Woven Identities

Basketry Art of Western North America

North American Indian baskets are cultural histories—documents of the aesthetics, beliefs, lifestyles, natural environment, and technologies of the people who made and used them.

These unique baskets are producible and fully comprehensible only within the social context of the weavers. Just as words take on unique meanings within sentences, baskets take on unique meanings within their social contexts. When anthropologist Deborah Neff collaborated with Tohono O’odham basket weaver Frances Manuel on her life history, Neff recognized that in order to understand something from another world we have to try and step outside our taken-for-granted realities and work on understanding difference. This means that because baskets are derived from and maintained by social interactions, and are not solely a consequence of utility, their forms and meanings are contingent on social and historical processes.

Like each basket, Woven Identities is an exploration of both the concrete and conceptual; it is a study of how weavers have worked with the utilitarian and aesthetic attributes of baskets for centuries to create both functional and cultural art forms. When the baskets included in this catalogue were first collected, little to no information about them was recorded—we know few of the weavers’ names, we have few of their words. Nonetheless, each basket has a woven identity, and all tell a story if you know the right questions to ask. Museums exist to collect objects as one means of understanding and documenting people, events, places, and times. We study peoples’ material culture to learn who they were and how they lived. When exhibiting and representing the lives of peoples with oral cultures—where no written record exists from the point of view of a cultural insider—the histories baskets hold become especially significant. We deduce the identity of each basket—where it was made, when it was made, who made it, who it was made for, and why it was made—by “reading” its individual characteristics.

To understand the language of a basket and to reveal its woven identity, we study five principal traits: materials, construction techniques, form, function, and two-dimensional design and ornamentation. By identifying the materials used in a basket and then determining the geographical availability of those plants, we can establish where the weaver lived and can begin to assign a tribal provenance. For construction, we know that weavers chose techniques based on tribal tradition, personal choice, and the basket’s intended use. When determining the form and size of the basket, function drove these attributes, but so did the social milieu in which it was made. Finally, two-dimensional design motifs and the ways they are combined, as well as their subject, are socially determined and thus tend to be unique to each individual tribe.

Excerpted from the introduction to the Museum of New Mexico Press book, Woven Identities: Basketry Art of Western North America, by Valerie K. Verzuh. Clothbound, 220 pages, 180 color and 55 black-and-white images, $34.95. This and other publications by the Museum of New Mexico Press are available at bookstores and museum shops, including the Museum of New Mexico Foundation Shops in Santa Fe, or by calling 800-249-7737, or at mnmpress.org. This book accompanies an exhibition of the same name on view at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture through February 23, 2014.

Valerie K. Verzuh is an anthropology graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, has studied and cared for Native American artifacts for the last twenty years, first at the Oakland Museum of California and later at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture. As curator of the Individually Cataloged Collections, she has worked to increase understanding of Southwest American Indian material culture and accessibly to the museum’s holdings for artists, scholars, and community members.

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The Decay of Nature, Suspended

By Laura Addison

Great artworks have staying power — intellectually, if not always physically. Many contemporary artists use fragile or ephemeral materials that pose a challenge to collections care in museums.

When it happens that a remarkable yet vulnerable work is offered to us for the New Mexico Museum of Art’s collection, we turn to the museum system’s conservators to advise us about the challenges that will face us if we acquire it. They analyze the materials and their longevity, consult with the artist when possible, and let us know how to best care for the work in order to prolong its life, or to suspend its inevitable decay. Sometimes this plan of care includes the conservators’ intervention to stabilize or restore a piece.Tasha Ostrander’s Seventy-three in a Moment, consisting of 26,645 paper butterflies, is a recent acquisition that posed such a conservation challenge for the museum.

Ostrander’s 10-foot-diameter butterfly mandala has been called “magnificent and telling,” “delicate,” “resilient,” and “a visual wonder.” She created the piece in 1996, xeroxing, cutting, staining, numbering, and interleaving the thousands of butterflies in a series of concentric circles. The number 26,645 represented the number of days in the average life span of an American in 1996 — seventy-three years. This work is, in essence, a meditation on life and death in which the art asks the question: if you knew how long you had to live, how would you live your days? The use of the butterflies is a metaphor for the brevity of life (butterflies have a short life span) and the idea of metamorphosis.

When she created the piece, Ostrander did all of the work herself, eight hours a day, seven days a week, for an entire year. The labor-intensiveness of the project was an important aspect of creating the meaning of the work. Because the work takes the form of a mandala, it reinforces its own symbolism as a meditative work or spiritual endeavor. To have the 26,645 butterflies seen in one glance is to demonstrate the intensity of a lifetime in a single moment.

