72 MUSEUM news PHILLIPS CENTER Santa Fe—Last June, the Wheelwright Museum opened its fi rst expansion in its seventy-eight-year history. The Jim and Lauris Phillips Center for the Study of Southwestern Jewelry is the result of more than twenty years of collecting and research focused on Navajo and Pueblo jewelry and related traditions. The center comprises two exhibition galleries totaling some 2,000 square feet. These include the Wheelwright’s fi rst permanent exhibition space, the Martha Hopkins Struever Gallery, 1,600 square feet devoted permanently to silversmithing and other forms of metalwork, lapidary, and historic and contemporary jewelry. A second space, the Schultz Gallery, named in honor of Sid and Ruth Schultz, is 400 square feet and is devoted to changing exhibitions on the same and other subjects. The Wheelwright has built an important collection, which enables the museum to tell the rich, multicultural story of jewelry through examples of innumerable styles and media. One of its strengths is that many of the earliest objects are documented or attributed to known makers. This enables the museum to present the story of jewelry in the Southwest as a human endeavor rather than just an anonymous sequence of styles. Though jewelry has been a major Native art form in the Southwest for centuries, almost all major exhibiting institutions have treated it as subordinate to the arts of basketry, pottery, beadwork, and textiles. The Wheelwright’s collection allows it to provide Southwest jewelry the prominence it deserves but so rarely gets. In addition to the extraordinary Phillips Collection of more than 800 examples of Southwestern silver items, during the past decade the museum has acquired the Carl Lewis Druckman Collection of Navajo and Pueblo spoons; the Anderman/ Gallegos Collection of New Mexican fi ligree; a major collection of early Southwestern earrings; “thunderbird” jewelry from Santo Domingo Pueblo; jewelry and hollowware by master silversmiths, including Kenneth Begay, Morris Robinson, Lewis Lomay, and Charles Loloma; and contemporary work by Yazzie Johnson and Gail Bird, Norbert Peshlakai, McKee Platero, Perry Shorty, and others. Its holdings exemplify artists and traditions dating from the 1870s to the present, many of which are not represented in any other museum. FAR LEFT: Navajo hair comb, c. 1895. Handwrought silver. Courtesy the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian. LEFT: Pin by Lambert Homer Sr. (Zuni Pueblo) and Roger Skeet (Navajo), c. 1935. Handwrought silver, turquoise. Courtesy the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian. ABOVE: Chart showing the variation in elements that make up Kota reliquary fi gures produced by the Master of Sebé. Drawing by Frédéric Cloth. RIGHT: Drawing of the convex face of a Janus reliquary. Ndassa, Republic of Congo. Laura and James J. Ross Collection. Drawing by Frédéric Cloth. KOTA: DIGITAL EXCAVATIONS St. Louis—This October, the Pulitzer Arts Foundation will open Kota: Digital Excavations in African Art, an exhibition that examines a new digital database created by Belgian computer engineer and independent researcher Frederic Cloth to study and reveal the hidden histories of Kota reliquary guardian fi gures. Produced between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries in what is now Gabon and the Republic of Congo, Kota fi gures depict abstracted human forms and were thought to bring the protection of deceased ancestors and ensure the survival of communities. They are singular among African sculpture for their incorporation of worked brass and copper over carved wood. As missionary efforts and colonialism swept through central Africa in the 1930s, much of the oral history and tradition relating to these artworks was lost, and while many fi gures remain in collections today, few details are known about the objects’ specifi c provenances and uses. Featuring more than fi fty of these guardian fi gures, the exhibition presents a visual process to detect groupings and similarities between the sculptures that
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