Indian Market Week

I thought about whether I should write yet again about this event in Santa Fe and then I thought, would I not write about The European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) or Art Basel Miami Masterpiece in London or the Biennale in Paris?

Santa Fe Indian Market is the most important of the fairs in the Native American world and there are always many events in the week surrounding the Market itself. Every year the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, a private museum devoted exclusively to Native art, has a collectors’ sale of works that have been donated and, as in an auction, you can watch cherished objects change hands yet again. We acquired such a piece this year, a small cast bronze sculpted by Roxanne Swentzell which she created of her daughter many years ago. It is titled “Little Rosie” and that is the name by which we first knew the now-grown and nationally recognized artist, Rose B. Simpson. Knowing Rosie’s mother and grandmother made it something important to us.

The day before Indian Market there is an event at the Santa Fe Convention Center where the works submitted for prizes are laid out along with the winning selections. They are labelled with the booth numbers serving as a guide to the artists you many want to seek out on the next morning. Also, the Blue Ribbon Winners in the various classifications such as Jewelry, Weaving & Quill Work, and Pottery are called up to the podium to be presented with a certificate which they can show off in their booths together with their ribbons. Here is the winner of the Youth division, Aydrian Day (Ho-Chunk, Anishinaabe, and Lakota)

What struck me was the genuine emotion with which they accepted their awards, speaking of their creation and thanking their families, praising all the other participants and even thanking the collectors for their support. They had worked hard to create works to qualify to be in this show and the honor of recognition means much more than the prize money and the extra they can ask when selling the object. Here is a prize winner, Dan Vallo, his proud mother, and the laboriously crafted bow and arrows commemorating the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 that won Best of Show.

As you might guess from the name of the sponsoring organization SWAIA (Southwestern Association for Indian Arts) most of the participants are from the Pueblos and tribes of the Southwest, but increasingly Plains as well as the Northwest Coast nations have been represented. During this extraordinarily hot summer, it was rather jarring to see these two seal skin coats in the booth of artist Quki-Golga Oscar who is from the Kosigluk - Yup’ik Tribe in Alaska.

We visited the booth of one artist couple, Gary and Elsie Yoyokie, from whom we have made several acquisitions in years past. They had hardly anything left on their stand. Their work is so popular in Japan that Japanese dealers turn up first thing and there is little left by the time others arrive after eight on Saturday morning. Some artists sell out and leave the first day.

We have been collecting Native American Art for over 25 years, not to mention the collections in different fields we built for the 25 previous years, so we now donate more than we collect. But there was one piece at Indian Market that we could not pass up. It is by a Native American (Cochiti) cartoonist, Ricardo Caté, a baseball cap that we hope will be prophetic.

The Best of the Best

Indulge me, imagine a museum where in one gallery you could see the sculpture Niké of Samothrace (ca. 190 B.C.E.), from the Louvre, and in the next gallery Botticelli’s, Birth of Venus (1485-1486) from the Uffizi, in Florence, then the woodblock print of the Great Wave (1830-33) by Katsushika Hokusai from the Tokyo National Museum, and one more Picasso’s Guernica (1937) from the Reina Sofia in Madrid. Let’s go for broke, when you come out to the great hall and look up there is Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling (1474-1481) with its iconic Creation of Man.

In my opinion there is an analogy in sports, the quadrennial Olympic Games. The coverage of the events that ended last week in Paris and elsewhere in France (no surfing in town) provided a history lesson. We were reminded that the Olympics can be traced back to 776 B.C. Created in honor of the Greek God Zeus, it was a sports festival and a religious and artistic one. This year’s programming highlighted the fact that the Olympics were revived in France in 1894 after a long hiatus. Apparently, the games which had become a tourist attraction and were banned in 393 A.D as promoting paganism!

I cannot say that I am a sports enthusiast. I enjoyed baseball when my father took me to games in New York, but I lost interest when the Dodgers moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in 1957. Still, I have always enjoyed the best of the best. For a number of years, I followed Formula One car races and attended a few at Watkins Glen in New York and Silverstone in England. Wimbledon Tennis has always been a favorite. Now the televised Olympics have brought us the best of the best.

Again, you have to use your imagination but this time it is the facts that are difficult to fathom. In Paris this year six continents sent representatives, only Antarctica was missing. From those continents, 206 countries and territories sent contestants which amounted to almost 11,000 athletes in 42 different disciplines!

The youngest contestant this year was Zheng Haohao a skateboarder from China age 11 and the oldest participant was the Spanish Equestrian Juan Antonio Jimenez Cobo, age 65.

But what made the Olympics so special, particularly right now, when partisanship seems at an all-time high, is that participants from countries that are political rivals, not only competed with each other but showed respect for each other. We witnessed a lot of high-fives among teammates and also with their rivals, and I believe I saw them sometimes hugging members of the other side.

In one case, American gymnasts Simone Biles and Jordan Chiles literally bowed down to their competition, Brazilian gymnast Rebeca Andrade, after she won gold.

If more people would recognize that kind of respect….

Pre-Historic Googling

I saw this humorous caption on the photograph below and after, laughing out loud, I was reminded of how important those 3x5 index cards were in the art world.

When my gallery purchased a work of art the first thing we did was take an index card and give the object an inventory number and put down the artist and title for the work and what we paid for it, in addition to possible partners and commissions and possible depreciation. Then when the work was sold, we drew a line and listed the purchaser and what they paid. More detailed information regarding the object went on 4x6 sheets in a loose-leaf notebook and then, of course, file folders with the information sheets we gave clients and physical documentation. Here is the first inventory card my father made, as a model.

My wife, Penelope, at the Metropolitan Museum, during the 1970’s and the early 80’s worked with filing cabinets of cards like those you saw in the first photo where an accession number, date of the object, dimensions and physical properties were recorded. Additional information including publications was added over time. Here is an image of a Met catalog card from the Greek & Roman Department.

There was a set of cards in the pertinent department and another set in the central cataloging department, run at the time, by Marica Vilcek. Today, she is known far better for the Vilcek Foundation which she and her husband, Jan, established in 2000 to recognize the contributions of immigrants to the United States.

Another former curator at the Met was kind enough to send me an article called “Cabinet Fever” by Dana Hart written in 2015 about cataloging at the Met. The original central catalog, shown here, is another image taken by Ms. Hart from that article.

Each museum catalog card had a hole in the bottom that allowed cards with further information to be tied to the original. Thin but strong string was required. I delighted my wife with a birthday present of a ball of red string perfect for the purpose. It came from a nearby bakery which was used for their boxes. Those who have lived in New York will be acquainted with the bakery William Greenberg founded in 1946 and still in existence today.

In the early 80’s, Penelope acquired, from a patron, the first computer in the Museum, even before it’s official release. It was an Apple II-E which she was able to assemble herself and, with an intern, run a trial cataloging project. Before long cataloging was done on a computer in every department but the cards remain as a backup, when you are dealing with one and a half million works of art, cataloging takes time.

There are those who lament the loss of the use of pen and paper in favor of the computer. Which is better, one can certainly dispute, both having advantages and disadvantages. However, the images here were all found online, even the one of the Rosenberg & Stiebel inventory card which was posted by the archivist at the Frick where our archive is housed.

I am always fascinated with the changes that have occurred in my lifetime. Like everyone else, I like some and dislike others. Fear of new technology or any advance is human. Photography was going to destroy the fine arts of painting and drawing and now we worry about AI. As my mother-in-law used to say, “You’ve got to take the bitter with the better”.

A New Discovery

Well, at least a new discovery for me. We went to Evoke Gallery in Santa Fe (with thanks to the images herein) in order to see the work of Patrick Mcgrath Muniz who never disappoints. After studying those paintings, we went on to an adjacent gallery and were bowled over by what we saw, images by Alice Leonora Briggs.

The title of the Briggs exhibition “The Fate of Poetry” relates to a recent article in Glasstire in which Nobel Prize laureate, Derek Walcott is quoted, “The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world, despite history”.

Briggs works in scraffito, a method of scratching imagery that has been traced back to the sixth century. She scratches her images through an inky surface to a white underlayer using engraving tools ex-acto knives and even steel wool.

The glass artist Harvey Littleton (1922-2013) is credited with the saying “Technique is cheap”. I can agree in some cases, but when technique is used to accentuate a goal it only enhances it.

Briggs lives in Cornucopia, a border town between Texas and Mexico, known for drug violence. Add to that her brother’s death in a mountain accident when she was seven, and it is not too surprising that much of her work is about mortality.

Many of the works in the exhibition reference the reign of Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) President of Mexico when 50,000 died in the fight against the cartels and drug violence known as the Six Years of Death. From that series, I found this image the most upsetting and effective. It is taken from an area within the Juárez army barracks that is designated for torture. It is titled “El Talller”, the workshop!

Briggs owes a debt to many of the 16th century German engravers such as Durer and especially Hans Holbein the Younger for his “Dance of Death” woodblock series. Look at the image of hell in the background of “No Enrranflados”. The title is the term for individuals who operate without protection as they do not belong to gangs and do not report to the police or military.

How moving can an image be. For me, the work of art must first hit me and then the story, the technique, the style can enhance that first reaction. A man shields his eyes from the sight of the bodies in the background under the title “Those who Still don’t Believe”.

My last illustration, at first, just looks like a portrait but then behind, you see the bobbed wire fence. It is called “The Crossing”. It represents the journalist, Julian Cardona (1960-2020), who was the artist’s informant and collaborator with Briggs on the other side of the barrier between Texas and Mexico. They worked together on the book, “Abecedario de Juárez: An Illustrated Lexicon”.

It is not often, that a single work of art grabs one in an instant, much less an entire exhibition engages, and it is so exciting when it does.