American Indian Art Magazine, Volume 36, No. 3 http://www.aiamagazine.com/

From Traditional Crafts American Indian Art at the Riverside Metropolitan Museum Bryn Barabas Potter, Brenda Buller Focht and Margaret Wood

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wo exhibitions on view at the Riverside Metropolitan Museum in Riverside, California through November 13, 2011 explore traditional and contemporary Native American art. American Indian Traditional Crafts features a variety of baskets, ceramic vessels, beaded objects and textiles that illustrate the items’ use in daily life, showing that everyday objects — tools, clothing, water jars, food baskets and so forth — are aesthetic in addition to being functional.

American Indian Women Artists: Beyond Craft includes ceramic objects by Anita Fields (Osage), woven baskets by Pat Courtney Gold (Wasco/Tlingit), beaded items by Teri Greeves (Kiowa) and quilts by Margaret Wood (Diné [Navajo]/Seminole), brought together through a grant provided by the Indigenous Contemporary Arts Program sponsored by the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. These four artists have created pieces specifically for this exhibition. Each woman is deeply rooted in her own cultural tradition and is passionate about her artwork. Each also considers herself a storyteller, and has chosen particular media to express her stories. Stories are the essence of a culture, linking the work of these four artists with their ancestors and future tribal artists.

Wood, who is also the exhibit’s cocurator, emphasizes that “every object usually has a story. As a viewer of exhibits, I really enjoy hearing the stories of the items.” 1 Courtney Gold’s weavings tell the ongoing story of basketry. For example, her Yuppie Indian Couple features traditional Wasco human figures dressed like Native people of today — in suits and ties, high heels and lipstick.

Fields observes, “Our art is very indicative of who we are today. Like artists before us, we are documenting and 1

Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations by Fields, Courtney Gold, Greeves and Wood are from interviews with Bryn Barabas Potter in 2010 – 2011. Transcripts are on file at the museum.

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1. Star blanket by Little Woman Yazzie, Navajo, pre-1902.

Wool. 77 13⁄16" x 56 1⁄8" (197.6 cm x 142.5 cm). According to Little Woman Yazzie, each star design woven into the blanket represents “the soul of a beloved one shining through the heavens” (Hall 1935). Courtesy of the Harwood Hall Collection, Riverside Metropolitan Museum, Riverside, California. Cat. No. A109-1. Photograph by Chase Leland.

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to Art Beyond Craft:

2. Fancy Dancing B-Ballers by Teri Greeves, Kiowa, 2010. Glass beads, canvas, rubber, cotton.

12" high, 10" long, 3 1â „4" wide (30.5 cm x 25.4 cm x 8.3 cm). Courtesy of the artist. Photograph courtesy of Shiprock Santa Fe.

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3. Pair of sally bags, Wasco, c.1900, collected prior to 1910. Left: Salmon gill bag. Native hemp, leather. 12 7⁄16" x 115⁄8" x 9 3⁄4" (31.5 cm x 29.5 cm x 24.6 cm). Right: figurative bag. Native hemp. 7 1⁄2" x 11 7⁄16" x 11" (19.1 cm x 29 cm x 27.9 cm). Courtesy of the Cornelius Earle Rumsey Collection, Riverside Metropolitan Museum, Riverside, California. Cat. Nos. A1-540, A1-539. Photographs by Chase Leland.

recording the here and now and what it means to be alive.” And for Greeves, the idea is simple. “ The only tradition there is, is that we’re still telling stories.”

Setting the Stage in Riverside At the beginning of the twentieth century, Riverside was among the richest cities in the United States. The wealth came from two sources: the area’s navel orange industry, and entrepreneurs who moved from the eastern United States, Canada and England searching for new economic enterprises. In 1924 the Cornelius Earle Rumsey Indian Museum was founded with the donation by his widow of 600 Indian artifacts collected by the couple. The following year, an ordinance establishing the Riverside Municipal Museum was adopted by the city council (Riverside Municipal Museum staff 2000: 4). In 2005 the museum’s name was changed to the Riverside Metropolitan Museum.