When the artwork was offered in 2012 to the New Mexico Museum of Art as a donation by William Siegal, who purchased the piece in 1996, it was clear that to accept it into the collection meant there would be a significant restoration project ahead. Conservator Mina Thompson came with me to Siegal’s home to assess the piece before the collections committee meeting. The mandala had been in a sheltered but open-air space for a number of years, and it became a favorite for all variety of creatures: spiders spun their webs across it, birds absconded with bits and pieces of paper for their nests, a cat once took a swipe at it and removed a chunk of butterflies, and during the conservation process intern Crista Pack even found shed lizard skin. Moreover, some of the materials the artist had originally used were contributing to the piece’s own deterioration over time: the butterflies are xeroxed on regular copy paper, which is acidic; they are mounted to Masonite, also highly acidic; and in order to give the piece some “sparkle,” Ostrander had splattered gum arabic over the surface, and it had become dry and crusty over time. Nonetheless, Thompson felt that the piece could be repaired and brought back to life, so to speak.

For six months, the Conservation Department worked to bring Seventy-three in a Moment back to its former glory. In the accompanying sidebar, Crista Pack describes the treatments she used to restore the piece. Significantly, the artist enthusiastically and very generously participated, sharing her materials and process with Pack and Thompson, creating new butterflies, and helping to interleave and adhere them. Her labor of love involved, once again, the daily repetitive practice of photocopying, cutting, and staining. It was, in essence, a full-time job. Ostrander worked at home but was also a frequent visitor to the downtown Conservation Lab, working side by side with Pack and Thompson. Along the way, the artist and conservators always discussed the hows and whys of the project. Though it was tempting to make changes, they were always guided by the original piece and Ostrander’s intent in 1996.

My role was as an observer and occasional decision maker. They consulted me periodically, and it was always thrilling to walk across the street to the lab to see the progress. I was amazed at the mundane nature of many of the tools of the trade: hair clips from the pharmacy to hold together the paper butterflies, dark roast coffee from Ohori’s coffee shop in Santa Fe for staining, a makeshift gauze cover wrapped around the end of a mini vacuum hose, and tiny Ziplocs filled with sand to weigh down wings that wanted to curl. What was not mundane at all was the level of knowledge and care that Pack and Thompson brought to the project.

As the deadline approached for the exhibition opening at the museum for Collecting Is Inquiry / Collecting Is Curiosity, Ostrander and the conservation team humidified the last butterflies, carefully touched up the edge wings with pastel pencils, and added the last new interlocking butterflies. Although they were mindful of remaining true to the original intent and appearance of the piece, the exact count of butterflies is unknown at this point. With the added butterflies, they likely number more than the original 26,645. “It’s now more like eighty-three in a moment,” Ostrander remarked. And with the care the conservators gave to Seventy-three in a Moment, it’s likely that the life expectancy of the mandala has increased for posterity as well.

Laura Addison is curator of North American and European folk art at the Museum of International Folk Art. She was previously curator of contemporary art at the New Mexico Museum of Art (2002–13), and is a frequent contributor to El Palacio.

A Tisket, a Tasket, What’s inside the Basket?

By Penelope Hunter-Stiebel

When conservator Landis Smith told me that she was working on an exceptional basket, what came to mind was the array of tours de force of basketry in the exhibition Woven Identities at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture.

With great anticipation I followed Landis into the bowels of the Museum of International Folk Art to the high-tech conservation laboratory that serves all of the Museum of New Mexico institutions. At her workstation she pointed to what struck me as the ugly duckling of Native American baskets. The focus of her attention was constructed with a simple technique of coiled grass stitched with yucca, widespread throughout the Southwest because it enabled containers to be quickly constructed from local materials. Alongside the basket lay a hank of the grass from which it had been made and the sandstone slab that had been broken to form its cover. She acknowledged that there was a comparable basket on view in the Mogollon-period (1200–1425) display in the MIAC exhibition Here, Now and Always.

So why the fuss? The basket had been discovered by a particularly nimble member of a group hiking along the Salado River. Scampering up an escarpment, he had spotted, under a high ledge, the lid and neck of the basket protruding from the soil. Another hiker in the group, who happened to be a volunteer working with the BLM, convinced the agile climber that they should leave the piece in place and report its location.

BLM archeologists returned to the spot to document the excavation of the find. They sent it on to the museum laboratory through an arrangement by which discoveries on BLM land can be researched, conserved, and then stored in MIAC.

I learned from MIAC curator of archaeology Maxine McBrinn that fragmentary or crushed baskets made by the earliest Basketmaker inhabitants of our region abound, but an intact basket is a rarity, and rarer still, one retaining a stone lid. This example was even more exciting because of what lay inside: glistening white crystals of salt. Though salt intake is necessary to human life, and its ritual uses, well-documented in both Old and New Testaments, are widespread among cultures, it dissolves, making archaeological evidence virtually nonexistent. The dry, protected location under the rock ledge where the covered basket was buried had preserved a rare sample.

