbles didn't reveal much, least of all a seller. There was nothing among Wagner's scant papers to provide a clue as to when or how he encountered the murals or how they passed into the United States. There was, however, a notarized statement asserting his ownership of them, which Teichman believes Wagner executed 'in 1970 or 1971' - about the time that the treaties affecting pre-Columbian artifacts were being drawn up.

"But those documents appear to have vanished. They are not among materials preserved in the probate court record. The City Attorney's office, the de Young, Newman, and James McDonald, another lawyer who helped settle the estate, disclaim any knowledge as to what may have happened to them. 'The thing that struck me was the small amount of paperwork Wagner left behind,' says Seligman. 'I suspect he knew that what he was doing wasn't exactly right, that it was sort of oily-edgy, and for that reason he purposely didn't leave much documentation.'

"Those who knew the secretive art donor weren't surprised that he apparently left no records about how he obtained the murals. 'He was an intensely private person who lived a compartmentalized life,' says Mary Caraker, 76, whose late husband, Emmett, was a close friend. Wagner was godfather to one of the couple's children.

".Wagner [was] upset with the de Young, or so he thought. In the late 1960s he had apparently believed that he had offered to sell the Teotihuacan murals to the de Young. In reality, Wagner's overture was to a director of the Asian Art Museum, which, at the time, was housed at the old de Young even though it was a separate entity, says Kathleen Berrin, the curator, who first revealed the snafu in Feathered Serpents and Flowering Trees., The Asian's director, who understandably had no use for pre-Columbian relics, apparently failed to pass the word to anyone at the de Young.

".One person who has never ceased to be curious about Wagner is renowned archaeologist Rene Millon, 85, who is retired from the University of Rochester. Having made mapping and excavating Teotihuacan his life's work, Millon and his archaeologist wife, the late Clara Millon, were among the experts the de Young assembled in 1979 to assess the Wagner trove.

"Experts already knew that the relics had come from Teotihuacan. But in an Indiana Jones-like moment in 1983 - in which he looked down next to a cactus and found a piece of adobe with painting on one side - Millon discovered the precise spot from which looters had taken the Wagner relics.

" 'I knew immediately what it was,' he recalls. 'It was like finding a piece of a puzzle.'

"His discovery, a small Tassel Headdress figure that matched what he had seen in San Francisco, led to a nearby looter's trench that had been crudely filled in after the Wagner artwork was ripped from the ancient walls beneath the surface. The spot was in an unexcavated compound of ancient residences, about 500 yards east of the famous Pyramid of the Moon.

"With funds from the de Young, the Millon team excavated the trench the following summer, exposing the walls from which pillagers had ripped colorful sections of adobe some two decades earlier. Unfortunately, as Wagner may have soon discovered upon spreading out the pieces in his residence, the component parts did not add up to a whole.

" 'The pieces were very crudely removed,' says Stephen Mellor, a former de Young conservationist who is now a curator at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art. 'The looters, whoever they were, tore away what came easily. They weren't interested in preserving anything intact.'

"Millon's discovery was 'a remarkable piece of archaeological detective work,' says George Cowgill, an Arizona State University anthropologist who has also worked at Teotihuacan. He, too, has long been intrigued by the lore surrounding the Wagner relics. 'You have to understand that back in the '60s, when this stuff was looted, and before the Mexican government began doing more to secure the site, there was still quite a bit of stuff laying around on the ground,' he says. 'Kids were selling it to tourists.'

" 'It was a different era,' says Clemency Coggins, a professor of archaeology at Boston University, who helped draw attention to the problem of stolen pre-Columbian artwork in the 1960s. 'Sad to say, back when [the Wagner murals] came out of Mexico, U.S. Customs didn't really give it a hard look at the border and many people didn't even think of [relic smuggling] as a crime.'

"Along with tourism at Teotihuacan has come a mushrooming population of mostly impoverished settlers near the ruins. The settlements are so close that 'some residents have been known to dig up pre-Columbian artifacts from their yards,' says Karl Taube, the UC Riverside anthropologist.