Although the museum has extensive natural history and local history collections, it is the anthropology collection, specifically the basketry collection, for which the museum is best known. Thanks to the work of Christopher L. Moser, curator of anthropology from 1979 to 2003, every American Indian basket in the museum’s collection has been exhibited. His books on the museum’s California baskets remain important reference works (Lopez and Moser 1981; Moser 1986, 1989, 1993).

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Riverside’s location, at the edge of the San Bernardino Valley, was a crossroads for the Cahuilla, Luiseño, Gabrielino/Tongva and Serrano tribes (Hanks 2010).

The city has many small neighboring Indian reservations. In 1902 a federal American Indian residential school, Sherman Indian High School, was established in Riverside, bringing in students from other tribes. This school continues to serve American Indian students who do not have easy access to educational services.

Beginning in 2003 Native Americans became involved with the museum through a series of exhibitions curated by coauthor Bryn Barabas Potter. For the 2006 exhibition Apache Life, Spirit and Art, Native artists and cultural consultants from the Riverside area examined the museum’s anthropology collection.

In 2008 the museum presented the exhibit Quilt Stories, which featured its growing collection of American Indian quilts.

Traditional Crafts The pieces exhibited in Traditional Crafts were chosen to reflect the four disciplines mastered by Fields, Courtney Gold, Greeves and Wood. Each artist has spoken about being grounded within her cultural tradition. Educating visitors about these crafts can enhance their understanding and enjoyment of the contemporary American Indian art in Beyond Craft. Traditional Crafts also explores the AMERICAN INDIAN ART MAGAZINE

development of crafts in response to the growth of the market economy, and finally, the acceptance of craft items as fine art objects.

Museum catalog records of traditional items were sent to the four artists for their comments. Each artist was interested in seeing the objects that had been selected to provide a historical perspective, and each lent her words to the Traditional Crafts exhibition. Regarding the idea of having two Native object exhibitions, Fields remarks, It is very important to have the two views; too many times our Native cultures are defined by objects of the past. When institutions only exhibit objects and historical material from the past, it can give audiences a distorted and narrow view of who we are today. By showing contemporary work, audiences can see that Native cultures are very much alive and thriving. Museum

viewers can look at the historical collections and contemporary work to see a continuum and evolution of our cultures.

The work made in the past provides a foundation and framework for many Native artists today: techniques, processes and materials used in the past defined how Native cultures saw themselves within a certain time period. This flow of knowledge and information is evident in the work of Native artists today, and allows us to make work that is indicative of who we are today, and how we see ourselves in a very fast-paced, everchanging, modern world.

A pair of the museum’s Wasco sally bags (Fig. 3), originally made for personal use as well as to hold pounded and dried salmon for trade, provides a historical context in which to view Courtney Gold’s work (Fig. 14). The depth of the museum’s 2,000-item basketry collection is shown through the inclusion of such items as a twined Achumawi hopper, an Akimel O’odham wine basket, a Chitimacha fanning tray made of plaited river cane, a coiled basket by Ipai weaver Ramona Balenzuela, a Panamint hat, a well-worn nineteenth-century Patwin cooking bowl, a Tlingit berry basket with bright designs in false embroidery and other items.

4. Bandolier bag, Chippewa, nineteenth century. Cotton cloth, yarn, glass beads. 58" x 18 1⁄2" (147.3 cm x 47 cm). This bag was purchased by Cornelius Earle Rumsey in Nett Lake, Minnesota in 1903. Courtesy of the Cornelius Earle Rumsey Collection, Riverside Metropolitan Museum, Riverside, California. Cat No. A56-14.

Photograph by Chase Leland.

5. Water jar, Luiseño, c.1900. Clay, red ocher. 11 1⁄2" x 9 1⁄2" (29.2 cm x 24.1 cm). Courtesy of the Mr. and Mrs. William Webster Collection, Riverside Metropolitan Museum, Riverside, California.

Cat. No. A724-2. Photograph by Chase Leland.

