Tucson Glass Festival

The Tucson Glass Festival was held from April 8-10, 2011 to celebrate art in glass. Originally the show was planned to be national but too many participants canceled after Arizona passed its racist anti-immigration law earlier in the year, so the organizers soldiered on with a local festival, and it was intimate and successful (from the point of view of a consumer of it, anyway).

There were tours of the Sonoran Glass Art Academy, which included demonstrations and instruction, with plenty of “product” for sale in the galleries, and likewise at the Philabaum glass studio and gallery, and other galleries around town.

A special highlight was a demonstration of technique by the brothers de la Torre, Einar and Jamex, originally of Guadalajara, now living and working in Esenada, Mexico and San Diego. They worked at Tom Philabaum’s studio in Tucson to produce a fantastic, life-sized glass head in their signature style of cartoonish, colorful, ironic, and witty construction that the three of them had designed the night before in the Ethiopian restaurant across the street from the studio.

The brothers were assisted by Tom Philabaum and a team of experienced glassworkers. The two-hour project was fascinating and almost medieval in its exercise of techniques that go back many centuries. I asked Tom Philabaum about the absence of safety equipment. All those bare arms and legs look awfully vulnerable moving around glass at fourteen hundred degrees, I said. But he replied, "I would rather work naked. You have to be able to feel the heat from the glass to know what it is doing." The man is clearly one with his material!

The glass bust that emerged was grotesquely beautiful, pinkish, as if its scalp had been removed, and decorated with something like a crown of laurels, except they were prickly pear pads, and topped with a sort of Mohawk haircut that made the whole thing reminiscent of a conquistador. It’s gaping mouth displayed the words “Baja Rizona.” Why not “Baja Arizona?” someone asked. Because, Jamex said, the two middle “A’s” are combined to one, and then it sounds like somebody is laughing, “Ha-ha, Rizona!” That is the kind of weird, eccentric humor the de la Torre brothers are known for.

The brothers have a major show now at the Tucson Museum of Art, called Borderlandia. It is a show that has traveled through the west, perhaps elsewhere. It presents a wide range of colorful glass pieces, some free-standing, some wall mounted, some animated by electric motors and videos; all of them baroquely elaborate, immensely intricate, and stuffed full of “found” trinkets and souvenirs culled from dollar stores. Some of their iconography is serious, tragicomically cultural, religious, and bitingly political, and some of it is just plain goofy fun.

The work highlights, overall, ethnic commonalities and differences among people living along the southwest border. They use images from Mexico, American pop culture, the Mayas and the Aztecs, and even some pre-Columbian images. Juxtaposition is their preferred method for making narrative comments, such as by filling a traditional religious altar with pop-culture icons and images of politicians. The show is overflowing with political and cultural meaning, but it is also a huge dose of eye-candy and a magnificent display of the glass artist’s craft.

The bizarre bust that the brothers made for the Glass Festival demonstration ended up looking something like a Spanish Conquistador who plays in a punk rock band in a Day of the Dead celebration. It was hastily stuffed into the annealing oven before it could be thoroughly appreciated, but even so, the artists asked the small crowd of observers if there were any early bids for it. The bidding stalled out at $2,000, but at least it was an open.

I’m not sure when the formal bidding for it is, but they said they would not be surprised to see $7,000. Proceeds benefit the nonprofit Sonoran Glass Art Academy’s Youth Development Program.

Viva el vidrio!

T.S. Monk On Monk

T.S. Monk, drummer and bandleader, is the son of renowned pianist and composer, Thelonious Monk. I think T.S. also stands for Thelonious Sphere, same as his father but anyway, Monk the younger goes by T.S. He founded the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, dedicated to honoring (promoting) the music of his father and educating and nurturing new jazz talent.

T.S. tours the world performing his father’s ensemble music. In Tucson recently, he presented a show for which he is known, called “Monk on Monk” with a brass and piano sextet. It was quickly expanded to ten players with the addition of a tuba and bass sax, and some other horns, for a smoothly blended “Monk’s Mood.” The sound was good overall, and of course anyone who loves Monk’s music can’t get enough of it. Nevertheless, individual performances seemed lackluster. Nothing sparkled except the instruments.

