Seen at the Heard Museum

While visiting the Southwest, I wanted to make sure we learned about the local/relocated Native American people. So after the archeological site of Pueblo Grande, we spent a good four hours in the award-winning Heard Museum. It is named for Dwight and Maie [sic] Bartlett Heard, who donated their collection of artifacts in 1929. The campus has grown since then to a cluster of Spanish colonial-style buildings around several courtyards and clustered with statuary. Dear Husband and I just missed their annual arts and crafts festival by a few days.

We started with Away from Home: American Indian Boarding School Stories and then ate lunch while digesting our sorrow. You have probably heard Richard Pratt's 1892 pronouncement, "Kill the Indian in him, and save the man." While that sounds more liberal than General Philip Sheridan's (re-written) 1869 comment, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian," it represents a nasty kind of progressivism that allowed that Native Americans could be educated; however, this was cultural and actual genocide by a different name, as Pratt acknowledged that it was cheaper to educate Native children than to kill them in military actions; plus, because the schools were located off the reservations, that money was injected into the local White economy.

On the left, an old-fashioned barber chair surrounded by long black braids; the sound of scissors played on a speaker. On the right, medical equipment for treating the tuberculosis that often ran rampant through the schools (you can see gravestones reflected in the glass of the display case).

This is a contemporary art piece, a basket woven from strips of paper with the (extremely racist) lyrics of "Ten Little Indians;" the photo on the front depicts a group of students in their Native dress when they arrived at the school, while the photo on the reverse shows them with their hair cut and wearing Western clothing.

The goal of the more than 350 government- and church-run schools was assimilation with White society; however, as one of the exhibit's interviewees pointed out, many different groups of new or "non-American" people were targeted for assimilation in the late 1800s without having their children stolen or coerced to be sent sometimes hundreds or thousands of miles away for years on end. This wasn't just about raising Christian Americans, it was about removing them from the land and the land from them. (Pratt said as much in that speech as well.) More than 100,000 children over 6 generations were persecuted for speaking their languages and practicing their religions; tens of thousands never returned home.

Eugene Holgate, Jr. (Navajo, 1938- ), painted 1958 at Phoenix Indian School

However, it is also true that from the mid-20th century, as the boarding schools came under increasing control of Native American teachers, students, and tribes, their meaning changed to include the fact that some students experienced them as places to solidify their "Indian" identity across reservation and tribal boundaries, such that they could lobby the federal government together for what they collectively needed (e.g. more funding for schools and the Native Health Service). Most of the schools closed in the 1980s after the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act was passed in 1975. Native art was (eventually) encouraged, and some families attend the same school generation after generation. 

Tony Jojola (1958- ) and Rosemary Lonewolf (1953- ), both Santa Clara Tewa, "Indigenous Evolution" (2004), a mixed media fence of metal, ceramic, glass, etc.

Next up was their HOME: Native People in the Southwest exhibition about the 22 tribes in and around Arizona, in their own words and through artefacts such as pottery, baskets, and clothing. This first photo is from the Pueblo section.

"Art/Pottery," by Ofelia Zepeda (Tohono O'odham)

Pottery is utilitarian

Used for carrying water

For cooking food

Food storing dry goods

For holding the spirit of those

Since gone

And if the designs on it are nice

Well, that is good too.

These are Hopi Katsina dolls, depicting characters who help mark the various seasons of the year and of life.

Here is a selection of Navajo clothing and accessories.

These baskets were woven by Tohono and Akimel O'odham women.

Finally, we admired the "Grand Procession" of Plains-Indian "dolls," aka "soft statues" by Jamie Okuma (Luiseño and Shoshone-Bannock), Rhonda Holy Bear (Cheyenne River Sioux and Lakota) and three generations of Growing Thunder family members; Joyce Growing Thunder, Juanita Growing Thunder Fogarty and Jessa Rae Growing Thunder (Assiniboine and Sioux. These were exquisitely detailed, requiring thousands of hours of stitching and beading and quilling.

That was one of several special exhibits; we didn't get a chance to look at the one on silver jewelry, 19th-century depictions of Native tribes, or of contemporary Native art. For more photos, click here.

Do these rocks ring a bell?

Dear Husband and I took one day to drive exactly 2 hours north of Phoenix to visit an old friend from Illinois. DH used to accompany her husband's choir(s) and even visited them for a week after they moved down there and I was busy with medical school rotations. They had a couple concerts, did some local hiking, and visited the Grand Canyon.

The husband has since passed, so this time we picked up lunch at a local cafe for the three of us, and then she dropped us off to hike around Bell Rock and Courthouse Rock so she could keep packing to move to Dallas with one of their kids. (Her landlord has decided to sell the house where the landlord is currently living and move into our friend's little house; she says the housing market in Sedona is worse than the one in Pittsburgh due to its proximity to California.)  

