Native Design Looms Large

Twenty-five or 30 years ago, a vogue for Pueblo and Navajo blankets, rugs and textiles rippled through the art world. The less-than-enlightened reason was that the blankets--flat, colorful and patterned--”looked like” Modern geometric abstract paintings.

If a protractor design painted with acrylics on canvas by Frank Stella or a length of vivid stripes by Gene Davis could carry the day, the reasoning went, then why not a Navajo pancho woven in a pattern of nested crosses, or perhaps a striped chief’s blanket? Didn’t the rugs and blankets even rise to the powerful heights of precedent, somehow anticipating advanced developments in Modern art?

Happily, the days of such silly comparisons seem to be behind us. Visit “Common Threads: Pueblo and Navajo Textiles in the Southwest Museum,” the knockout inaugural exhibition of the Southwest Museum’s satellite space at LACMA West, and you will see: Not only does the foolish comparison with geometric abstract painting demolish the integrity of these often gorgeous textiles (and, by far from insignificant extension, that of the cultures that made them); it also betrays a certain blindness, an ignorance in the eye. For any resemblance between these blankets and those paintings is superficial in the extreme.

“Common Threads” even ranks as something of a revelation--if not in our deeper understanding of Pueblo and Navajo textiles, which scholars have been diligently examining for years, then certainly in the general awareness of the stature of the Southwest Museum’s amazing collection.

The venerable museum, founded in 1907 (and thus the oldest in Los Angeles) and housed in a Spanish Revival building in Mount Washington since 1914, has always been highly regarded by specialists in the field of Native American art. Its handsome displays presently include a variety of remarkable artifacts--pottery, baskets, textiles, kachinas--but space in the lovely old building just off the Pasadena Freeway is tight. Much of the already low-profile collection has always remained hidden in storage.

The decision by the Southwest Museum to lease 8,000 square feet of space on the ground floor in LACMA West, the refurbished department store in a landmark Streamline Moderne building at the busy intersection of Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue, turns out to have been ideal. Culminating six years of research on the museum’s entire collection of 1,746 Pueblo and Navajo textiles by curator Kathleen Whitaker and her staff, “Common Threads” presents about 90 choice examples ranging over the last 150 years. It adds up to an often dazzling overview, which highlights numerous rare and unparalleled textiles.

The Beauty of Human Imperfection

Surely the similarity once superficially posited between Southwest Indian blankets and contemporary geometric abstract paintings must have been exacerbated by photographic reproductions. How else to explain the wholly different order of visual experience that, in “Common Threads,” comes with looking at the actual textiles?

For one thing, there’s barely a straight line or edge anywhere to be seen in the show. Every stripe, diamond, cross, saw-tooth, swastika, arrow and zigzag is instead created from a woven line that is inevitably irregular, a product of the roughhewn looms employed. The patterns exploit symmetry, but almost always large or small discrepancies in scale, placement or coloration are plainly visible.

Even the blanket shapes, whether vertical or horizontal, are not strict rectangles. Instead, thanks to the irregularities of the wool yarn and the vagaries of the human hand performing repetitive tasks, the blankets’ edges are sinuous, more animated than static. And forget about perfect 90-degree corners.

These irregularities are not a weakness, they’re a strength. They result in what I think of as a kind of “organic geometry.” Like many of the dyes employed, which are rarely uniform and flat but instead create a range of sensuous tonalities within each shape, this organic geometry is different from what an automated machine would weave. The vitality and tender charm of human imperfection streams through these textiles.

In the exhibition, many of the blankets are displayed flat against the wall, so that the full textile and its pattern can be seen. Others are shown hanging over rails or boxy pedestals, in a manner that suggests the way they were originally displayed for sale at trading posts in New Mexico and Arizona.

Elsewhere, though, a number of blankets are displayed on torso mannequins, to show how they would be worn. The inclusion of these mannequins is critical. When the blankets are wrapped, tucked, folded and draped on the body--itself an example of organic geometry, given the bilateral symmetry of the human animal--they assume an elemental vivacity and grandeur of often staggering beauty.

The loose rectangles disappear into wobbly cylindrical passageways. Patterns squirm. Multicolored crosses, zigzags and stripes bend, twist and encircle, like charged fields of wild electricity.

No wonder Plains Indian chiefs did anything they could to get their hands on sophisticated Navajo blankets, to make them gifts for their wives and daughters. These so-called chiefs’ blankets were the decorative, nominally functional, always status-conscious “mink coats” of 19th century Native Americans.

Tribal societies tend toward conservatism and celebration of continuity, as the Pueblo and Navajo cultures represented here attest. The principal difference between their textiles is that the Navajo examples, which are more abundant in the show, also seem more flexible and open to innovation, new materials and the shifting demands of the marketplace.

Influences as far-flung as Persian rugs can be detected in Navajo designs but would probably not be found in Pueblo work. Pueblo weavings--including those of Zuni, Rio Grande, Hopi and other groups--are more tightly controlled and repetitive, which bespeaks a relatively rigid society.

Photographs Put Displays in Context

The exhibition design for “Common Threads” is simple but effective. Earth colors--adobe, sand, terra cotta, sage--and rough timbers used as framing devices insinuate the natural landscape of the Southwest into the context, while subtly recalling the museum’s home in Mount Washington. A judicious use of period photographs, enlarged to mural scale, creates an occasional backdrop from which the design of several displays has been derived.

The show, which remains on view for nearly a year, also comes with a well-written and informative catalog, providing a useful introduction to the complex subject and the museum’s fantastic holdings. A catalog of the entire Southwest Museum collection of Pueblo and Navajo textiles is scheduled for publication soon.

For the oldest art institution in town, the Southwest Museum has managed a wonderful surprise. “Common Threads” feels like a refreshing bolt from the blue.

* “Common Threads: Pueblo and Navajo Textiles in the Southwest Museum,” Southwest Museum at LACMA West, Wilshire Boulevard at Fairfax Avenue, (323) 933-4510, through Sept. 26, 1999. Closed Wednesdays.