T.S.’s drumming tends to the musical, which I like. He is 60 years old now, so one cannot expect fireworks. The different drums are tuned over a wide pitch range (I don’t know proper drum terminology) and he uses that variability to produce some melodious solos instead of the usual whap-bang theatrics. The playlist was not tremendously satisfying. It emphasized lesser-known works, such as Little Rootie-Tootie, Boo-Boo’s Birthday, and Crepuscule with Nellie, tunes that he explained were dedicated by his father to the family. I suspect there are still copyright issues with the “big” tunes, like ‘Round Midnight and Epistrophy, that prevent them from being featured. Still, it was good music, if lackluster.

T.S. put out a disc in 1997, also called T.S. Monk on Monk, which included just about the same playlist as this show, but had in the band such luminaries as Roy Hargrove, Dave Holland, Christian McBride, Wayne Shorter, and many others. Now, that music pops, so I conclude that the Tucson concert was not lukewarm because of the playlist but because of the players. Or maybe it’s something about Tucson itself that makes performers sleepy.

Blues with Grace

Abounding Grace Sanctuary, a Lutheran Church in Tucson, hosts local and regional music performances almost every week. Churches give me the creeps, and this one was no different, but I took a deep breath and went to see Joe Bourne, Arthur Migliazza, and Tom Walbank. The last two are local stars. Walbank is a guitar and harp (harmonica) wizard often found at Tucson’s 17th Street Market. Migliazza is a stride piano and boogie-woogie master, formerly of Tucson, but who now lives in New York. Tom and Arthur are old friends and often appear together in Tucson (not often enough). Joe Bourne is a jazz singer from Cambridge, MA.

Migliazza led off with his signature version of Yancy’s Blues, a genuine foot stomper. Bourne then sang several tunes with piano accompaniment. The accompaniment was great. I especially liked a rendition of Fats Domino’s “Blueberry Hill,” because Arthur really slammed the downbeat note on the left hand in each bar. Plus I am just wild about any tune in 4/4 time over a 6/8 rhythm. I don’t know why. Arthur also did a version of Pinetop Blues that had people in the audience literally gasping in astonishment, interrupting often with applause.

Bourne sang many jazz standards competently, but he was not my favorite. He just did not swing, and that is death for blues. He hit every note dead center, exactly as written, but that’s not enough. To swing, you have to use rubato, play with the music, interpret it. Bobby Darin had swing. Bourne doesn’t. Also, his accent was uninteresting. In “Georgia On My Mind,” he actually said “Georger” at one point (Boston area accent). However, he did do “Motherless Child,” an old slave song from the late 1800’s and he did it a capella, as a Negro spiritual, not as a blues tune, and it was very heartfelt and moving, and really showed off his voice well. That’s obviously his forte, not jazz singing.

Tom Walbank came in at the second hour and knocked everybody’s socks off with his dazzling harmonica work, which is unbelievable. He has a composite piece of pre-World War I tunes that he has put together that is astonishing. He is hooting and barking and yelling and singing into the harmonica even as he plays it , creating his own rhythm section as he goes. It’s just amazing, seemingly impossible.

The show was $15 per person, ran about 90 minutes and was attended by about 150 people, mostly members of the church, I would guess, and mostly fifty years and older. I saw nobody under forty, which is a shame. The kids wouldn’t know who Count Basie is, true, but nobody can resist a hot boogie-woogie piano or a wailing blues harmonica -- nobody. I left early because of the growing lack of oxygen and the increasing smell of humanity in the windowless, airless room. But I was well pleased to enjoy Arthur and Tom again, individually and together.

Toward a Science of Consciousness

Toward a Science of Consciousness
April 12-17 Tucson, AZ

The Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona held its ninth biennial conference in the Tucson Convention Center, as it does every even numbered year. In the odd years, the conference is held overseas. The 2011 conference will be in Tel-Aviv. According to the catalog, “The Tucson conferences are the major world gatherings on a broad spectrum of approaches to the fundamental question of how the brain produces conscious experience, a question which addresses who we are, the nature of reality and our place in the universe. An estimated 700 scientists, philosophers, psychologists, experientialists, artists and others from 43 countries on 6 continents … participate[d] in 400 presentations…”

This is the fourth or fifth one I have attended since the series began in 1994. It was not as well attended as some previous ones, possibly because of the worldwide recession, but it was still deeply fascinating. These are among the most profound questions human beings face. I presented a paper at this one, “Avoiding the Perceptual Model of Introspection,” available online at http://sites.google.com/site/billadamsphd/publications (scroll down 10% or so to find it). It seemed well-received and the Q&A session after was lively. My point was (is) that introspection is not a passive inspection of mental contents but necessarily involves active conceptualization, which is itself subject to the biases of language and culture. It is a tiny contribution, I hope, on the road to development of a full “scientific” method of introspection that would allow us to examine the mind directly in a way that could produce broad consensus.