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6. Details of quilts by Margaret Wood, Diné (Navajo)/Seminole. Left: Charlie Wood’s Maze, 2000. Ultrasuede, cotton, shell buttons.

64 1⁄2" x 60" (163.8 cm x 152.4 cm). Right: Helen Mae Watchman Wood’s Maze, 2008. Cotton, cotton velveteen, polyester ribbon, shell buttons, human hair. 71" x 83 1⁄2" (180.3 cm x 212.1 cm). Courtesy of the Margaret Wood Collection, Riverside Metropolitan Museum, Riverside, California. Acc. Nos. P100, P122. Photographs by Tom Galbraith.

Prehistoric ceramics from the Southwest, with their fanciful effigy handles and crisp black-on-white paint, provide an impressive foil for Anita Field’s clay figures and wall pieces (Figs. 7, 8, 12). From Acoma to Zuni, the Pueblos of the Southwest are fairly well represented in the museum’s ceramic collection, including a blackware pot by Maria Martinez of San Ildefonso. From closer to home, a Luiseño water jar with red ocher designs (Fig. 5) and a large Cahuilla storage olla decorated only with

random fire clouds are on display among the more showy Pueblo ceramics. Most of the California desert pieces are unpainted, yet they are classic in their simplicity. Although the museum’s ceramic collection is not extensive, it spans the breadth of this art form.

Beaded pieces include a Blackfoot doll in a fully beaded miniature cradleboard. This late-nineteenthcentury piece is an excellent example of its type.

Colorful flat bags from the Plateau area, featuring floral and animal designs, presage some of Greeves’s work. A trio of circa 1900 brilliantly colored awl cases — Kiowa, Cheyenne and Sioux — illustrates the diversity of beadwork among Plains Indian women, something Greeves discusses. In reference to beadwork being considered a traditional art, Greeves points out that

7. Movement of the Sun #2 by Anita Fields, Osage, 2011. Clay, underglaze, gold luster glaze.

21" x 32" (53.3 cm x 81.3 cm). Courtesy of the artist; made to commemorate the Riverside Metropolitan Museum exhibition.

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beads were not traditional to Native people on this continent. You have to go back and think about what is traditional. Like the craft versus art, authentic versus contemporary debates.

You can bet your bottom dollar that when women got cotton thread, they stopped using sinew. With new materials, women found new art forms, expressed their own designs and colors. They were given new materials but were able to turn them into such iconic items — enough to say “that’s Kiowa,” or “that’s Cheyenne”—based on its design and techniques.

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A pair of fingerwoven, multicolored Chippewa sashes, a Chippewa beaded vest adorned with brass military buttons, a Chippewa bandolier bag (Fig. 4) and a Hopi wedding sash are some of the objects in the textile portion of the exhibition.

A noteworthy Navajo blanket was purchased in 1902 or 1903 by Harwood Hall, the first superintendent of Sher man Indian High School, who bought it from a student, John Yazzie (Fig. 1).2 The relationship between the museum and the high school began informally when the museum was established. Frances D. Hall, widow of Harwood Hall, was one of the founders of the museum. Frances Hall wrote of special streetcars bringing children and families from the railroad depot to the school, many carrying bundles with crafts to sell (Hall 1935).

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Beyond Craft The Beyond Craft exhibit examines questions about when and how craft becomes art and whether it always maintains its connection with a traditional form of cultural expression. Greeves remarks, “My work is contemporary, but it comes from a tradition, and I’m always honored to be called a beadworker.” A similar view is held by Fields: In terms of being a craftsperson or an artist, I see myself as an artist. I use a material, an element of the earth, that is often times thought of in very traditional terms and create objects

The blanket was donated to the museum in about 1953

by Mrs. Florence Gregory, who had received it from Hall’s widow. It was added to the museum’s Harwood Hall Collection.

8. Holding Patterns by Anita Fields, Osage, 2011.

Clay, underglaze, gold luster glaze. 33" x 33" (83.8 cm x 83.8 cm). Courtesy of the artist.

