The Stories Behind the Masks

According to the creation mythology of Northwest Coast Indians, their ancestors emerged from the heavens and landed on Earth in a dazzling blaze of light. Whether they appeared in the form of a wolf, a bear, a sun or a moon, the forefathers descended from an effervescent sky, arrived on Earth amid a blinding aura, then transformed themselves into human progenitors.

The images evoked by these legends are extraordinarily powerful. So it’s really no wonder that the indigenous people of Alaska and northwestern Canada have a long-standing tradition of carving masks that define their origin and place in the cosmos.

No wonder either that “Down From the Shimmering Sky: Masks of the Northwest Coast” is the title of a major traveling exhibition, opening Thursday at the Southwest Museum at LACMA West. As the Canadian exhibition curators might say if they spoke the American vernacular form of English, choosing the title was “a no-brainer.”

But only to those in the know. Visitors who haven’t a clue to Northwest Coast creation mythology and think of the masks in terms of exotic decorative objects have much to learn from the landmark show of 145 masks. Covering 200 years of history, the exhibition represents 10 culturally distinct First Nations that inhabit the area stretching from the northern portion of Washington state to southeastern Alaska.

“This is the most complex, varied view one could see in a traveling exhibition,” said Peter Macnair, an independent scholar who was curator of anthropology at the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria for more than 30 years. Macnair organized the show for the Vancouver Art Gallery in Vancouver, Canada, with Robert Joseph, a Kwakwaka’wakw chief, writer and curator, and Bruce Grenville, the gallery’s senior curator.

“There are institutions that have 500 Northwest Coast masks in their collections nailed to the wall,” Macnair said, speaking by telephone from Vancouver. “But in the sense of presenting a basic story line, addressing the issues--the cosmological view from the native point of view, including that of a Native American who not only guided the look of the exhibit but consulted with all the tribal nations in British Columbia, Washington and Alaska--we think this is a unique and first-time experience.”

The show is also an unusually ambitious project for the Southwest Museum, which has a renowned collection of Native American art but struggles financially and generally lacks the space to present large traveling exhibitions. Based in a historic but inadequate building in Mount Washington, the museum gained considerable visibility last year by opening a satellite facility at LACMA West, the former May Co. building now owned and operated by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

For the first time during the next few months, the Southwest will have an even larger presence on Wilshire Boulevard. “Down From the Shimmering Sky” will be installed in the temporary gallery at LACMA West, home to “Van Gogh’s Van Goghs: Masterpieces From the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam” and, more recently, a show of Impressionist works from Washington’s National Gallery of Art. The Southwest’s LACMA West space will be closed for reinstallation until mid-February, but when it reopens, with “Siksika: Within the Circle of Life”--a show of Walter McClintock’s photographs of Blackfeet people and related objects from the museum’s collection--the Southwest will occupy about two-thirds of the ground floor at LACMA West.

For Duane King, director of the Southwest Museum, hosting “Down From the Shimmering Sky” is an opportunity to present “an unparalleled achievement in artistic creativity” and thus encourage interest in Native American art. Displaying the masks in a high-profile, centrally located facility known as a showcase for popular Impressionist and Postimpressionist art also gives the Southwest a chance to broaden its audience, he said.

The mask show opened in Vancouver in June 1997, then traveled to the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ontario; the Portland Art Museum in Oregon; and the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Okla. Los Angeles is the final venue.

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A major exhibition of Northwest Coast art is a rare occurrence in Southern California. But even in Canada, where the material is much more familiar, “Down From the Shimmering Sky” was a notable project that exemplifies changing attitudes about the display of Native American art, Macnair said.

“In Canada, Native American art is generally found in the museum rather than the art museum or art gallery, as we call them here. But the Vancouver Art Gallery has been moving over the last decade into presenting Native American art. They have featured the great living Northwest Coast artists Robert Davidson and Bill Reid. In keeping with their commitment to provide a venue for this sort of thing, they came up with this idea for a mask exhibit,” he said.

The concept was under discussion for about three years, but the curators only had about a year to organize the show, Macnair said. “Fortunately, I had left my employ at the Royal British Columbia Museum, and I was freelancing. We were working on a very tight schedule, but by bringing in our First Nations curator, Robert Joseph, we were able to put the exhibition together, borrowing from more than 20 institutional lenders and 30 private lenders.

“About halfway through the preparations, we learned that there was money for a catalog, so we had the additional pressure of photographing and writing text for the publication. It’s hard to imagine that so much was accomplished in so little time. It was the goodwill of the lenders and the Native American community that made it possible,” he said.

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The curators have combined traditional ethnographic pieces with works made for sale “because these are both legitimate traditions,” Macnair said. “We are celebrating the art form and not distinguishing between old and new or between masks made for use or to decorate a room. Some masks made for sale are not hollowed out to fit on the face, but the aesthetic point of view and applied design is consistent.”

Nonetheless, the masks are metaphors for ritual power and traditionally created to be worn in ceremonial dances, not hung in an art museum. In his catalog essay, Macnair writes: “Often viewed in shadowed, flickering firelight and rarely in an arrested pose, masks invoke the image of an ancestor, the terror of a monster, the serenity of a celestial orb. The debate on whether or not such works are ‘art’ obscures their meaning and intent. Mythic history is manifest in the mask. For anyone outside the culture, it is impossible to fully understand the relationship between mythic history as manifest in the mask and its animated presence on the stage of a ceremonial house when a skilled dancer brings life to the mask.”

Creating a context that would help visitors understand the meaning of the masks and the excitement of the ceremonies was an enormous challenge, Macnair said. “Our strategy is that we title the first gallery ‘The Human Face Divine.’ That’s a quote from Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ by a fur trader describing a masked performance that he had seen in the 1830s. He observed that most of the masks represented the human face. So in the initial gallery we will present faces of people--men, women, the elderly, the young. We hope visitors will engage with them and see their own humanity reflected back from these pieces that are relatively easily comprehended.”

Depictions of more complex creatures--including ancestral suns and birds, killer whales and warriors--will appear in subsequent galleries, and most of them will be displayed in glass cases. “But the First Nations people involved as advisors said some of the masks--mostly contemporary pieces of fairly recent manufacture--cannot be put behind glass, so we developed the idea of showing them on a platform,” Macnair said. If artists or lenders wanted their masks to be “unencumbered,” experts who have danced in the masks placed them on platforms at the proper height and angle, as if they are being worn, he said.

“At first, people at the Vancouver Art Gallery thought this idea was too anthropological,” Macnair said. “We agonized over it, until finally I had a flash and said, ‘Consider this an installation piece.’ ”

Whatever it’s called, that portion of the exhibition enlivens the gallery space for visitors, he said. “The gasps of the audience coming around the corner [and encountering the masks on the platforms] testify to that.”

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“DOWN FROM THE SHIMMERING SKY: MASKS OF THE NORTHWEST COAST,” Southwest Museum at LACMA West, 6067 Wilshire Blvd. Dates: Thursday-May 6. Hours: Opening day, 1-6 p.m.; thereafter, Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, noon-6 p.m.; Fridays, noon-8 p.m.; Saturdays, 11 a.m.-8 p.m.; Sundays, 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Prices: Adults, $10; students ages 6-17 and seniors, $8. Tickets available through Ticketmaster and at the museum. Phone: (323) 933-4510.