Pueblo Indians of New Mexico--Pottery

Consideration of utility and meaning found in American Indian Pottery of New Mexico

'Lines on the Horizon: Native American Art' review



By Kenneth Baker

May 2, 2014 | Updated: May 3, 2014 10:08am

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'Lines on the Horizon: Native American Art' review

By Kenneth Baker

May 2, 2014 | Updated: May 3, 2014 10:08am

"Lines on the Horizon: Native American Art From the Weisel Family Collection," opening today at the

 de Young Museum, presents problems and fascinations in about equal measure.

It no longer counts as mere political correctness to underline the irony of admiring artifacts whose makers our ancestors may have had a role in extirpating: The civil rights movement began a long, slow and far from complete reckoning with the founding American atrocity of slavery. But to my knowledge, despite several recent decades of Native American activism and isolated reversals of tribal fortune, no parallel reckoning with the blood-soaked history of native peoples has occurred.

"Dime novel" and Hollywood mythology only made it harder to imagine the violence of both internecine tribal warfare and the ultimate Western expansionist conquest of native cultures.

This knowledge inevitably shadows appreciation of the splendid textiles and ceramics in "Lines on the Horizon," objects whose value to their makers, even as trade goods, is difficult to translate into the prices that Native American artifacts command in today's auction market. Beyond matters of price, the differences between barter and market economies reflect different worldviews.

That untranslatability makes itself felt most forcefully in the case of Mimbres ceramics, stars of the current show. To modern eyes, these decorated vessels look like design masterpieces. Many modern artists have prized them, including Donald Judd (1928-94) and Tony Berlant, longtime friend and adviser to Fine Arts Museums benefactor Thomas Weisel.

But the functions of Mimbres ceramics appear far more easily inferred than the meaning of their designs. Did the angular patterns that adorn these thousand-year-old objects have meaning for their makers? Did they foreshadow our sense of decoration as gratuitous aesthetic enhancement, or did every pattern encode some reference, belief or feeling about their world?

Intriguing and difficult

The question becomes more intriguing and difficult when we focus on the ceramics' composite human and animal figures, possibly unique in this hemisphere's culture.

Did these figures represent mythic beings, imaginary transactions associated with hunting or with occult ritual? Or were they sheer design epiphanies?

We may never have an answer, as the people of the Mimbres Valley in present-day New Mexico apparently suffered cultural collapse more than 10 centuries ago and left no traces of language that might help us unriddle their lifeways.

Seeing walls filled with the Weisel Collection's gifts and promised gifts of brilliantly patterned Native American textiles reminded me of the art world's "discovery" some years ago of African American pieced quilts as abstract outsider art. Modernism seemed suddenly to acquire a past it did not know it had.

Modern American and European art has had various deflations in self-importance since its mid-20th century heyday, though today's art economy seems to reflect the opposite. One of those deflations was the recognition that the rigor and exuberance of color field and other modes of abstract painting had precedents in world culture before and socially beneath the tiers on which modernism officially conducted itself.

Native American peoples prized textiles such as we see here for their high craft achievement and their value in trade. Curatorial notes in the exhibition and its catalog tie aspects of specific pieces to the availability of materials and dyes: further signatures of a fraught history. But where do we have to stand conceptually to reconcile the disparate registers of appreciation?

"Lines on the Horizon" may strike many visitors as an almost anthropological exercise, although it justly marks a major gift to the Fine Arts Museums.

Ceramics from Acoma

For me, the encounter with ceramics from Acoma counted among the show's most arresting moments.

Anyone who has visited the high mesa in New Mexico on which a few descendants of the ancient Acoma still live has to marvel at the fateful improbability of this people's ultimately decimating encounter with European invaders, which began in the 16th century.

My recollection of such a visit 15 years ago infused "Lines on the Horizon" with an air of sadness. I wonder whether others will experience that.

Lines on the Horizon: Native American Art From the Weisel Family Collection:Textiles, ceramics, masks and effigies. Opens Saturday. Through Jan. 4. De Young Museum, Golden Gate Park, S.F. (415) 750-3600, www.deyoungmuseum.org.