9. Cedar Wall Hanging with Mixed SW/NW Fibers

by Pat Courtney Gold, Wasco/Tlingit, 2009.

Northwest cedar bark, southwest yucca, southwest tamarisk. 72" x 48" (182.9 cm x 121.9 cm).

Courtesy of the artist.

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that are rooted in what people perceive as craft. My work is not utilitarian or used for a specific function. I use clay to transform my emotions, my ideas and many inspirations into narrative, expressive forms.

As the artists chose the pieces they wished to include in Beyond Craft, several themes became evident, including telling stories and maintaining family connections.

Fields’s art has been highly influenced by the Osage philosophy of her forebearers. This worldview is based on the division of the earth and sky, which represents the many dualities in nature, and the ancestors’ close observation of the universe. “ I find it interesting to see how this thought is still very much alive and evident in our ceremonies, relationships to one another, and how we think. I use this as a metaphor in my work and

base many pieces on the essence of this thought.”

Some of the new artworks Fields created for Beyond Craft were inspired by this duality. Movement of the Sun #2 is one of several wall pieces that use this idea as a metaphor (Fig. 7). These pieces have heavily textured areas imprinted with tiny objects that represent elements from the earth and sky. Fields invites viewers to look closely at these works and find connections with their own lives. For this artist, clay is a perfect medium to translate these thoughts.

Fields cites two more sources of inspiration for her art: the vibrant colors of Osage ribbon work and articles of clothing that she grew up with. These finely crafted items were her grandmother’s most treasured possessions, and Fields’s first introduction to pattern

10. Prayer Blanket by Teri Greeves, Kiowa, 2006. Brain-tanned deer hide, glass beads, silver beads, hawk bells, cotton, wool, silk ribbon. 52" x 511⁄2" (132.1 cm x 130.8 cm). Courtesy of the artist.

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and design. Today her family greatly influences her work. Her son Yatika is a painter, her son Nokosee is a musician, her daughter Welana is a dancer and her husband Tom is a photographer.

Being surrounded by family, all of them artists, is of great importance to her.

For Courtney Gold, the theme of family encompasses Wasco cultural history. About twenty years ago, she and her sister learned the art of Wasco basketry from a few tribal elders who could still make a whole basket when working together: Some of the elders knew the basketry starts, some knew how to finish them, some knew the full-turn twine, so we met with them to put it all together. We were using yarn. We didn’t know the plant materials.

Later I went to museums to identify plant fibers and study the designs on baskets. I learned the variations of plant fibers and designs.

Examining baskets stored in muse ums is often a profound experience for Courtney Gold. She spoke of her feelings while holding a Wasco basket collected by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark in 1805, now in the collection of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology 11. Bag Series: #1 Hidatsa Pipe Bag Quilt by Margaret Wood, Diné (Navajo)/Seminole, 1992. Ultrasuede, cotton sateen, polyester ribbon. 112" x 29" (284.5 cm x 73.7 cm). and Ethnology, Harvard University, CamWood wrote, “Since many tribes were migratory, leather and rawhide bags were bridge, Massachusetts. She studied the important packing containers…This particular quilt incorporated design elements basket for six hours, incredulous at the from a Hidatsa tanned hide pipe bag decorated in dyed porcupine quill work” (2008).

Courtesy of the Margaret Wood Collection, Riverside Metropolitan Museum, workmanship and thankful for the opRiverside, California. Cat No. A1770-3. Photograph by Chase Leland. portunity to connect with the spirit of its ancestral basketweaver. This experience inspired her to create Columbia River. When she weaves a sturgeon design Honoring the 1805 Weaver (Fig. 13; Grantier 2009). into a piece, Courtney Gold gives it a deformity in Courtney Gold’s Salmon Gill Basket, created esresponse to her concern about the ill-health of the river, pecially for this exhibition, is another example of how stemming from toxic pollutants from the Hanford nuclear traditional items can inspire the creation of a new artsite in Washington, where radioactive waste is stored. work (Fig. 14). Salmon were and continue to be impor“Someone can see what I’m stating so I don’t have to tant to Wasco culture. The museum’s founding collector write a page about all the pollution — it’s right there for Cornelius E. Rumsey collected the historic basket (Fig. them to see” (Stark 2010:21).