"In 2000, there was an international outcry after inspectors found an ancient altar just outside the official archaeological zone - beneath a Wal-Mart parking lot.

"Few people involved with the murals believe that Wagner had anything to do with looting them. Rather, it is assumed that he bought them in Mexico and personally brought them to the United States. Newman, the attorney for the estate, says that based on what relatives of a former Wagner friend, who is now deceased, told him, he 'always had the impression that Wagner made multiple trips' to Mexico 'and drove the murals to San Francisco himself.'

"But Millon, who first began working at Teotihuacan in the 1950s while still on the faculty at UC Berkeley, suspects otherwise.

"Based on the accounts of several Mexican nationals, including a man who worked with the archaeologist at Teotihuacan for more than 30 years, Millon believes the murals were trucked to the Panama Canal Zone and shipped to the United States. He says former workers at Teotihuacan told him in 1964 that stolen materials from the then-largely unprotected archaeological site were being spirited to a secret warehouse near the ruins and offered for sale on the black market. He suspects that's where Wagner encountered them.

"At the time, the Mexican government was working feverishly to complete a major excavation of Teotihuacan's so-called Avenue of the Dead, the road and plaza linking its two largest pyramids, dedicated to the sun and moon. Mexico's then-president, Adolfo Lopez Mateos, wanted the work completed before the end of his six-year term that year and government trucks hauled huge amounts of dirt day and night, Millon says. 'If you ask how 3,400 pounds of antiquities could just disappear, the answer, I'm afraid, is very easily.'

"By the next year at the latest. the murals were spread out inside Wagner's Jackson Square home. There, they remained out of sight and under the radar of the pre-Columbian art world for more than a decade.

"If nothing else, Wagner knew how to keep a secret."

John Noble Wilford's September 15 story in The New York Times had the headline, "Writing May Be Oldest in Western Hemisphere."

Wilford wrote: "A stone slab bearing 3,000-year-old writing previously unknown to scholars has been found in the Mexican state of Veracruz, and archaeologists say it is an example of the oldest script ever discovered in the Western Hemisphere

"The Mexican discoverers and their colleagues from the United States reported yesterday that the order and pattern of carved symbols appeared to be that of a true writing system and that it had characteristics strikingly similar to imagery of the Olmec civilization, considered the earliest in the Americas.

"Finding a heretofore unknown writing system is rare. One of the last major ones to come to light, scholars say, was the Indus Valley script, recognized from excavations in 1924.

"Now, scholars are tantalized by a message in stone in a script unlike any other and a text they cannot read. They are excited by the prospect of finding more of this writing, and eventually deciphering it, to crack open a window on one of the most enigmatic ancient civilizations.

"The inscription on the Mexican stone, with 28 distinct signs, some of which are repeated, for a total of 62, has been tentatively dated from at least 900 B.C., possibly earlier. That is 400 or more years before writing was known to have existed in Mesoamerica, the region from central Mexico through much of Central America, and by extension, anywhere in the hemisphere.

"Previously, no script had been associated unambiguously with the Olmec culture, which flourished along the Gulf of Mexico in Veracruz and Tabasco well before the Zapotec and Maya people rose to prominence elsewhere in the region. Until now, the Olmec were known mainly for the colossal stone heads they sculptured and displayed at monumental buildings in their ruling cities.

"The stone was discovered by María del Carmen Rodríguez of the National Institute of Anthropology and History of Mexico and Ponciano Ortíz of Veracruz University. The archaeologists, a married couple, are the lead authors of the report of the discovery, which is being published today in the journal Science.

"The signs incised on the 26-pound stone, the researchers said in the report, 'link the Olmec to literacy, document an unsuspected writing system and reveal a new complexity to this civilization.'

"Noting that the text 'conforms to all expectations of writing,' the researchers wrote that the sequences of signs reflected 'patterns of language, with the probable presence of syntax and language-dependent word orders.'

