Robert Goldwater Library blog

'Radiance From the Rain Forest' in NYTimes

Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art
A wall hanging from the seventh or eighth century, made of cotton and macaw feathers. It was created by the Wari, a people of Peru’s southern highlands.

via NYTimes: Art Review:

'Radiance From the Rain Forest'
Objects From a Long-Vanished Peru, Parading All Their Magnificent Plumage
By KAREN ROSENBERG
Published: July 5, 2008

As Darwin wrote, brightly colored feathers give certain species of birds an evolutionary advantage. Ancient Peruvians adapted such plumage for their own purposes, adorning ritual objects and personal accessories with startling yellows, reds, greens and blues.

“Radiance From the Rain Forest: Featherwork in Ancient Peru,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is one of the few New York museum exhibitions ever to focus on this little-known art form. Organized by a senior research associate, Heidi King, it supplements the Met’s rarely displayed holdings of featherwork with examples borrowed from public and private collections, including those of the Brooklyn Museum and the American Museum of Natural History. It’s the kind of specialized yet accessible show that only the Met can pull off.

According to Ms. King, ancient Peruvians had no written language, and the symbolism is therefore somewhat arcane. Contemporary viewers can nonetheless appreciate the way feathers conveyed wealth, status and sheer animal magnetism.

Most of the works on view were made between the 7th and 16th centuries, before the Spanish conquest of Peru. They were objects for the elite, fashioned with feathers that were carried across the Andes from the Amazonian rain forests. The plumes themselves were considered luxury goods on a par with precious metals, shells and gemstones.

Well-preserved examples of featherwork are rare, because feathers are easily damaged and, like other organic materials, decompose. Among the most vivid works in the exhibition are two hangings with a simple abstract design of blue and yellow macaw feathers arranged in quadrants; they have retained their color and texture because they were stored in rolls within large ceramic urns. Made by the Wari people of Peru’s southern highlands, they are among the oldest works in the exhibition, dating from the seventh or eighth century, but they have a remarkably modern feel.

Macaws and other parrots supplied most of the plumage, but that of other species — Muscovy ducks, flamingos, egrets and the petite paradise tanager — was also prized. Some colors were produced artificially in a process known as tapirage. Birds with, say, green and blue feathers were plucked and then rubbed with frog secretions; the feathers would then grow back in an unnatural yellow-orange hue.

The Peruvians used several methods to attach feathers to a cotton or leather backing. To cover a large area, as with the Wari hangings, they often layered strings of feathers in horizontal rows. For smaller objects, individual feathers were glued on with a kind of mosaic technique.

On the large end of the scale are several richly patterned tabards, or open-sided tunics. The most spectacular of these has a blue semicircle, echoing the shape of a bird with extended wings, on a yellow background. On the smaller scale is a set of ear ornaments carved from wood and adorned with an intricate circular pattern of feathery wisps. Both examples date from the reign of the Chimu kings, who ruled the northern coast of Peru from the 13th century until the Spanish conquest in the 1500s.

The Chimu kings and other Peruvian royals favored luxurious accessories, including several different styles of headdress. Among the examples on view are conical helmets, a crown with flat plates in the front and rear, and a gladiatorlike tuft attached to waist-length earflaps.

Arguably the most beautiful object is a headdress from the late Moche or Wari periods (the 8th to the 10th century), patterned with curlicues, trapezoids and broad stripes of blue, chartreuse, red and black.

Not all Peruvian featherwork was intended for personal decoration. Peoples including the Nasca and the Inca used small feathered figures in rituals and as burial offerings. In a miniature family grouping, made by the Nasca in the first to third centuries, the figures have tiny parrot feathers tied to their wigs of braided human hair.

Other examples of ritual featherwork include a bag holding coca leaves made by Inca craftsmen within a century or so before the conquest. The covering of red and yellow parrot feathers remains intact, as do the bag’s medicinal contents.

Although the works in “Radiance” had social and religious currency in pre-Columbian Peru, their appeal transcends cultures. As the Rev. Bernabé Cobo, a Spanish missionary, noted in a chronicle of Peruvian customs, “The gloss, splendor and sheen of this feather cloth is of such exceptional beauty that it must be seen to be appreciated.”

“Radiance From the Rain Forest: Featherwork in Ancient Peru” continues through Sept. 1 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org.

Rare uncontacted tribe photographed in Amazon

via BBC News, May 30, 2008:

Isolated tribe spotted in Brazil
One of South America's few remaining uncontacted indigenous tribes has been spotted and photographed on the border between Brazil and Peru.

