Just one block east of the Plaza, on Cathedral Place, is a touch of respite from downtown.
Though Cathedral Park, Sena Plaza and the Institute of American Indian Arts Museum aren't exactly secrets, there's always a cool, leafy calm conjured up by the tall trees, the massive, confidence-inspiring stone blocks of the cathedral itself, the hobbit-like doorways beneath the portal on Palace Avenue and the graceful, near-Moorish spires of the museum. In other words, if you're looking to eat your Plaza-cart fajita in peace, away from cops, hackey sacks, pit bulls and Pennsylvanians-it's as almost peaceful as it gets downtown. Though, honestly, the tall shadows cast at mid-morning which project a sort of spectral church across the IAIA museum have always had an uncomfortable symbolism for me; kind of metaphorically keeping Indian expression in a boiling colonial quagmire under the cast-iron lid of Catholicism. Probably I've been reading more than necessary into the positioning of said buildings, but it has nonetheless done my heart glad to see the newly remodeled museum casting some shadows back-not due to any height added during renovation-but more in the form of Bob Haozous.
Not Haozous himself exactly-he's not wearing a cape and standing atop the museum with feathers billowing in the wind or anything, but the sculpture garden, named for his famous father Allen Houser, is populated with his towering, steel constructions. These Indian industrial fabricated pieces-mostly done in the 1980s-are signature pieces for Haozous, his most famous work, and there's a fantastic Geiger-with-a-good-vibe sense to them, spiralling over the top of the museum and in contrast to the cathedral and the nearby Hotel La Fonda, as though an East Coast steel-yard collided in time and space with an alien invasion of the Mayan empire, with opposing armies led by John Gaw Meem and the Bishop of Lamy, respectively. But everyone ended up dancing and BBQing instead of fighting, if you can feel me, here. There is one newer piece in the sculpture garden as well, with a minimalist charm and a phenomenal presence. Lodge is an eight-legged structure, a skeletal holy hut with a drizzle of pollen poured through it's domed top and resting gently in the gravel below. It's the kind of thing that ought to be public art around town-in the park across the street, for example, perhaps in place of the malformed stack of farm animals and friars that sits there now. But, have no fear that Haozous has gone minimal: The tallest shadow cast by this show is from within the museum, not only in the form of Haozous' Indigenous Dialogue survey exhibition, but from the startling and potent installation by Marie Watt, Blanket Stories: Ladder.
Like me, you may have chosen to skip the opening reception (and grand-reopening of the museum following months of renovation) amid the hoopla of Indian Market. A wise choice, I maintain, but don't forget to go back and see these concurrent exhibitions-they're not only excellent, but a seminal step in the museum's future and a claim of bold, new leadership in terms of contemporary work made by Native artists.
Haozous' show, installed like an altar and entered like a temple, is a retrospective showcasing his effortless merger of traditional and industrial aesthetics, his cagey sense of humor, his mastery at a multitude of mediums and his almost bi-polar lunges from whimsy to heavy-handed politics. Particularly worth lingering over are his ink and watercolor works with rich text backgrounds and maddening, hilarious and poignant drawings over the top. For all the years of work crammed into the room, it's placed with purpose and it fairly zings with energy.
In contrast, Watt's work sits heavy in the room, rich with energy to be sure, but with such stillness that the effect is one of great reverence. If Haozous provides the entrance to a temple, then Watt's installation is the inner sanctum. Six towers of blankets, some actual wool, some carved from reclaimed wood and others cast in bronze, are stacked on bases all the way to the ceiling. Each stack is possessed of its own character and appearance-from structural, stout and guardian-like, to precarious, nearly toppling and sagging sweetly with the weight of fabric and captured experience. The piece invokes so many ideas simultaneously-the smallpox genocide attempts, quilting as government enforced labor, but also robes, ceremonies, marriages and a lineage of craft and quality-that the stacks become wondrous totems of conflicting essences of humanity, unapologetically simple and physical objects holding in their folds both our deepest understandings and our most shameful misunderstandings. Also, they're just eerily beautiful. So, too are a series of lithographs made by Watt as well as a small collection of mixed-media pieces done with blanket fragments.
One might think that during the heavy commercialism of Indian Market week, the museum would go with a guaranteed crowd pleaser and certainly not an exhibition which would prompt curator Joseph M Sanchez to write: Contemporary Native artists have encountered challenges which encourage tempering of their work to make it fit into a commercial anthropological and stereotypical niche. This provides economic benefit, but is in reality a continued selling of the Indian, his spirituality and soul. Still Native artists do have an opportunity to create work for themselves, their communities and their collectors. It is their choice to either accept descriptions of themselves and their communities based on a 19th Century model or to describe what their art is, and how it represents them in the contemporary world.
The IAIA Museum is standing very tall indeed and casting, near as I can tell, the longest and bravest shadow around.
Indigenous Dialogue and Blanket Stories are on view at the IAIA Museum (108 Cathedral Place, 983-8900) through March 26, 2006.
