ART on View New Frontiers for Tribal Art Native American Art in Colombia and China 86 ramic; basketry; textile; and feathered, carved, and beaded artworks. The Bowers is considered a medium-sized institution, but much of its success is owed to its big aspirations. The museum was conceived by Charles and Ada Bowers, who felt Orange County, California, deserved its own museum devoted to the history of the area, which had been developed and influenced by Spanish, Mexican, missionary, and Indian cultures. The Bowers bequeathed land to the city of Santa Ana for the purpose of a museum, which opened to the public in 1936. Filling the galleries with collections was a slow process, as the first curator, Bessie Coulter, petitioned local families for local artifacts and family treasures. With these came a number of Native American works of art, including the Bowers Mu- By Julie Perlin Lee An exhibition presented by the Bowers Museum of Santa Ana, California, titled First Americans: Tribal Art of North America, has the distinction of being the first exhibition of Native American artworks ever to travel to China. The show is comprised of 133 artworks from the museum’s permanent collection. Even with little previous exposure to tribal art, Chinese audiences have welcomed this exhibition, embracing the contribution of these varied cultural groups’ artistic innovations and individualism as expressed in the displays of ceseum’s treasured Navajo First Phase Chief Blanket (fig. 5), which is unique for its combination of traditional blue, brown, and white bands that are combined with cochineal-dyed red designs. The two crosses at the center are usually associated with later Navajo blankets, and the asymmetric zigzagging lines at each of the blanket’s ends are unusual. Dating to 1860 or earlier, the blanket shows that the weaver was creatively experimenting with her medium. Donated in 1936, the blanket sat in storage unidentified and unnoticed until 2005. Also during the 1930s, the museum became the designated repository for findings from local archaeological excavations carried out by the United States Works Progress Administration (WPA). News of this relationship opened the door for donations of similar materials previously in private hands, and the collection grew significantly. A number of enigmatic stones, circular in shape and grooved around their perimeters, were taken in at this time (fig. 9). Called cog stones because of their visual similarity to a cogged wheel, they are at least 2,000 years old. Many speculations about the function of these oftenstudied artifacts have been made without any certain results. The baskets in the Bowers collection also have garnered specific merit; in 1976 the Smithsonian’s SITES program circulated the museum’s most-prized baskets in an exhibition titled Indian Basketry of Western North America. The Bowers’ Native American collection FIG. 1 (top): Schoolchildren viewing an installation of katsinam in First Americans at the Guangdong Museum, China. FIG. 2 (above): Installation view of First Americans at the Guangdong Museum, China.
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