The Brazilian government says it took the images to prove the tribe exists and help protect its land.

The pictures, taken from an aeroplane, show red-painted tribe members brandishing bows and arrows.

More than half the world's 100 uncontacted tribes live in Brazil or Peru, Survival International says.

Stephen Corry, the director of the group - which supports tribal people around the world - said such tribes would "soon be made extinct" if their land was not protected.

'Monumental crime'

Survival International says that although this particular group is increasing in number, others in the area are at risk from illegal logging.

The photos were taken during several flights over one of the most remote parts of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil's Acre region.

They show tribe members outside thatched huts, surrounded by the dense jungle, pointing bows and arrows up at the camera.

"We did the overflight to show their houses, to show they are there, to show they exist," the group quoted Jose Carlos dos Reis Meirelles Junior, an official in the Brazilian government's Indian affairs department, as saying.

"This is very important because there are some who doubt their existence."

He described the threats to such tribes and their land as "a monumental crime against the natural world" and "further testimony to the complete irrationality with which we, the 'civilised' ones, treat the world".

Disease is also a risk, as members of tribal groups that have been contacted in the past have died of illnesses that they have no defence against, ranging from chicken pox to the common cold.

more via Reuters, May 29, 2008:

Rare uncontacted tribe photographed in Amazon

[...] One of the pictures, which can be seen on Survival International's Web site (http://www.survival-international.org), shows two Indian men covered in bright red pigment poised to fire arrows at the aircraft while another Indian looks on.

Another photo shows about 15 Indians near thatched huts, some of them also preparing to fire arrows at the aircraft.

"The world needs to wake up to this, and ensure that their territory is protected in accordance with international law. Otherwise, they will soon be made extinct," said Stephen Corry, the director of Survival International, which supports tribal people around the world.

Of more than 100 uncontacted tribes worldwide, more than half live in either Brazil or Peru, Survival International says. It says all are in grave danger of being forced off their land, killed and ravaged by new diseases.

(Reporting by Stuart Grudgings; editing by Sandra Maler)

OLIVIER DEBROISE, 1952-2008

Olivier Debroise at ARCO 2005
Photo by Haupt & Binder
Universes in Universe

via ARTNET NEWS, May 12, 2008:

OLIVIER DEBROISE, 1952-2008
Olivier Debroise, 56, a prolific scholar and curator of Mexican modern art and a key figure in the country’s art world for more than three decades, died from a heart attack in Mexico City on May 6, 2008. As coordinating curator in the Department of Visual Arts at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), he had been working on plans for the university’s new contemporary art museum, designed by Teodoro González de León and scheduled to open in September.

A French citizen born in Palestine, Debroise lived in Poland, Morocco and Brazil before settling in Mexico in 1970, where he became the art critic for La Cultura en Mexico (1979-86), La Jornada (1986-94) and Reforma (2000-03). He helped found the curatorial think tank Grupo Teratoma as well as CURARE, an alternative art critics’ association and magazine. He published scores of articles and books, ranging from studies of Diego Rivera in Montparnasse (1979) and Mexican art in the 1920s and 1930s (1982) to a survey of photography in Mexico (1999).

As a curator, Debroise helped integrate Mexican modern art into the international exhibition circuit, bringing a leftist political bent to numerous landmark shows, such as "Modernity and Modernization in Mexican art" at the Museo Nacional de Arte (1991), "The Bleeding Heart/El corazón sangrante" at the ICA, Boston (1991), and "David Alvaro Siqueiros: Portrait of a Decade," which traveled from Mexico City to Houston, Santa Barbara and the Whitechapel Gallery in London (1997). His curatorial projects also included the cross-border art show "InSITE97," which saw artworks installed in public places in both San Diego and Tijuana, and "The Age of Discrepancies: Art and Visual Culture in Mexico 1968-1997," which premiered at UNAM in 2007 and travels this year to MALBA in Buenos Aires and the Pinacoteca in São Paulo.

A wide-ranging intellectual, Debroise completed three novels, the most recent of which, Cronica de las destrucciones (1998), is a reimagining of the early post-Conquest history of Mexico. He directed the film A Banquet in Tetlapayac about Sergei Eisenstein’s Qué viva Mexico. The critic and curator Cuauhtémoc Medina, who worked with Debroise on the "Discrepancies" show, describes him as "one of the most ferocious critics and curators of the art of Mexico, the inventor of the notion of the curator as a leftist cultural politician, a homosexual novelist who explored the crossroads of history, violence and desire, and an equally devastating cultural agent in demolishing myths and provoking institutional transformations."