The conference opened with three interesting talks about William James, founder of experimental psychology in America with his laboratory at Harvard in 1875. His writings are much admired even today by virtually all scholars working in the field of consciousness studies. Eugene Taylor talked about James’ “Radical Empiricism,” the idea that no aspect of human experience should be excluded from scientific study, and that includes consciousness. That was a radical idea then, and it still is today, because consciousness, whatever it is, is not physical, and therefore not amenable to the scientific method. A hundred and twenty five years ago, the scientific method was not as well-defined as it is today and James could get away with such a proposal. Today, the best we can hope for is to study of the brain, and from that, make unverifiable inferences about the mind. Taylor recognized this dilemma, but seemed resigned to it, as there is little appetite in the scientific community for reform of the method.

Bernard Baars, a well-known member of the inner circle at TSC (he teaches the WebCourse on Consciousness for the Center (see http://www.consciousness.arizona.edu/WebCourseAnnounS2010.htm ), gave a talk blaming James for behaviorism. The reasoning is that James “glorified” the mind-body problem, according to Baars, and argued for the reality of mind in that dichotomy. By focusing on on that dichotomy, James gave the behaviorists an opportunity to declare material monism and end the confusion. Compounding his sins, James also put a great deal of emphasis on the problem of reconciling religion and science. Again, the behaviorists ended that dilemma in a stroke by declaring religious questions unscientific. That is an oversimplified history of psychology, although not entirely wrong. Baars himself favors a materialist, neurologically based explanation of consciousness, so it is understandable that he would present history this way.

After the opening plenary speeches, there are multiple, smaller break-out groups run in parallel on such topics as neurobiology and consciousness, the nature of representation, unconscious processes, artificial intelligence, perception and art, altered states of consciousness, and so on. There are about five speakers at each of these mini-conferences, and if one is fleet of foot and lucky with the timing, it is possible to dash among the conference rooms to catch the most interesting talks within several groups, but it is always frustrating that choices must be made. In the evening of the opening day there was a reception in the Hotel Arizona (a very dreary place that used to be a Holiday Inn until it became too run down even for that company). Tucson is sorely lacking in decent hotels to support the convention center.

There was an interesting plenary talk by Marcus Raichle, one of the “discoverers” of so-called Brain Dark Energy. I use ironic quotes because I am not convinced that anything significant actually has been discovered there. Raichle and others have documented the well known fact that the brain is always active, even when the mind is at rest, even during sleep. This fact was noted in 1929 by the inventor of the electroencephalogram (EEG) machine, that measures “brain waves”. What Raichle and others have done is map the intensity and extent of this background brain activity and correlate some aspects of it to other, better known brain functions. He has also indulged in wild speculation about what the background noise might be “for.” (And of course, he had the good fortune to be the first one to call it “Dark Energy.” Woo-woo!). You can get a quick summary of his work in the March, 2010 issue of Scientific American. I think it is interesting stuff, but grossly overinterpreted.

The afternoon and evening were again absorbed by the dozens of concurrent sessions on topics such as Introspection (in which I read my paper), panpsychism (the idea that everything in the world is conscious), phenomenology, dreaming, quantum physics (which some people think is related to consciousness), and spiritual and religious approaches. Alas, when one is giving a paper at one of these concurrent sessions, it is impolite to leave for a different session, so I was obliged to attend exclusively to matters of introspection.

The evening poster sessions were not as numerous as in past conferences, but there were several dozen. I didn’t see a whole lot that was new and exciting there. A lot of the familiar old arguments were re-hashed with some new twist: Can computers think? Are philosophical zombies really conceivable? Is a science of consciousness even possible? The Neural basis of decision-making, What are feelings? What is Shamanism? Each author is supposed to be standing by his or her poster to engage in discussion of it, although many were not. A lot of the posters were little more than the pages of a typed paper tacked to the board – too much to read on a fly-by. Apparently, many people have difficulty summarizing their work. Despite its extreme unevenness, the poster session is usually where one can get a glimpse of the hot new ideas of tomorrow, and a sense of what the young researchers are thinking.