"Several paired sequences of signs, scholars said, have even prompted speculation that the text contained poetic couplets.

"Experts who have examined the Olmec symbols said they would need many more examples before they could hope to read what is written on the stone. They said it appeared that the symbols in the inscription were unrelated to later Mesoamerican scripts, suggesting that this Olmec writing might have been practiced for only a few generations and never spread to surrounding cultures.

"Stephen D. Houston of Brown University, a co-author of the report and an authority on ancient writings, acknowledged that the apparent singularity of the script was a puzzle and would probably be emphasized by some scholars who question the influence of the Olmec on the course of later Mesoamerican cultures.

"But Dr. Houston said the discovery 'could be the beginning of a new era of focus on the Olmec civilization.'

"Other participants in the research include Michael D. Coe of Yale; Richard A. Diehl of the University of Alabama; Karl A. Taube of the University of California, Riverside; and Alfredo Delgado Calderón, also of the National Institute of Anthropology and History.

"Mesoamerican researchers not involved in the discovery agreed that the signs appeared to represent a true script and that their appearance could be expected to inspire more intensive exploration of the Olmec past. The civilization emerged about 1200 B.C. and virtually disappeared around 400 B.C.

"In an accompanying article in Science, Mary Pohl, an anthropologist at Florida State University who has excavated Olmec ruins, was quoted as saying, 'This is an exciting discovery of great significance.'

"A few other researchers were skeptical of the inscription's date because the stone was uncovered in a gravel quarry where it and other artifacts were jumbled and possibly out of their original context. "

The discovery team said that ceramic shards, clay figurines and other broken artifacts accompanying the stone appeared to be from a phase of Olmec culture ending about 900 B.C. They conceded, though, that the disarray at the site made it impossible to determine if the stone was in a place relating to the governing elite or a religious ceremony.

"Dr. Diehl, a specialist in Olmec research, said, 'My colleagues and I are absolutely convinced the stone is authentic.'

"Road builders digging gravel came across the stone in debris from an ancient mound at Cascajal, a place the discoverers said was in the 'Olmec heartland.' The village is on an island in southern Veracruz and about a mile from the ruins of San Lorenzo, the site of the dominant Olmec city from 1200 B.C. to 900 B.C.

"That was in 1999, and Dr. Rodríguez and Dr. Ortíz were called in, and they quickly recognized the potential importance of the find.

"Only after years of further excavations, in which they hoped to find more writing specimens, and comparative analysis with Olmec iconography did the two invite other Mesoamerican scholars to join the study. After a few reports in recent years of Olmec 'writing' that failed to hold up, the team decided earlier this year that the Cascajal stone, as it is being called, was the real thing. "

The tiny, delicate signs are incised on a block of soft serpentine stone 14 inches long, 8 inches wide and 5 inches thick. The inscription is on the stone's concave top surface.

"Dr. Houston, who was a leader in the decipherment of Maya writing, examined the stone with an eye to clues that this was true writing and not just iconography unrelated to a language. He said in an interview that he had detected regular patterns and order suggesting 'a text segmented into what almost look like sentences, with clear beginnings and clear endings.'

"Some pictographic signs were frequently repeated, Dr. Houston said, particularly ones that looked like an insect or a lizard. He suspected that these were signs alerting the reader to the use of words that sound alike but have different meanings - as in the difference in English of 'I' and 'eye.'

"All in all, Dr. Houston concluded, 'the linear sequencing, the regularity of signs, the clear patterns of ordering, they tell me this is writing, but we don't know what it says.' "

"Finding Beauty in Usefulness," Grace Glueck's review of the Museum of the American Indian's new pavilion named for Valerie and Charles Diker, ran in The New York Times on September 22.

"It's no secret," the review began, "that native peoples of North and South America are among the world's most gifted artisans. The Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, which houses more than 800,000 artifacts - beautiful and useful objects fashioned of bone, hide, clay, reeds, seeds, wood, metal and other stuff - in New York and Washington, has done a first-class job in recent years of bringing their skills to international attention. And the opening tomorrow of the Diker Pavilion for Native Arts and Cultures at the museum's George Gustav Heye Center in Lower Manhattan will provide welcome additional exposure.

