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OBJECT history 126 FIG. 6 (above): Updated version of the Seattle Seahawks team logo, in use 2002–2012. FIG. 7 (below): ”Sealth’s Hawk” (2014) an interpretation of the logo by artist Shaun Peterson (Qwalsius) employing Coast Salish aesthetics. Image courtesy of Qwalsius Studios. working halfway between Alaska and Seattle on the northeast side of Vancouver Island. It is a transformation mask depicting a supernatural eagle (or thunderbird) in its closed form and has a human face inside that is revealed when the mask opens as it is danced. Bruce Alfred, a member of the Namgis Band of the Kwakwaka’wakw Nations, recently examined the mask and described how a dancer would enter the big house wearing it in its closed position, dancing counterclockwise around the fire, imitating the movements of a large raptor as the firelight reflected in the mask’s mirrored eyes. At a certain point, the drummers would beat faster and the dancer would dramatically open the mask and reveal the inner human face and long-necked bird rising above (fig. 9). We do not know when or under what circumstances the mask left its indigenous context, but scuffs and scratches on its surface show that it was used in ceremonies before it was sold. Sometime soon thereafter it was mounted on a wooden plaque similar to those used for taxidermied animal trophy heads. A label on this mount bears an inventory number telling us that in 1910 the mask was in the possession of the Fred Harvey Company, which began dealing in Native American artwork in 1901, selling it through their hotels and restaurants throughout the American Southwest. The mask’s history for the next few decades is unclear, but we know that sometime after July of 1941 it became part of the collection of the German-born Dadaist and Surrealist artist Max Ernst. He most likely acquired it from either Julius Carlebach or Gustave Heye’s Museum of the American Indian while he lived in New York between 1941 and 1946. A great deal of material from the Harvey Co. had been acquired over the years by the museum and Carlebach sourced many objects from the latter. 10 Ernst famously “discovered” Carlebach’s gallery in 1941, and he and other Surrealists in exile, including André Breton, Roberto Matta, Georges Duthuit, Isabelle Waldberg, and Enrico Donati, along with Robert Lebel11 and Claude Lévi-Strauss, were known to have acquired important Inuit, Northwest Coast, Southwest, and Pre- Columbian material from these sources during that time.12 In late 1946, Betty Parsons and Barnett Newman (at the time himself a Surrealist artist) assembled the inaugural exhibition for the former’s New York gallery, which would later become renowned for its promotion of abstract expressionism. This exhibition was titled Northwest Coast Indian Painting and included sixteen pieces borrowed from the American Museum of Natural History and four from Ernst’s collection. Of these, the exhibition checklist describes a “double-faced mask, Kwakiutl, Vancouver Island.”13 This is likely the same mask, though photographic confirmation is pending as of the time of this writing.14 As noted above, the mask was published by Robert Bruce Inverarity in 1950.15 Around 1970, the mask was acquired by Los Angeles collector Proctor Stafford.16 William P. Palmer III acquired it next, sometime before his death in 1982, and it passed, along with the rest of his collection, to the Hudson, which maintains ownership of it today. In 1985, it was exhibited in Symbols of Prestige: Native American Arts of the Northwest Coast from Los Angeles Collections, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.17 Thanks to a successful crowdfunding campaign, the mask was sent on loan in autumn of 2014 to the Burke Museum at the University of Washington, where it is presently featured in Here & Now: Native Artists Inspired, on view until July 27, 2015 (fig. 5). The exhibition celebrates the tenth anniversary of the Bill Holm Center for the Study of Northwest Native Art and focuses on pairings of historic and contemporary works by Native artists. The


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