Debroise’s unexpected death shook the fractious Mexico City art world, whose leaders turned out to pay their respects at the wake and funeral, among them most of the city’s museum directors, curators, foundation heads, collectors and artists, including Francis Alÿs, Melanie Smith, Thomas Glasford, Alex Navarrete and Enrique Serrano.

– Jason Edward Kaufman

Four Maya sites featured on new web site

Originally spotted on ARLiSNAP:

An visually exciting and comprehensive web site on four Maya archaeological sites has just been posted by Charles Rhyne, professor emeritus of art history, and his colleagues at Reed College. [Kudos to Prof. Rhyne, who was my academic advisor at Reed.]

Architecture, Restoration and Imaging of the Maya Cities of Uxmal, Kabah, Sayil and Labná "includes over 1000 photographs ... taken on site, with descriptive captions, including architectural and sculptural details, paint remains, and interior spaces, not previously published. In addition, there are over 250 19th century drawings, prints and photographs and another 300 by early 20th century scholars, many previously unpublished, showing the appearance of these four cities before the extensive restoration campaigns of the twentieth century." While the site was produced by Reed College primarily for the use of its faculty and students, the site will certainly be of interest to a wider audience of specialists and non-specialists alike.

Of particular note to the library research-minded are the extensive scans culled from published works including Waldeck's Voyage pittoresque et archéologique dan la province d'Yucatan (1838), the several works by Stephens and Catherwood from the 1840s, as well as Charnay's Cités et Ruines Américaines (1862-63) and Anciennes  Villes du Nouveau Monde (1885), photographs by Le Plongeon, and Seler's monograph on the ruins at Uxmal.

An extensive bibliography is included, sorted into four separate pdf files by subject, author, title and date.

Nineteenth-century views of Mexico City

Reblogged in part from BibliOdyssey, 3/30/2008:

Mexico and Environs ['Mexico y sus Alrededores']

The album of chromolithographs, 'México y sus Alrededores' (Mexico and Environs), is online at NYPL. [A copy of the original is held by the Thomas J. Watson Library here at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.] The principal lithographer/artist for the project was Casimiro Castro, one of Mexico's foremost landscape artists in the nineteenth century. The forty illustrations were originally published in 1855-1856 [available at Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes (click 'leer'), which includes the text]. The version at NYPL was published in 1869.

Speaking of NYPL, check out the newly designed Digital Gallery, announced as a 'soft launch' last week.

Radiance from the Rain Forest: Featherwork in Ancient Peru

Miniature Tabard
Chimú(?); 10th–16th century
Private collection

Radiance from the Rain Forest: Featherwork in Ancient Peru
February 26, 2008–September 1, 2008
Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas—The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, 1st floor
 
View images from this exhibition.

In the Andean regions of ancient South America, the brilliantly colored feathers of Amazonian birds were a luxury that was much treasured and long used. From the third millennium B.C. onward, feathers served various ceremonial and secular purposes throughout pre-conquest Peruvian history. Radiant blues, yellows, reds, and greens embellished high-status apparel and accessories such as ear ornaments, pectorals, fans, headdresses, miniature ritual offerings, and large-scale hangings. Examples of them, drawn from public and private collections and the Museum’s own holdings, are on view.

Radiance from the Rain Forest: Featherwork in Ancient Peru

The gloss, splendor, and sheen of this feather cloth is of such exceptional beauty that it must be seen to be appreciated,” wrote Europeans who arrived in Peru in the early sixteenth century. Astounded by the grandeur and fine quality of the textiles worn by Inka nobility, they particularly admired the luxurious cloth covered with plush, brilliantly colored feathers of birds from the Amazonian rain forest. In Precolumbian Peru, feathers were highly valued for their magnificent colors, silken texture, and perhaps also for their symbolism. Known in ritual contexts as early as the third millennium b.c., feathers served various ceremonial and secular purposes among Andean peoples throughout preconquest history. On the Pacific south coast in the early first millennium a.d., the Nasca peoples buried feathered garments and precious cloth figurines only a few inches tall, which were dressed in miniature clothes embellished with feather tufts, as offerings. In the seventh and eighth centuries the Wari people of the southern highlands covered impressive numbers of large panels with radiant macaw feathers, perhaps for display on festive occasions or as offerings. Farther north in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Chimú royalty rode in feather-decorated litters and wore feathered tabards and luxurious accessories in iridescent blues, yellows, reds, and greens. The conquering Inka are said to have “paved” the streets in their imperial city, Cusco, with colored and feathered cloth on the occasion of royal weddings.