Scientific tests are now underway: comparative analysis by Chief Conservator Mark McKenzie should identify the salt source, and radiocarbon testing will provide a date range for the basket. But to what end? Smith took me to MIAC curator Tony Chavarria (Santa Clara) for an answer that reveals an important aspect of his museum’s role: “Descendant communities are among this museum’s constituencies. Though they connect to their respective pasts through songs and stories, artifacts can awaken or confirm memory.”

I finally came to understand why Smith is so relentless in her tests and consultations with specialist scholars, scientists, and members of Native communities. While the role of pottery is well known because so many examples survive, the earlier use of baskets is as yet little understood. Maybe, just maybe, this nondescript artifact, with its handfuls of salt, will be a window to a past so distant as to be almost forgotten.

Woven Identities is on view at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture through February 23, 2014. Here, Now and Always is a long-term exhibition.

Penelope Hunter-Stiebel was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Portland Art Museum, Oregon, and recently curated Mirror, Mirror: Photographs of Frida Kahlo for the Nuevo Mexicano Heritage Arts Museum.

Archaeology of a Desk

By Daniel Kosharek

The final gleanings of Kenneth Chapman’s life as an archaeologist and artist arrived in the Photo Archives in five cartons, in June of 2009.

After Chapman’s death in 1968, family members slowly gathered up the contents of his personal desk and office. This material was stored for decades and then generously donated to the Photo Archives and Fray Angélico Chávez History Library at the New Mexico History Museum. Chapman would have appreciated this final sifting of the artifacts of his life, and the ironies of this bit of “archaeological work” would not have been lost on him. This photograph of Chapman “in situ” is one of approximately 300 photographs included in this donation. The collection also included memorabilia, documents, books, small objects, notes, letters, and other material that quietly accreted in Chapman’s desk over the course of his rich and significant life. Noted for his early influence in the revitalization of Pueblo pottery, Chapman was dedicated to preserving the then-dying art form, with lasting effects. Chapman and his wife, Kate, were beloved by all and stand firmly alongside the other titans of Southwestern archaeology.

The Photo Archives at the New Mexico History Museum/Palace of the Governors can be searched online (with the option of ordering prints) at palaceofthegovernors.org/photoarchives.html.

Daniel Kosharek (opens in a new tab) is a writer and former photo curator at the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives at the New Mexico History Museum.

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Peter Sarkisian

Criticality and the Media Machine

By Laura Addison

Artist Peter Sarkisian has said that he is more interested in questions than answers. The questions he poses through his work constellate around the tensions of paradox. Is it real, or is it illusion? Is it image, or is it object? Is it surface, or is it interior?

In posing these questions, he seeks to redefine spectatorship as an active and critical, rather than a passive, endeavor. A piece such as Extruded Video Engine (2007), which was recently gifted to the New Mexico Museum of Art’s permanent collection, exemplifies how Peter Sarkisian perennially pushes the limits of video art and challenges the dynamic between viewer and object. His hybrid form of installation comments on the ubiquity of the moving image in contemporary society, whether in television, movies, or video games. It also critiques the passivity with which we as viewers absorb the images projected onto a flat screen.

Sarkisian refers to Extruded Video Engine as a “parody of media.” The parody is apparent in the visual and auditory cacophony of an imaginary engine whose colorful gears and pistons produce a text ribbon much like the tickertape of information we are accustomed to on twenty-four-hour news channels. The texts that the machine churns out are transcribed from recordings Sarkisian made of friends and colleagues telling stories and sharing memories. Reduced to snippets, the narratives are ambiguous and, therefore, at least partially emptied of meaning. They move through the engine with such speed that they are difficult to read, let alone glean any meaning from.

Extruded Video Engine is one of sixteen works, spanning eighteen years of the artist’s career, on view at the New Mexico Museum of Art as part of the exhibition Peter Sarkisian: Video Works, 1994–2011. The exhibition was curated by Susan Moldenhauer of the University of Wyoming Art Museum, which opened the show in January 2010. It has since traveled to various venues and concludes its tour at the New Mexico Museum of Art, Sarkisian’s hometown museum. The museum’s presentation of the exhibition has been expanded to include pieces from local collections as well as some of the artist’s most recent works.

Technology itself is one of the recurrent threads that run through Sarkisian’s video installations. In a 2005 interview for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Sarkisian stated, “I’m trying to essentially climb inside the medium and steer it back toward some sort of physical dynamic with the viewer.”

He accomplishes this in several ways: by projecting video onto a flat screen embedded in a three-dimensional object that shares the viewer’s space; by creating a spatial illusion of interiority rather than mere surface; and, as in the case of Extruded Video Engine, by making the screen itself sculptural and contoured.

