Native American Art

I recently treated myself to a gallery talk at the University of Pittsburgh Art Gallery in the middle of the week. I are an early lunch with my mentor at one of the little plazas in Oakland and then walked over. The Henry Clay Frick Arts Building is a classical-looking edifice with a sweeping  semi-circle entrance facing a bronze and granite fountain of Pan and a Muse. Inside there is a small but beautiful central garden, surrounded by the Nicholas Lochoff Cloister of Renaissance religious artworks. You can just see the Cathedral of Learning peaking over the edge of the roof.

They have newer artwork, too, such as this 2004 piece from the Neon calligraphy series: The Poem of the University of Pittsburgh, in which Gu Wenda uses Chinese characters that read phonetically "you ni fu se ti bi ci bao ge." The words are "shiny -- neon -- blows on -- colorful -- silk -- green --  china -- treasure -- pavilion." It *is* a treasure pavilion.

I was there for the first event in a series focused on Native American art, an object lesson on Inuit Sculpture. Most of the other attendees were Art students or faculty. We practiced observing the mother and child figure, the curator told us about the artist, and then a sculptor showed us how such a piece might be worked out of a block of sandstone held in the lap.

I no longer remember the artist's name, but I learned that he made thousands of sculptures that were sold to a White American dealer, who distributed them around the United States. In the mid-20th century there was a surge of demand for "authentic" artwork that played into popular ideas of what that art should look like. A mother-baby pair such as this one was common. Eventually so much stone was quarried that supplies ran low, the art market was glutted, and the value dropped, leaving the Inuit without sustenance, just as when the beavers and fish disappeared. The New York Times recently profiled a successful Inuit artist collective you can read about here.

p.s. I learned that we're supposed to use "Inuit" instead of "Eskimo," and that the singular is "Inuk."