Search results for ""author judith ostrowitz""

Interventions examines how members of Native American and Canadian First Nation groups situate their art in contemporary global environments, creating a new kind of nexus between the requirements of Native communities and the forms of public display that are of interest to worldwide audiences. Judith Ostrowitz selects several critical cases to demonstrate this strategic tacking between macro- and micro-identities. The long-term implications of the totem pole restoration projects of the second half of the twentieth century; the opening of the National Museum of the American Indian; the dance event in Juneau known as Celebration; the impact of modernism and postmodernism on Indian art; and the use of electronic media to establish Indian territory on the Internet all demonstrate facets of the purposeful and context-driven strategies of self-representation designed by Native communities. The NMAI may be the paramount example of the construction of public identity originating from Indian Country to date. Ostrowitz describes how, in the course of the museum's creation, the distinctions among many specific groups of origin were selectively blurred in service of larger goals. In contrast, the purpose of the gathering of Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian people at the biennial Celebration is to rejoice in distinct Native groups and in the vitality of their traditions. Postmodernism has afforded twentieth- and twenty-first century Native artists the opportunity to penetrate mainstream art worlds, where experimentation is encouraged and the former criteria for the production of “Native art” are selectively referenced. Through close readings of Native cultural productions, Ostrowitz puts Native art practices into conversation with larger issues in cultural studies. Art audiences are becoming familiar with many works that address global communities but are generated in environments affected by specific ethnic, gendered, and cultural perspectives. As the work of non-Native artists in world-system venues is now also interpreted in the context of the biographical and cultural histories of their makers, all works of art may be better appreciated as expressions of local artistic position.

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What makes Northwest Coast Native American art authentic? And why, when most of art history is a history of the avant-garde, is tradition so deeply valued by contemporary Native American artists and their patrons? In Privileging the Past, Judith Ostrowitz approaches these questions through a careful consideration of replicas, reproductions, and creative translations of past forms of Northwest Coast dances, ceremonies, masks, painted screens, and houses. Ostrowitz examines several different art forms—two very different architectural constructions, a dance performance, and modern sculptures and dance paraphernalia—considering their relations to arts of the past. Chief Shakes’ Community House has endured, in various forms, at the same site in Wrangell, Alaska, for close to 170 years as an “old style” Tlingit tribal house. The Grand Hall of the Canadian Museum of Civilization at Hull, Quebec, is constructed as a Native village with an assemblage of replicated houses made by contemporary Native artists, both old and new totem poles, and references to the Northwest Coast landscape. The opening ceremonies of the exhibition Chiefly Feasts: The Enduring Kwakiutl Potlatch at the American Museum of Natural History in New York in October 1991 included a dance program by a group of Native performers from Vancouver Island, B.C., adapting traditional elements for a long and complex theatrical presentation. Finally, artists such as Art Thompson, Beau Dick, Doug Cranmer, Robert Davidson, Susan Point, and Jim Schoppert produce vital and lively art—masks, rattles, prints, and paintings are considered here—that utilizes inherited subject matter and conventionalized stylistic devices. Ostrowitz finds that these replicas and performances function as do most other works of art, referencing history in a highly selective manner. Ostrowitz draws on an extensive body of interviews she conducted with tribal leaders, artists, and artisans long known and highly respected in both Native and non-Native venues. Throughout the book, we hear their voices—members of the Alfred, Cranmer, Hunt, Tallio, and Webster families, and many other individuals—as they relate their responses to the modern adaptation of their cultural heritage. Privileging the Past explores intellectual issues raised by postmodern theory, supported by detailed studies of projects that will interest a broad audience of students, historians, museum-goers, and those intrigued by Native American art and cultural history.

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