"The new 6,000-square foot pavilion, which includes a performance area that can seat 400, occupies former storage space under the grand oval rotunda on the main floor of the center's home, the United States Custom House on Bowling Green. The marble floor has been replaced by one of sprung maple suitable for dance performances; the walls have been covered with handsome cherry paneling, sloped gently inward; and 10 vertical exhibit cases have been placed in the window niches, covering up a bleak view of an inner courtyard. Behind the performance space is a curving wall of jade-green translucent glass. (The pavilion is named for the New York collectors Valerie and Charles M. Diker, who contributed $1 million toward its realization.)

"But it's the cases filled with objects - 77 great examples selected from the museum's collection by Johanna Gorelick, its public programs manager - that grab your attention when you enter. Representing cultures throughout the Western hemisphere, the clothing, tools, musical instruments, games and sports equipment, masks and pottery chosen for the exhibition, 'Beauty Surrounds Us,' attest to the variety and vitality of native life.

"Start with a case of children's clothing and adornments, not only beautifully made but also fun to look at. The 1915 dress of a girl from the Crow culture, of black wool and cotton cloth with red borders at the sleeves and hem, is covered with elks' teeth, symbolizing long life but also representing wealth, status and the hunting skills of the family's male provider. Only eyeteeth were used, and to cover an entire dress took affluence. (Elk-tooth dresses are still worn today, but the teeth are plastic.)

"In a nearby case devoted to games and sports, the gamut runs from a Sioux child's sled made of buffalo ribs with a hide seat to a gambling tray, a handsome, superbly worked flat basket with upturned edges made of woven grass and roots by Yokuts women of central California. (Both objects are circa 1900.) With the tray they played the game of huchuwish with huge dice (or 'bones') made of materials like stones, nuts, beans, sticks, bones, animal teeth and what have you. (This was before casinos.)

"Another display sets out symbols of respect, like an intricate Tlingit frontlet headdress (circa 1870) from British Columbia, made of wood, hide and ermine skins and adorned with the image of a beaver, an ancestral crest animal, inlaid with abalone shell. A chief might wear it to welcome you to a social gathering like a feast, or potlatch.

"Elements that move, important to American Indian regalia, are seen in a Karuk woman's two-piece skirt (circa 1890) from northwestern California, of hide decorated with clam and abalone shells that clink as a dancer performs, and leggings made from the shells of box turtles, worn by Seminole women to perform the Stomp Dance during the Green Corn Ceremony, an important religious and social affair.

"Musical instruments are wonderfully in evidence too, with perhaps the star among them being a beautifully carved conch shell trumpet (A.D. 900-1500) from the Huastec culture in the Panuco River basin of Veracruz, Mexico. To make the trumpet, the snail was ousted and the top of the shell fashioned into a mouthpiece. Tonal control was achieved by the player's hand positioned inside the shell's opening.

"If asked to pick a favorite among the show's dazzlers, I would opt for the wide-brimmed hat of an Aleut sea otter hunter (1820-1860) from Kodiak Island, Alaska. A gorgeous thing of wool cloth in bright but weathered blue with a sprightly painted design, it is adorned with beads and dentalium shells - luxury trade items that marked the wearer's elite status - and sea lion whiskers indicating past successes.

"The only jarring note is a bronze sculpture, a vertical pileup of elements from traditional native stories, made in 2005 by Rick Bartow of the Wiyot tribe in Northern California and titled 'From the Mad River to the Little Salmon River, or the Responsibility of Raising a Child.' It stands at the entrance to the new pavilion, but it's not up to what's inside."

"Beauty Surrounds Us" continues through Sept. 23, 2008, at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, George Gustav Heye Center, 1 Bowling Green, Lower Manhattan, (212) 514-3700.