3) that inspired Courtney Gold’s contemporary one.

Hightop tennis shoes are the medium often chosen More recently, within a few miles of Courtney Gold’s

by Greeves for her beaded narratives. Each shoe in a home along the Columbia River, an ancient Chinook vilpair has a different image, as seen in Fancy Dancing lage was excavated by archaeologists. She was honored B-Ballers (Fig. 2). These high-heeled hightops feature to hold a basket from the early 1700s and identify its a dancer dressed in regalia, with her fringed shawl fibers as cedar. “ Oh, a spiritual experience,” she ex whirling, and a woman athlete shooting a basketball. As plains. “ I was touching hands with an ancestor, it was so her art has changed, Greeves has used her shoes as incredible. It was made exactly as I weave — it was a way to make statements about the world today. She amazing.” Courtney Gold has used cedar and the same explains the positive reaction people have when they weaving technique in a wall hanging (Fig. 9). see them. “They’re funny! People approach smiling. I Courtney Gold also likes to comment on environcan bring up any subject I want to address and have mental health in her weaving. The Wasco are attuned to an open audience.” the condition of salmon and sturgeon that inhabit the The subjects she wants to address often reflect curSUMMER 2011

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rent world affairs. The American occupation of Fallujah, Iraq is one such weighty issue. Prayer Blanket, a beaded blanket made up of five deer hides (Fig. 10), compares modern soldiers heading to battle and warriors of the past, members of the Kiowa Black Leggings Society.

Another piece by Greeves, Witness: OccupationDemocracy, is about the Middle East, yet it also deals with women’s issues. One side of this beaded diptych portrays a traditional Kiowa woman with her baby in a cradleboard. The other side features an Iraqi woman holding a child. Both images have oil wells in the back-

ground. Here Greeves questions the role of mothers in wartime. A mother herself, she ponders, “How do you teach your sons not to hate when they witness what they witness in war? Not just Kiowa, not just Iraqi, but a question of the ages.”

Stories and family were Greeves’s inspiration for Tahlee: The Kiowa Sun Boys Book. Her young sons’ interest in superheroes sparked the production of this beaded book. The Sun Boys, mythical beings, are portrayed as superheroes in traditional Kiowa stories. Greeves hopes that the strong images she has created can be passed on to her sons’ children and grandchildren.

Wood documents the lives of her parents in a pair of biographical quilts, Charlie Wood’s Maze and Helen Mae Watchman Wood’s Maze (Fig. 6). The quilts are pleasing to the eye, each with recurring motifs and colors, each expertly stitched. Yet they both embody intensely personal stories of two people close to her.

In two other works, Wood reaches back to her Navajo homeland and also references all Native Americans. She is in the midst of a multiyear, multiquilt installation piece celebrating the beauty and serenity of Monument Valley, on the Arizona-Utah border. Monument Valley Landscape Quilt #2 requires considerable designing and preplanning, as Wood would like technical consistency with the individual quilts in the series. She admits that “plans can change; it’s art. We don’t necessarily have control, even though artists try!” While Monument Valley honors Wood’s traditional home, Ribbon Shirt Quilt, in the collection of NMAI, is “a tribute to Native American seamstresses and the creativity they show in making these shirts, and to honor the pan-Indian shirt.”

To provide a link between crafts in Traditional Crafts and the art in Beyond Craft, Wood’s oversized quilted Hidatsa pipe bag (Fig. 11) is shown alongside a beaded Lakota pipe bag from the late nineteenth century. This juxtaposition of the functional with the inspired allows the viewer an opportunity to compare the creations of two women across the centuries.

Conclusion

12. Changing Thought in Black Dress by Anita Fields, Osage, 2009. Clay, clay slip, fabric, oil pastel. 36" x 12" x 4" (91.4 cm x 30.5 cm x 10.2 cm). Courtesy of the artist.