Ancient Peruvian featherwork has not been extensively studied. As these fragile objects only rarely survive burial in good condition, the full repertoire may never be known. “Radiance from the Rain Forest” is the first exhibition at an American art museum to focus exclusively on the subject. On view are about seventy works, graciously lent by museums and private collections, illustrating the wide range of items embellished with this luxury material—garments, crowns, personal ornaments, accessories, and ritual objects. Additional impressive feathered textiles from the Museum’s permanent collection may be seen in the adjacent South American gallery.

The exhibition was made possible by the Friends of the Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas.

Featherworking in Ancient Peru

Featherworking was a widespread and ancient tradition in Peru in Precolumbian times. Considered a luxury material by peoples along the Pacific coast and in the Andean mountains, feathers were used in rituals as well as to embellish festive and ceremonial garments and ornaments of persons of high rank. Particularly sought after were the brilliantly colored feathers of rain-forest birds that inhabit the eastern slopes of the Andes and the vast Amazonian basin. Examination of feathered pieces in museum collections has shown that the feathers from less than 2 percent of all bird species in the region were used. The most common were macaws—blue and yellow, scarlet, and red and green—and parrots, followed by Muscovy Ducks, curassows, flamingos, and egrets. Smaller birds included various types of cotingas, honeycreepers, and tanagers, especially the spectacular Paradise Tanager of five different colors. Birds of the coastal and highland regions of Peru—seabirds such as pelicans and cormorants and birds of prey, including hawks, eagles, and condors—are generally muted in color, and their feathers were seldom used decoratively. The dazzling feathers employed in the manufacture of plush feathered cloth had to be carried westward from the rain forest across the Andes to the coast, where the finished products were made. Spanish conquerors reported that during early-sixteenth-century Inka times, large quantities of plucked feathers as well as birds, both dead and alive, were brought to the coast. Parrots, macaws, and Muscovy Ducks—all easily tamed—are also thought to have been kept as pets.

Right: Headdress Chimú 15th–16th century Collection Michael and Judy Steinhardt, New York >

The highly specialized craft of featherworking used different techniques to surface garments and objects with feathers. Textiles covered with feathers were usually made by sewing strings of feathers—mostly the small body feathers or larger wing feathers of birds—to the fabric. Other smaller objects such as crowns or headbands of leather or ear ornaments of light wood were decorated with mosaics of tiny feathers—often of the Paradise Tanager—glued to the surface. Some featherworking techniques are explained here, and feathers are identified primarily by sight. The ancient context of feathered textiles is only rarely known, leaving iconography, style, and technology to determine approximate dates and cultural attribution. In recent years, however, archaeological investigations and technological studies have shown that most surviving feather pieces were made during the last five hundred years prior to the arrival of the Spaniards in Peru or during the early colonial period in the sixteenth century.

Shreyas and Mina Ajmera Gallery of Africa, the Americas and Asia-Pacific

The Shreyas and Mina Ajmera Gallery of Africa, the Americas, and the Asia-Pacific, opening on April 5, 2008, will be the first permanent home for the Royal Ontario Museum's collections from these regions in over 30 years.

From ROM's site:

This gallery reflects the ROM’s vast and diverse collections that represent the artistic and cultural traditions of indigenous peoples from Africa, the American continents, the Asia-Pacific region and Oceania. This is the first permanent home for these collections in over 30 years, with many of the 1,400 artifacts on display for the first time.

Ranging from large and dramatic ceremonial masks and colourful robes to archaeological objects such as ceramics and basketry, the collections were gathered from the late 19th century to the present and represent some of the Museum’s founding collections. The artifacts reveal aspects of everyday life, clothing, commerce, ceremony and art of indigenous cultures from around the world. Divided into four geographic areas, this gallery is rich with symbols of heritage and identity that continue to have meaning today.

ROM's site also features a number of behind-the-scenes photographs of the installation.

Pictured above: Diablada dance mask (papier-mâché), Bolivia, c. 1955. [source]

Online journal contents: Americas

The following list contains articles recently published in electronic journals on native and Precolumbian Americas. To access the full-text of the articles you must be at an institution with subscriptions to the journals (including within the Metropolitan Museum) or access WATSONLINE remotely (read how here).