The image of Extruded Video Engine is rear-projected onto a vacuum-formed plastic sculptural surface through a process that took the artist five years to develop. To create the imagery, Sarkisian photographed Cold War–era gears and other mechanical parts from Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the first atomic bomb was created. On some level, to image an antiquated technology (gears) by way of state-of-the-art technology (video) comments on the inevitable obsolescence of all technologies. Even the most current technology is almost defunct as soon as it is introduced.

In one of his newest video vignettes, Book 1 (2011), Sarkisian literally “climb[s] inside the medium” by making himself the protagonist in a humorous, ironic narrative. An open dictionary rests on a pedestal, and we see the projected image of a man, in miniature, crawling over the surface of the pages and scribbling corrections. At times, he slips into the binding of the book and re-emerges on the facing page to continue his editing project. Sarkisian’s manipulation of scale provides an amusing fantasy of a Lilliputian world while at the same time questioning how we acquire and codify knowledge. What happens, the artist makes us ponder, when the authoritative sources we rely on for knowledge prove to be inaccurate?

Through his artwork, Sarkisian suggests that we can never arrive at truth or determine what is real. The works toy with perception and question the viewer’s ability to distinguish between surface and depth, image and object, reality and illusion. In viewing Sarkisian’s work, we are never quite sure what is tangible and what will disappear when the projectors are turned off. This is what Sarkisian refers to as “a perceptual trap.” These traps appear as manipulations of time, space, scale, and content. They require viewers to interrogate their own perceptions and to attempt to reconcile what is actual and what is perceived.

In many cases, this perceptual trap manifests as a confusion of surface and interior. The liquid surface of works such as Blue Boiling in Pail (2003) or Green Puddle (2000) appears to be “breached,” as the artist calls it, and the rolling boil of the water or the tessellating ripples of a drip give us the impression that this movement is coming from within. We are tempted to ascertain the “truth” of this visual experience by touching it. (Please don’t!) By now we are well versed in the idea that seeing is not necessarily believing, that photography and related “truth-telling” mediums (such as video) that are rooted in realism are often turned against themselves by their makers in order to disrupt the medium’s perceived legitimacy as a “truthful” representational strategy. This is precisely what Sarkisian’s liquid installations accomplish: the confusion of surface and interior calls attention to video’s questionable authority on matters of truth and the real.

Sarkisian’s perceptual traps can also be seen in a work such as 12 Minutes Flat (1998), in which the confusion of surface and image is explored. The viewer stands before an actual table, whose top is in effect a rectangular screen upon which the narrative unfolds. First we see the image of dead leaves that are swept away by hands jutting into the frame. From under this layer of leaves appear lush green grass and an occasional daisy that are then trimmed by the same disembodied hands. Next a layer of dirt is uncovered. Eventually, after digging deeper and deeper through the layers of dirt with a spade and then a shovel, the “actor” reveals a wood top—like the table-object itself. The hands then spread a red-and-white-checkered tablecloth and set the table for one, as if for dining al fresco. During the course of this twelve-minute narrative, an image that is incongruous with the tabletop gradually morphs into an image that melds with the table itself. This converging of image and object again confounds the notion that seeing is believing, but it also disintegrates the frame, transforming a representational space into an experiential space. We are, literally, invited to the table to attend an imminent feast. Physical object and illusionistic image merge to create an experience that broaches the participatory as well as the visual.

Coming from a background in film, where the frame is always present and contains the visual narrative in the fixed boundaries of a rectangle, Sarkisian recognized early on that video installation offered the possibility of eliminating that frame by creating “video in the round.” That is, he takes the moving image and integrates it into a three-dimensional form that physically occupies the viewer’s space. With Extruded Video Engine, we saw how he radically altered the flat, planar frame. In either case, the artist negates the traditional screen and opens the door to a new dynamic of looking. Always aware of the viewer’s experience, he seeks “to reintroduce experience to watching.” He wants a more active looking to take place by the viewer of his video works—an active looking that is characterized not just as a purely visual experience, but an intellectual, physical, sensorial, or even affective experience.

Pounding Study (2004) illustrates Sarkisian’s appeal to an affective experience of video. This piece was the artist’s response to the First Gulf War. He conceived of a blue illuminated rectangle with a pristine surface as a frame whose surface was a metaphor for the boundary between antagonists and conflicting points of view. The pristine surface and the peaceful calm of the blue frame are marred by an occasional pounding that dents the surface from behind. The impressions of a mallet’s head accumulate on the surface. The loud and unpredictable sound is startling and visceral. This is a piece that is intended to create an unsettling experience that shakes the viewer from passivity and moves him or her to an active and engaged looking that corresponds to critical thinking.

Criticality is what transforms the viewer experience from the visual to the experiential. Like Extruded Video Engine, all of Sarkisian’s works are self-searching engagements with the machinery of media. That is, he requires of his works and his viewers a degree of criticality in considering these perceptual traps, even if (and especially if) they constitute unresolvable tensions.