The weather forecast called for rain or even snow, so we borrowed jackets from our hostess and set out on an easy hike circumnavigating the two large rocks.

There were some other hikers out, especially between the two parking lots; on the far side of the buttes we could walk for many minutes without seeing someone else. We enjoyed the colors and shapes of the rocks, including the white stripes in the picture at the top, which reminded me of Where's Waldo's? socks. This green and purple prickly pear cactus looked pretty. And we found a clutch of baby saguaro cacti under a mesquite tree (below), just like at the Desert Botanical Garden. It will be decades before they grow large enough for their root systems to steal all the water and kill the tree that sheltered them, however.

This was a particularly large and prickly agave plant. To stay on schedule, we decided not to climb any of the rock formations, which DH thinks he did back during his first visit, as he recognized some of the terrain. There was no inclement weather, and in fact the sun came out toward the end of the hike. Our hostess picked us up so we could have brownies a la mode with crème de menthe before we hit the road. Back in Phoenix we spent an extra hour in the car to drive back to the Air BnB in order to heat up leftovers for dinner so we wouldn't have to a) buy something else and b) throw away $20's worth of food. 

We made it back to the Musical Instrument Museum in time for a beautiful classical guitar concert. Attendance was light, so we basically had our own private box above the main floor to watch and listen to Miloš. The day was everything I had hoped it would be.

This was us at the rest stop on our way up to Sedona.

A desert oasis in Phoenix

On Wednesday, Dear Husband and I visited the Desert Botanical Garden. We love botanical gardens anyway, and this was a COVID-safe activity while traveling. AND they were hosting a full-scale Dale Chihuly exhibit at the same time. Their motto is a twin-headed agave plant.

Below, the first Chihuly pieces you see are this spiky trio of lime-green yucca trees at the check-in gates. After that, as soon as you walk in, there is a boat full of different-colored glass shapes, which was hands-down our favorite of everything on display.

In addition to the glass, of course, there was plenty of interesting architecture (mostly gazebos), as well as all those plants. We learned to pronounce saguaro with a "w," and that the plants typically need to be about 65 years old before they grow their first arm. There were so many different kinds of cacti and wildflowers. There is also a small butterfly building, but I didn't get any good photographs there. We walked around the whole park in about 3 hours and were ready for lunch, but the expensive restaurant at the front was too busy, so we opted to go back to the house for chicken noodle soup for him and leftovers for me. (He had come down with acute gastroenteritis on Tuesday--bad airport burger?--so on the one hand it turned out to be a good thing that the baseball games were cancelled due to the labor dispute, so we could stay home for DH to recover, but on the other hand it was really uncomfortable for him.)

Yes, we were the fools from the East Coast ogling the palm trees and cacti.

It's a hedgehog cactus [sic]!

On the left, an ironwood tree in a metal box to protect it next to a saguaro statue made out of pick heads; on the right, a saguaro fanning out at the top (the docent said they don't know why it does that). 

In one of the exhibition halls, they had multiple rooms holding a variety of Chihuly pieces, both glass pieces and drawings/paintings. I had not expected that on top of all the statues outside as well.

These curly-cues must have been a satisfying to make as pumpkin stems!

We found a desert oasis! For more pics, here's my Google Photo Album.

The Home of the Hohokam

First stop of our second day in Phoenix was the Pueblo Grande Museum and Archaeological Park. I hadn't bought advance tickets, because they were not required, and I thought we might appreciate the ability to show up a little later in the morning. Online reviews also suggested we would only need 1-1.5 hours, and the baseball game would start at 1pm. Well, as you probably know by now, Spring Training was cancelled, and we were in the process of buying a house, so we ended up using the morning for a research Zoom (me) and setting up the utilities (Dear Husband). Then we took the hostess's bicycles for a short ride on the nearby "Old Crosscut Canal Path" before I cooked us a nice lunch that we enjoyed at a high-top table on the patio at our AirBnB. If DH looks cold, that's because the nighttime temperatures were in the 40s, so another perk of being able to flip our schedule was getting to walk the park in full sun, much as we had with Taliesin West the day before.