King Island Mask Returned to Ghost Village

King Island Shaman's Mask at the Carrie M. McLain Memorial Museum. Photo: Laura Samuelson / AP file. The King Island Shaman's Mask, which was returned to Alaska by Marilyn Lewis of Port Townsend, Wash. A Lewis relative took the ancient mask from Alaska more than a century ago and she wanted to get it back to its rightful owners.

via msnbc.com [thanks Nicole!]:

Ancient mask returned to Alaska ghost village
Four decades after it was abandoned, King Island gets sacred surprise
By Rachel D'Oro, Associated Press
Fri., Jan. 18, 2008

ANCHORAGE, Alaska - Four decades after it was abandoned, King Island holds an almost mystical pull for former inhabitants and their descendants, its crumbling homes still perched on stilts, clinging to the steep, rocky terrain.

Until recently, little else remained of the island, an Inupiat Eskimo village, except for traditions, memories and artifacts scattered at museums around the nation. Then came word from a stranger nearly 2,000 miles away who said she possessed an ancient mask a relative brought back from Alaska more than a century ago.

On the back of the relic was a faint inscription: "Taken from a medicine man's grave on King Island."

The woman from northwest Washington e-mailed Charlene Saclamana, tribal coordinator with the King Island Native Community based in Nome, a city 80 miles southeast of the tiny Bering Sea island where many of its residents relocated.

Marilyn Lewis said she wanted to return the wooden mask to its rightful owners. Two weeks later, she traveled to Alaska to deliver the artifact, which is now on display at the Carrie M. McLain Memorial Museum in Nome, named after the museum's late founder, a gold rush pioneer.

"It gives me and my family something tangible from our past. We've lost so much of the culture," said Saclamana, whose parents lived on King Island. "We were eager to have the mask back in our possession. We never had anything that well preserved from the island."

The island, home to about 200 people a century ago, was abandoned for various reasons. [read on...]

Photo: Capt. Budd Christman / NOAA Corps via AP. The deserted stilt village of King Island, Alaska, about 625 miles northwest of Anchorage, is shown in 1978. Four decades after it was abandoned, King Island holds an almost mystical pull for former residents and their offspring, its crumbling homes still perched eerily on stilts across the steep, rocky face of an unforgiving terrain.

Kevin Gover's Rodeo

Photo: Andrew Councill for The New York Times. “This isn’t my first rodeo,” says Kevin Gover, director of the Museum of the American Indian, with Kiowa battle dress.

via NYTimes:

Undaunted Director at Indian Museum
By ROBIN POGREBIN
Published: January 21, 2008

WASHINGTON — It was not exactly a welcome mat that greeted the new museum director. When Kevin Gover left his quiet life teaching American Indian law among the cactuses of Arizona to lead the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian here, he arrived during a storm of publicity about spending by his predecessor, W. Richard West Jr.

But in his first in-depth interview since settling into his new office, Mr. Gover, 52, seemed unconcerned about the scrutiny he might now encounter about his own spending habits, or about the long-term effects on the museum.

“This isn’t my first rodeo,” he said last week. “I took a few poundings in the past.”

Spending by Mr. West, the institution’s founding director, who retired last month after 17 years, has provoked two senators to call for independent investigations. Mr. West spent more than $250,000 on travel and hotels during his final four years in office and paid $48,500 to a New York artist to paint his museum portrait.

“I felt bad for Rick,” said Mr. Gover, who practiced in two of the same law firms as Mr. West. “I felt that it was unfair.”

The Smithsonian said in December that all of Mr. West’s travel had been approved and that he had raised $51 million in that period. In a Jan. 11 letter to Indian Country Today, a weekly newspaper, Mr. West disputed reports first published in The Washington Post, calling them mischaracterizations of travel that was within the scope of his duties. "I traveled as required by the job I had to do," he wrote.

Referring to Mr. West’s trips in Europe and Asia, Mr. Gover said: “I understand the visceral reaction some people have to what looks like living the life of Riley. But the fact is, the museum has to be present in those places. This is the museum world. This is how it’s done.”

But Mr. Gover, a member of the Pawnee tribe of Oklahoma, described himself as a conservative person and less of a public figure. He said that he expected to conduct a more low-key operation at the museum.

“We took a little hit on our image,” he conceded. “I worry about that in connection with the tribes. But in a very few months I think very few people will remember this.”

[read full article...]