Exhibit explores work of Native glass artists

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When most of us think of Native American art, works created from glass aren't usually what first comes to mind. But a visit to an exhibit being hosted by the Heard Museum in Phoenix this summer could change that.

Fusing Traditions: Transformations in Glass By Native American Artists opened at the museum in April, and runs until the end of August. The exhibit features the work of 18 Native artists from across North America, some of whom have been working in the medium as early as the 1960s and 1970s.

While exhibits in the past have looked at the work of individual Native glass artists, this exhibit is the first to provide an overview of Native glass art as an art movement. The exhibit was put together by co-curators Carolyn Kastner and Roslyn Tunis, who met through happenstance and a mutual interest in Native glass art.

Kastner, curator of the Museum of Craft & Folk Art in San Francisco, explained how the exhibit came about.

"The most mature artists in this exhibition have been working for more than 20 years. And yet no one had ever put an exhibition together that looked at the history of how all these people came to work in glass," she said. "And so in the summer of 2000, I began to gather information to work on this based on my knowledge of a few artists, primarily coming out of the southwest, that I knew about. And when I began to ask around here in the San Francisco Bay area, someone said to me, 'Are you working with Roslyn Tunis on her glass show?' And I was just floored. Because in 20 years, nobody had done this, and now somebody's telling me somebody else is doing this. So we met, and she had a similar epiphany on a trip to Haines, Alaska, and she saw an exhibit of primarily northwest and Alaskan artists in Haines at a small gallery there. And she had been thinking the same thing."

Tunis, an independent curator, had been focusing on the work of Preston Singletary, a glass artist of Tlingit ancestry, who grew up in Seattle, while Kastner's focus had been on the work of Tony Jojola, an artist from the Isleta Pueblo in New Mexico.

"So we had these sort of two points, with Tony Jojola, who does really very free and open work, and Preston Singletary, who's very detailed and elaborate in the kinds of work he produced. And they're like the two poles of this kind of artistic production at this point in time," Kastner explained.

Singletary came on board the project, serving as a consulting curator to the exhibit.

"Sort of keeping us on track about the sensitivity to the Native traditions and that kind of thing."

What Singletary also did was introduce Kastner and Tunis to the next generation of glass artists. Students in their 20s who are learning glass art from Singletary and Jojola.

One of the ways in which the newest generation of glass artists differs from the artists who have been working in the medium for some time is in the approach they take in combining glass with their Native culture.

Whereas the older artists, those in their 30s and 40s, faced more resistance and more limitations on what they could create, the younger artists are approaching their art with more freedom, explained Kastner.

"For instance, Tony Jojola had difficulties. He's from Isleta Pueblo and his pueblo rejected the medium, and when he tried to open a school there, they didn't want a glass school, because it wasn't traditional," she said. "So with these new, younger generations, they didn't have any of that political limitation or hesitation. They just embraced glass and their Native culture, and they are making things that are extraordinary, and not limited in any way."

One artist whose works demonstrates this freedom to combine the medium and the culture is Robert Tannahill, a Metis artist of Mohawk and Scottish descent, who has created a series of blown glass figures he has called the False Face series.

"He has blown glass into a wooden cylinder, and what happens then, he's burned out some holes, and it allows the glass o expand outside of the wood, and actually burns and chars the wood at the same time . . . . He's Mohawk, and in the Mohawk tradition, masks are carved on the tree, and then at a certain point when the mask is done, it's taken off, it's cut away from the living tree. But it's carved, actually, on the tree before it's removed. It's not created from a plank of wood. So the artists were doing a couple of things. One is they were creating really ferocious masks that were meant to scare people, to terrify people, and they were used for ritual purposes. And when you look at Robert Tannahill's pieces, they're grotesque, and the glass flows out of these holes and gravity works on it. And so you can see all the characteristics of glass . . . it's not using it in another way, it's allowing the glass to just show its properties, to expand and to drip and to do things like that. But it's also similar, not in its look, to the old false face mask, but in his way of working with contingencies and natural imperfections in the same way that the Mohawk carver would have originally done on the tree. Because once you start carving into a tree, you open the tree up and then there are knotholes and things you didn't know about, and the artist would work around those and they would become part of the mask. And that's what Robert Tanahill is doing," she said.

"He's creating art, and he's doing that on his own, because at the same time, he refers to the series as autobiographical. In the series, he uses names like a ghost from my grandmother's basement, and things like that. So that it's taken completely out of the realm of the sacred, and he's working from a concept, which is this false face, scary mask that's carved from nature, but it doesn't look a thing like it. So the point is that there are no limits, both on his artistic intention, because he's inventing new ways of working with glass, and at the very same time, he's not being limited by the traditions of the false face."

In addiion to the works of Jojola, Singletary and Tannahill, the exhibit also features Choctaw artist Marcus Amerman, who uses glass beads to create portraits of contemporary figures such as Brooke Shields and Janet Jackson, and Coast Salish artist Susan Point, for whom glass is but one of the many mediums in which she works.

The works of C.S. Tarpley are also featured in the exhibit. Tarpley, who lists Choctaw, Chickasaw and Anglo as his heritage, recreates traditional pottery forms in blown glass, then employs his experience as a goldsmith and lapidary, sandblasting decorations into the glass surface, then electroplating it with metal.

Other artists in the exhibit include Salish artist Ed Archie NoiseCat, Navajo artist Conrad House, Hopi artist Ramson Lomatewama, Quinalt artist Martin Oliver, Inupiat artist Larry Ahvakana, Salish artist Shaun Peterson, Alaskan Native artist John Hagen, Tlingit artist Clarissa Hudson, Nuu-cha-nulth artist Joe David, Pawnee artist Brian Barber, Siberian Y'upic artist Michael Carius, and Tlingit artist Wayne Price.

The Fusing Traditions exhibit originally opened at the San Francisco Museum of Craft and Folk Art in September 2002, and then traveled to Los Angeles, where it appeared at the Los Angeles Museum of Craft and Folk Art before coming to the Heard Museum. After its run in Phoenix, the exhibit will be at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History before heading to Alaska. The exhibit will open at the Anchorage Museum of History and Art in February 2004, and will travel to the Alaska State Museum in Juneau in May 2004.

For more information about the exhibit, contact the Heard Museum at 602-252-8840, or visit the museum's Web site at www.heard.org.