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Craft or art, craftsperson or artist — these seem to be moot points in this pair of exhibitions. Traditional Crafts teaches about the tools of the ancestors, how they were made and how they were adapted. Beyond Craft brings together four contemporary women artists who demonstrate the significance of tribal cultural history in their lives and art. Yet like the warps and wefts in a basket or blanket, this contemporary art is a melange of cultural tradition and twenty-first-century influences. Through their art, Anita Fields, Pat Courtney Gold, Teri Greeves and Margaret Wood share their inspirations, thoughts and aspirations. The theme ultimately expressed by each of the artists is a simple one: we’re still here, we’re still Indian and this is our art.

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14. Salmon Gill Basket by Pat Courtney Gold, Wasco/Tlingit, 2011. Catttail leaves, dyed raffia, burr reed, Hungarian hemp.

10 1 ⁄ 2 " high, 9" diameter (26.7 cm x 22.9 cm). Courtesy of the artist; made to commemorate the Riverside Metropolitan Museum exhibition. Photograph by Bill Bachhuber.

13. Honoring the 1805 Weaver by Pat Courtney Gold, Wasco/ Tlingit, 2003. Hemp, cattail, raffia, dye, dogbane bark. 113⁄16" x 10 7⁄16" x 9 5⁄8" (28.4 cm x 26.5 cm x 24.5). © President and Fellows of Harvard College, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Cat. No. 2003.24.1.

Bibliography Grantier, Virginia 2009 Native Art: Pat Courtney Gold ‘61 Preserves Her Heritage.

Whitman Magazine, March:30 – 32.

Hall, Frances D. 1935 The Story of the Navajo Blanket (Star Design). Manuscript on file, Riverside Metropolitan Museum, Riverside, California.

Hanks, Richard 2010 Personal communication with Potter.

Lopez, Raul A. and Christopher L. Moser (editors) 1981 Rods, Bundles & Stitches: A Century of Southern California Indian Basketry. Riverside Museum Press, Riverside, California.

Moser, Christopher L. 1986 Native American Basketry of Central California. Riverside Museum Press, Riverside, California.

1989 American Indian Basketry of Northern California. Riverside Museum Press, Riverside, California.

1993 Native American Basketry of Southern California.

Riverside Museum Press, Riverside, California.

Riverside Municipal Museum staff 2000 Riverside Municipal Museum: A Report to the Community on the Occasion of the Seventy-fifth Anniversary. Riverside Municipal Museum, Riverside, California.

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Stark, Liz 2010 Traditionally Innovative: Pat Courtney Gold Reflects Contemporary Wasco Life in Baskets. NEA Arts, 3:8 – 9, 20 –21.

Wood, Margaret 2008 Author’s object label copy for Bag Series: #1 Hidatsa Pipe Bag Quilt for the exhibition Quilt Stories. Riverside Metropolitan Museum, Riverside, California.

For their assistance and support, the authors thank: Kevin Hallaran, Archivist, Riverside Metropolitan Museum; Richard Hanks, Chaffey College, Rancho Cucamonga, California; Ennette Morton, Director, Riverside Metropolitan Museum; Ernest Siva (Cahuilla/Serrano), Tribal Historian/Cultural Advisor, Morongo Band of Mission Indians and President, Dorothy Ramon Learning Center, Banning, California; Clifford Trafzer (Wyandot), Costo Professor of American Indian Affairs, University of California, Riverside and the Riverside Museum Associates.

Bryn Barabas Potter, Adjunct Curator of Anthropology at Riverside Metropolitan Museum and BBP Museum Consulting, is the curator for Traditional Crafts. Brenda Buller Focht, Curator of Collections and Exhibitions at Riverside Metropolitan Museum, is the lead curator and coordinator for the Beyond Craft and Traditional Crafts exhibitions.

Margaret Wood (Diné [Navajo]/Seminole), quilt artist and clothing designer, is the cocurator and a contributing artist for Beyond Craft.

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