We started with the small but reasonably thorough museum, which explained how the Hohokam [Anglicized name] had settled along the Salt and Gila Rivers about 200-1450 CE. They dug--by hand! (no draft animals)--miles upon miles of canals to irrigate the land on which they grew food crops like maize, squash, and beans, and also cotton. Knowing how much water cotton requires gives you sense of how much the land has changed, now that the rivers have been dammed and no longer flow throughout the year, much less flood the alluvial plain where Phoenix / Scottsdale / Tempe / Mesa now sit. At first they lived in individual "pithouses," dug partially into the ground and covered with adobe. They chipped petroglyphs into boulders and made distinctive "red on tan" pottery. The Hohokum also spun the cotton into thread that they wove on back-braced looms and traded with other tribes for seashells that they turned into jewelry and traded again. Later, perhaps after depleting the local wood supply, they moved to pueblo-style "apartment buildings" and built mounds like the one here, presumably for administrative and ceremonial purposes. Researchers have discovered that they were situated to tell calendar time via the solstices. The Hohokam also apparently played ball games on a court somewhat like the Maya. They abandoned the area in the mid-1400s, too soon to be decimated by European diseases or conquest; instead, the cause is thought to be divided leadership and mismanagement of the water supply during and after a drought. The modern Pima and Tohono O'odham ("Desert People") are their descendants.

You can see what's left of the mound and some reconstructed homes here.

Frank Lloyd West

One thing Dear Husband brought to our relationship is an appreciation of Frank Lloyd Wright architecture and design. We have been to most of his major sites (just search my blog for his name to see my other reviews), so when I saw an advertisement on social media for a Dale Chihuly exhibit at his winter estate, Taliesin West, I very badly wanted to see it in person. (I brought a love of art glass.) I planned a spring break trip to allow us to spend >50% of our time out of doors. It was cooler than we had hoped, so we started our trip with a visit to the Musical Instrument Museum, and then drove over to Cactus Drive for the height of the afternoon warmth.

Our tour guide, Jacob, must do stand-up comedy on the side, because he had lots of jokes--both one-liners and long set ups--as we circumnavigated the public parts of the site. Here you can see him starting the tour in front of the rock with the ancient petroglyph of a squared-off spiral that is the symbol for Taliesin West. You can see the shape again in the entrance artwork in the first photo, for instance.

When in 1937 Wright's doctors told him he needed a warmer, drier climate for his health, he was only too glad to leave snowy Wisconsin winters behind for the sunny desert of Arizona. Eventually his architectural fellows packed up, moved south, and built the campus according to his ideas with their own hands. The 600+ acres northeast of Phoenix are one of eight FLW locations designated UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Most of the structures are made of scavenged desert rock dry cemented together, so they are very much connected to the place. But they also look...amateur, unlike the professional masonry elsewhere.

To the left you see one of thirteen ceramic vignettes Wright bought for cheap from a San Francisco dealer, since they had been damaged in transit. They look old and weathered despite his apprentices' best efforts to reconstruct them. Their character tells you something about Wright's character.

There are lots of great geometrical shapes in the buildings, and plenty of Wright's signature reds. Here is the domed water fountain that burbles at the center of the compound.

Besides it are three enormous orange, white, and yellow yucca plants out of glass.

In front of the drafting studio are Chihuly's famous red reeds, interspersed with glass orbs that are larger and more colorful than the Japanese fishing net floats on which they are modeled.

I didn't appreciate this until Jacob pointed it out, but pool has actually been dyed black to make it more reflective. The reeds stand taller, and the colors of the orbs pop.

Honestly, I couldn't imagine Taliesin without the Chihuly pieces;

this is always what it will look like in my mind's eye.

Reportedly the glass saguaro and yucca are even more beautiful in the setting sun, but I wasn't sure about signing up for cocktail hour, what with COVID. We were I think the only people masked on our tour.

Here at "the prow" of the site, the point faces west so Wright could watch the sun set and the shadows race across the desert like waves of darkness. Jacob pointed out the really cool detail of how the "desert" shapes of the glass could also be "sea" shapes, like kelp, jellyfish, and anemone.

Inside the space Wright used as a den and living room, now decorated with his likeness.

A Chihuly "basket" modeled after Native American baskets, with the "moon door" in the background.

No Hobbit sightings have been reported recently.

This is a fire-breathing dragon (no really, it does spit fire for special occasions)

given to Wright's third wife, Olgivanna, to protect the estate.

As much as I loved the black pool out front, these red reeds may have been my favorite installation piece. They stand between the water tower and the windowless kiva, which Wright used as a storage room when they had de-camped to Wisconsin for the summer, and as one of three movie theaters on the property. Apparently he was quite the cinephile.

To the left, the dinner bell overhanging the residential quarters, which we could not see because they are still in use, and another of those ceramic Chinese vignettes. To the right, a massive Chihuly "chandelier" stands guards over the orange orchard.

With this panoramic view you can see the straight, horizontal "Prairie" lines that characterize

Wright's older work, as well as the "Cherokee" red mirrored in Chihuly's glass,

the green left over from the desert winter or signaling the coming spring,

and blues in the glass saguaro "cacti" and of course that big, big sky.