Unprecedented Selection of Native American Art Begins Five-City Tour at Stanford University's Cantor Arts Center.

Entertainment Editors/Education Writers

STANFORD, Calif.--(ENTERTAINMENT WIRE)--May 13, 2002

"Uncommon Legacies: Native American Art from the Peabody Essex Museum" premieres at the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University. The exhibition reveals the richness of indigenous cultures of the Americas and examines how Native American artists responded to the changing cultural landscape from 1750 to 1850. The exhibition opened last week and is free to the public through August 11 at the Cantor Arts Center, then travels to four other museums across the country.

"Uncommon Legacies" begins with an introductory section of rarely exhibited objects from European collections, then showcases approximately 100 exemplary art works from the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts. The Peabody Essex holds one of the nation's oldest collections of Native art, with scores of masterworks from throughout North America. The collection, totaling 20,000 historic works from the 17th through the 20th centuries and 50,000 archaeological objects, was largely inaccessible, even to staff, until the recent completion of a major storage vault.

The exhibition moves beyond traditional stereotypes and ethnocentric viewpoints to present recent research and new scholarship. Guest curators, overseen by an advisory committee of eminent Native American experts, selected the objects for "Uncommon Legacies." The exhibition is organized by the American Federation of Arts and the Peabody Essex Museum. The exhibition's presentation at the Cantor Arts Center is made possible by the Phyllis Wattis Program Fund. A fully illustrated, 272-page catalogue, available in the Cantor Arts Center Bookshop, accompanies the exhibition.

The genesis of the East India Marine Society's collection, as the Peabody Essex Museum was named originally, makes it a powerful vehicle for understanding the creative versatility of Native American artists of this period. The Society was founded in 1799 by an elite group of sea captains who emulated the collecting voyages of Captain James Cook and developed a "cabinet of natural and artificial curiosities," a foundation for what was to become the collection.

Although the collection was inspired by Cook's expeditions, it differs significantly in that it was assembled in the course of regular commercial and missionary interactions between Native peoples and non-Natives. Ship captains both chronicled the creative output of the people with whom they had contact, and were themselves agents of profound social, political and economic change.

Salem became the headquarters of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in 1812, and by 1816-20, missionaries had set out to minister to the Cherokee and other southeastern Native American peoples. Over the next two decades, missionary outposts were established in the Great Lakes region. Seeking to document the lives of the peoples with whom they lived, missionaries at many of these stations collected Native works, forming remarkable collections that subsequently became part of the Peabody Essex Museum's holdings.

In the Pacific Northwest, commerce created extensive trade relationships between American mariners and Tlingit, Haida, Kwakiutl and other Native communities. Trading for furs and other natural commodities for the Chinese market, Salem's captains also traded to obtain items for display at the East India Marine Society, including masks, textiles, personal apparel and many utilitarian objects, both decorated and plain. These range from the spectacular "Coppers" Chilkat blanket, the earliest known of its type, to ingeniously carved stone items that combine Native iconography with images of men and ships of the American trade.

The early 19th-century lumber and fish trade of the New England and Canadian maritime coasts yielded opportunities for assembling the Society's collection of works by Penobscot, Passamaquoddy and Micmac artists. For example, a magnificent Pawtucket pouch from the 17th century is one of very few extant works from this early period. In many parts of southern New England, a new cultural milieu and new modes of creative expression emerged from the economic interaction of Europeans and Native Americans through hunting, trapping and fishing.

Both the Yankee merchants and whalers on their passage around Cape Horn visited the ports of call on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of South America. They brought back a wealth of Native art, including ceramics from Peru, an apron from the Caribbean and a headdress from Brazil.

Over the last two decades, both scholars and connoisseurs have become persuaded that traditional Native American arts are to be viewed as a dynamic continuum of creative responses to new ideas, influences and materials. These oldest surviving Native American works belong to a complex living tapestry of cultural expression. They are the product of the artists' effort to balance, in a particular time and place, the shifting conventions of the community with their own visions, skills and mediums.

Docents give free tours of "Uncommon Legacies" on Thursdays at 12:15 p.m. and Sundays at 2 and 3:15 p.m. throughout the exhibition. No reservation is needed for groups of 10 or fewer; call 650-723-3469 to request tours for large groups.

The Cantor Arts Center is open Wednesday-Sunday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m., Thursday until 8 p.m. Admission is free. The Center is located on the Stanford University campus, at Museum Way, off Palm Drive. Call 650-723-4177 or visit the Center's web site at www.stanford.edu/dept/ccva/ for directions, parking instructions and information about events, other free tours and exhibitions in the Center's 24 galleries.

Note to Editors: PUBLICITY IMAGES are available. Visit http://newsphotos.stanford.edu or contact Anna Koster, Public Relations Manager, Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University 650-725-4657; [e-mail]; http://www.stanford.edu/dept/ccva/