JoAllyn Archambault - Collecting in Modern Native North American Communities
The end of the 19th century and the first quarter of the 20th century witnessed the height of collecting activity in American Indian communities in the US and Canada. As western Indian tribes were adjusting to the realities of administered life and education on federally run reservations, museums and dealers rushed to buy up the ethnographic evidence of their prior Stone Age culture. The quantities collected were impressive by any measure and by 1950 there were very few 19th century objects left in Indian hands. Since then market forces have elevated the value of these objects to the point that many museums cannot compete in public auctions and are dependent on donations from private collectors. Since WWII American Indian communities have established tribally owned and operated museums that focus on their cultural heritage and range in size from one room in a larger tribal complex to stand alone buildings with professional caliber exhibits and storage. Currently there are about 200 of these institutions with huge variability in their financial resources. The same economic forces that have made it impossible for many mainstream museums to compete for objects in the auction house have had the same effect on most tribal museums.
Most mainstream museums, priced out of the fine art antiquity market, have failed to explore the possibility of documenting modern Indian life by collecting objects made for community activities. Posters, fliers, T shirts, beaded pens, eyeglass frames, tennis shoes, are only a few of the items that are made, displayed, and sold on reservations and in urban Indian centers. The inter-tribal powwow is becoming one of the most salient cultural institutions uniting urban and rural communities and the dance outfits are various and can be stunning. Indian craftsmen and fine artists in all media are expanding their visual vocabulary and forms and selling their work in the marketplace. Some objects (cradles) are still made and used and their makers are using new designs and materials in their creation. Most of the above objects are what others have called ‘ordinary’ objects of daily life and not the extraordinary fine art objects that museums prefer to feature in exhibits but how will these ‘daily’ pieces be judged 100 years in the future? Some traditional arts have entered the market of fine art with its commodity values (e.g. NW Coast masks, sculpture, jewelry) and most of their buyers are non-Indian but native people are proud of the art and its makers. Some tribes have adopted policies with regard to the purchase of items of their material culture which directly impact on their collection by outside institutions. The Hopi do not wish any items of their religious traditions, including historic photographs and descriptive notes, to be owned or purchased by any non-Hopi people. Some Lakota religious leaders do not want anything made of the red stone Catlinite to be purchased by non-Indians. Generally items made for sale as a means of income are accepted as legitimate by Indian individuals and institutions with some exceptions (reproductions of Hopi prayers sticks). This includes commissions of objects by native artists of rare objects that are otherwise unlikely to enter the market. Tribal and mainstream museums can play an important role in the documentation of contemporary Indian life if both had sufficient economic resources and vision.
Suzanne Bardgett - Collecting from Holocaust survivors at the Imperial War Museum
The Holocaust Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum was created between
1996 and 2000. One of the biggest challenges faced by the curatorial
team was to amass sufficient original historical material to fill the
showcases of a 1200 metre square exhibition. A process of mass
annihilation necessarily leaves little evidence behind, but with time
and effort material was found. The most important source for this
material were those men and women who - greatly against the odds - had
survived incarceration in the Nazi camps and rebuilt their lives in the
UK after the war, or who had managed to escape to this country before
the war broke out (often leaving family behind who were subsequently
murdered). The talk will look at how the Holocaust Exhibition Project
Office set about finding such material, the kind of material acquired,
how the related stories were gathered and how we continue to nurture the
relationship with these individuals today.
Kodzo Gavua - What to Collect in Africa Today
Collecting in Africa has been dominated by Western Europeans over the years. Due in part to economic factors, and to the absence of concise collecting policies and plans, collecting is generally not normal business of African museums, and rarely do private collectors donate their collections to African museums, or establish private museums on the continent. Collectors, who are active on the continent, collect for mainly the European, American and other markets. Focusing on Ghana, I shall suggest in my presentation that Africa, today, has a wide range of objects that would be relevant to private collectors and collecting institutions and to their audiences world-wide. Thus, collecting on the continent should not be restricted to any particular class or type of objects, time frame, and space. It should be systematic and broad-based, and cover a wide-range of objects, including old, new, ephemeral and mundane objects, which reflect or express various aspects of indigenous knowledge systems and life-ways.
What is required, however, is that collecting in Africa must be guided by a new way of seeing; a new collecting paradigm that would guide the collecting and preservation or display of objects, which would inform, and excite the public about positive aspects of the life-ways of Africans beyond the continents ‘mysterious’ past. A new collecting philosophy is necessary, as the way of seeing that has influenced much collecting in Africa is no longer tenable in a world of increasing interaction between peoples of different geographical, social and cultural background. The museum public has generally become sophisticated and may no longer be excited by objects that are meant to attest to the so-called ‘backwardness’ or ‘waywardness’ of indigenous peoples.
Henrietta Lidchi -
Great Expectations and Modest Transactions: Art, Commodity and Collecting
This paper will consider the issues that emerge when collecting in an environment determined both by the vigour and dynamism of the art market and by the seamier side of tourism. The location is the American Southwest whose status as a cultural destination has been well established for over a hundred years, and whose current reputation remains wedded to perceptions of landscape and ethnic diversity. The object is jewellery, one of the foremost artistic products of the Southwest, but an artistic domain more of interest to private than public collectors. Operating in such an environment inevitably raises questions of what to collect and what constitutes a collection. It raises issues of representation and representative-ness and exposes material culture’s possibility both to avow and withhold meaning.