Exhibiting Cultures

The Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona is part American Indian art, part American Indian culture. Established in 1929 by Dwight and Maie Heard it has grown to an internationally recognized institution with a mission to promote public understanding of the indigeneous people of the Southwest.

Welcoming the visitor to the museum is a glass art installation by Tony Jojola and Rosemary Lonewolf. Inspired by the staple of Southwest landscaping, the ocotillo fence, the sculpture symbolizes "living in two worlds".

Our timing was such that we were able to join a docent-led tour of the permanent exhibit "Home: Native People in the Southwest" led by a physician that also worked in Arizona Public Health. He was able to bring to the conversation personal knowledge of some of the cultures of the American Indians in Arizona. One story he told was of the importance of the tribal traditions in caring for the ill. He and his colleagues devised a way to place a sacred object from the tribe with the patient who had to be in a sterile environment (they were able to wrap it in plastic). While we were there just a short time this story supported the importance of personal experiences to the museum.

As explained by docent, the "Home" exhibit show the adaptation of the indigenous peoples to the changing environment. With the coming of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 came the travelers and the opportunity to profit from their purchases. Turquoise and silver jewelry, intricate baskets and woven blankets were some of these items.

At the time of our visit the Sandra Day O'Conner Gallery hosted an exhibit with almost a local connection. "Beautiful Games: American Indian Sport and Art" documented the achievements of athletes with Native heritage as well as showing sports related art.

The art related to sports brings us to the art of Gina Adams, an Ojibwe/Lakota, which is in the collection of the Spencer Museum of Art at KU. Two of her ceramic, encaustic and oil paint balls were borrowed for this exhibit. They are part of a series that she has named Honoring Modern Unidentified. She embarked on this project after researching a group of photographs with unidentified, but clearly Native American subjects. Like any good genealogist she used other old photographs, this time from the Menninger collection at the Spencer Museum, to identify the accoutrements used in the obviously staged photographs.

Not to ignore the opportunity to bring the exhibit audience into play, an entire room was set up with games for visitors.

In the introduction to their collection of writings Exhibiting Cultures, Karp and Lavine call for museums to take a role in bringing diverse cultures together. Declaring that this is no small task, the sub-title of their book is The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. With the enormous subjects of poetics and politics outside the scope of this project there are points in Michael Baxandall's chapter of Exhibiting Cultures that warrant reflection.

Baxandall's chapter is titled "Exhibiting Intention: Some Preconditions of the Visual Display of Culturally Purposeful Objects". Saying that viewing an object from a different culture is complex, he points out three element of the display. First there is the person that created the work, then there is the exhibitor that decided the object should be display and finally the viewer that attempts to understand the object. Thinking of the exhibition as a field with three players, how do they connect? Baxandall decides to connect them with the didactic and the object. He contends that the exhibitor is not to explain the culture but to provide some fact of the culture for the viewer to process, to make their own.

Let's take the tour and see: