Conversations with collections: Native artists inspired

The Here & Now: Native Artists Inspired
exhibit at the Burke Museum
(November 22, 2014 – July 27, 2015).
Pictured: PochaHaida, 2009, by Lisa Telford. 

The vitality of the Native art scene in the Northwest continues to grow in creative and unexpected ways, but connections to older artworks often provide the spark that keeps Native artists inspired.

Over the past ten years, the Burke Museum’s Bill Holm Center for the Study of Northwest Native Art has awarded grants to more than 90 artists and scholars so they can visit the Burke Museum and interact with the cultural collections.

We wanted to gauge the real-world effects that our grants had on recipients, so we contacted each of our grantees and invited them to share how their artistic practice was affected by their visit to the Burke.

Many told us about new pieces they made that were inspired or informed by the historical artworks at the museum, so we created an exhibit, Here & Now: Native Artists Inspired, in November 2014 to showcase their art alongside the pieces from the Burke that they identified as being key to their learning.

Before the exhibit closes on July 27, 2015, (here’s how you can plan your visit) we want to share some of the pieces in the exhibit, along with the artists’ thoughts on this process—the conversations between the old and the new—in their own words.

Bringing a Native American story pole home

This 37-foot story pole stood prominently for nearly 70 years in Krape Park in Freeport, Illinois.

Photo courtesy of the Freeport Park District.

It's colorful carvings represent interrelated stories hand-carved by renowned Coast Salish artist and Snohomish Tribe leader William Shelton, who began carving story poles in the early 1900s to revitalize and increase understanding of Native American culture.

"What is that?" A series on the outdoor artwork at the Burke, Part 2

This post is the second in a series about the artwork surrounding the outside of the Burke Museum (read the first post, about Mark Calderon’s Pluma sculpture here). In this post, we explore the answer to the commonly asked question: What is that tall female figure just outside the front doors of the Burke?

This Dzunuk'wa figure stands in front of the Burke Museum. Photo by Steve Whiston.

This is a carving of a Dzunuk'wa figure, a supernatural creature with importance to the Kwakwaka’wakw people. This replica was carved for the Burke Museum in 1970 by Curator Emeritus, Bill Holm.

Some people equate Dzunuk'wa, (pronounced D’ZOO-no-kwa) with Sasquatch, sometimes called Bigfoot, the shy hairy giant of the forest. Others view her as a fearsome creature that can be the source of great wealth. The privilege of representing Dzunuk'wa in carving and performance is a prized heritage of some Kwakwaka'wakw chiefs (the Kwakwaka'wakw people live on northern Vancouver Island and the adjacent mainland of British Columbia).

The pole outside the museum is a replica of the original (pictured at right in a 1914 photo by Edward Curtis), which was erected in Gwa'yasdam's village on Gilford Island, B.C in the early 19th century. This kind of pole is sometimes called a "ridicule pole" and these poles were raised to shame someone who owed a debt to a chief. For three years, this original Dzunuk'wa figure faced down the beach toward the owner's in-laws, who had not paid a marriage debt. When the in-laws honored the debt, the pole was pivoted to face the water. To acknowledge the payment of the debt, the owner had carvings of shield-shaped coppers added to her head and hands, to represent wealth.

Bill Holm initially painted the Dzunuk'wa figure’s entire body black, based on the black and white historical photos that he was using for reference. But based on later analysis of Emily Carr's colored image, Holm has come to believe the body of the original sculpture was painted red. The replica was changed from black to red in 2002, when it was placed outside the Burke. The head of the original sculpture is also in the Burke Museum's ethnology collections.

Posted by: MaryAnn Barron Wagner, Communications

The Enduring Power of Totem Poles

About a year ago, we launched a special Web site called The Enduring Power of Totem Poles. It has since won the 2009 CASE award for best Web site. Anyone who is interested in learning more about the history of totem poles ought to explore the site a bit. You might learn something about totem poles that you did not know, such as:

• Totem poles, which are defined as free-standing columns with many figures, are not actually indigenous to Washington State. Even though totem pole imagery can be found all over the place in Seattle, it was the northern Northwest Coast groups (Nuu-Chah-Nulth, Kwakwaka’wakw, Tlingit, etc.) that carved totem poles, not the Coast Salish people surrounding the Puget Sound. It’s a common misconception that totem pole carving was practiced near present-day Seattle, but it is not historically or culturally accurate. The totem poles standing outside the Burke Museum are all replicas of poles from Canadian or Alaskan-based tribes.



• Totem poles are not only historical objects; up and down the Northwest Coast, poles are being raised again in a spirit of cultural survival and revival.



• The Burke Museum has been very active in the repatriation of poles and other clan treasures that were taken from communities along the Northwest Coast in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Enduring Power of Totem Poles tells the story of two of the Teikweidi clan’s houseposts, taken from the Tlingit village of Gaash (Cape Fox, AK) by an American railroad magnate in 1899 and donated to a young Burke Museum. In July 2001, along with four other North American museums, the Burke returned the posts and other clan treasures to the Tlingit people of Cape Fox and acknowledged the wrong that had been done. Two new houseposts were created for the Burke Museum by father and son, Nathan and Stephen Jackson, to replace the two posts that were repatriated and are now on display in the Pacific Voices exhibit.

For more fascinating stories about totem poles and the people who make them, visit the Enduring Power of Totem Poles site:

Posted by: Julia Swan, Communications

Photo: Replica of Tsimshian Memorial Pole, carved by Bill Holm in 1969, now standing in front of the Burke Museum