Читать книгу Baleen Basketry of the North Alaskan Eskimo - Molly Lee - Страница 7

Foreword

I met Molly Lee in 1985 at a Native American Art Studies conference where she gave a talk on baleen baskets, a type of art about which I knew virtually nothing. There was a reason for my ignorance: this basketry was not part of a centuries-old indigenous art form and there was little in print about it. Baleen baskets had been “invented” in the relatively recent past and were made for tourists. Because they could not easily be assigned to categories of mainstream western art, they were generally dismissed as craftwork and thus inferior to the fine arts.

A scholar who was unwilling to adhere to such a restrictive paradigm, Molly Lee treated Inupiat baleen baskets as objects of significant artistic merit, which also embody profound statements of cultural identity. Her trenchant observations at that conference more than a decade ago prompted me, and I’m sure others, to rethink objects made for the tourist market as worthy of serious study. Argillite carvings, Eastern Woodlands moose hair embroidery, and Plains ledger drawings, as well as baleen baskets, are just a few examples of art that until recently was disparagingly labeled as “acculturated.” In the last decades of the twentieth century a new respect for tourist art acknowledges its intrinsic merit, its cultural significance, and its place in the world’s history of art.

It is most fortunate that this book is available again after a decade out of print. It stands as a major contribution to the literature on the enduring vitality of Native art.

ALDONA JONAITIS

Director

University of Alaska Museum, Fairbanks