On Thursday, David Chalmers, an Australian philosopher, former director of the Tucson Center for Consciousness studies, and well-loved consciousness rock-star, gave a rare paper of his own on “the Singularity.” This hare-brained idea taken from science fiction, supposes that as soon as we have computers (robots) with intelligence equal to that of humans (right around the corner according to some people), then those robots will be able to build other robots with even greater intelligence. Extrapolate that line of thinking and you see a curve of exponentially increasing robotic intelligence, until at some point a super-intelligence is reached and human beings become irrelevant. Chalmers suggests therefore, that we should program into our artificial intelligence systems basic human values, including a high value on human life. Or even better, as soon as we have a complete map of the brain, we should “upload” a copy of a person’s mind to one of these supercomputers, so we could be part of the superintelligence revolution and not be left behind. But, Chalmers cautions, there are problems. Would the uploaded consciousness be the same person as the biological person it was taken from? Or would it be two persons (Bio-Dave and Digi-Dave)? How could it be the same person, if there are two distinct copies of the consciousness? Additional philosophical perplexities of that nature were brought forth and considered.

The talk was delivered mostly with a straight face, but it is hard for me to believe that Chalmers took it very seriously. I think he was just trying to liven up the discussion. If he was serious, I am surprised, shocked, really, at his naivety. I choose to believe he was pulling our collective leg.

On Friday was one of the most interesting talks of the entire conference. A Buddhist monk, Za Choeje Rinpoche, spoke. In 1984 the Dalai Lama named him the sixth reincarnation of ZaChoeje Rinpoche, one of the highest Buddhist Lamas of Eastern Tibet. At the age of 16, Rinpoche entered a Tibetan monastery for 10 years of studies. He came to the U.S. 1998 to lead the Mystical Arts of Tibet tour. Afterwards, he lectured on Tibetan culture and philosophy at Emory University in Atlanta. He told his tale with self-deprecating humor. He said that as an ordinary 16-year old boy in southern India, he was completely surprised to be identified as the reincarnation of a Tibetan saint. “If I was the reincarnation,” he asked, “how come I didn’t know about it?” It took him several years to “become the person everybody said I was.” He talked about Buddhism and becoming enlightened, which he described as “ceasing to struggle against the struggles of life.” (Which is not the same as ceasing to struggle). When someone asked him what was the nature of enlightenment, he referred to the big screen, on which every other speaker had shown a PowerPoint. But the screen was completely blank. The crowd was delighted. He did say that when you finally burrow down to the bottom human experience, what you find is laughter. And then he giggled. After his talk, which was enthusiastically received by the audience, he was swamped with additional questioners. It was impossible to get to him. I would have liked to ask him two questions: 1. What is mental illness? And 2. When you were in that monastery all those years, learning all the Buddhist prayers, to what or whom were you praying?

A Buddhist Lama is a hard act to follow but Neurophysiologists Antonio Damasio gave a nice presentation on “the Neural Self” accompanied by interesting slides. As he has already done in his numerous bestselling books, he defined several levels of self, including a “protoself” that constitutes one's feeling of existing and living, and arises from the processes in the brainstem that regulate the automatic life functions, such as breathing. Beyond that there is a “core self,” a secondary self that rises to consciousness whenever the primary protoself is modified. A tertiary self is the autobiographical self based on large scale integration of memories and experience.

There was nothing new, as all this has been covered in his books, but it was nice to have it all spelled out in one summary talk. I don’t buy the theory myself, because it presupposes identity of mind and brain, which I find unintelligible, and at the same time presupposes mind-body dualism. Damasio says such things as “The brainstem delivers conscious experience.” What? I defy him to cut open a brainstem and point out the “consciousness” there. The brain is very complicated, but it is just a piece of meat. It does not have “consciousness” lurking within it. And again, the brainstem delivers consciousness? To what or whom does it deliver, we must wonder. The little man in the head, or homunculus, no doubt. I grant that it is nearly impossible to talk about the mind-body problem without getting tangled up in such linguistic absurdities, but I expected better from a world-famous scientist giving a talk with this title.

There were many more plenary talks, and dozens more concurrent sessions and dozens of new posters in the second poster session. There were also after-hours presentations of “Art and Media” where one could marvel, for example at beautiful, colorful magnifications of biological processes captured on film.

After hours on Friday night there was everybody’s favorite, the Consciousness Poetry Slam and the Zombie Blues. At the poetry slam, volunteer conference-attendees read or otherwise perform an original poem on a consciousness related theme. There is quite a diversity, as you can imagine. The hit piece this year was surely one by a young man (didn’t get the name) who played a decent electronic keyboard and sang original lyrics to the Beatles’ tune, “Hey Jude.” Only in this case, it was “Hey Stu,” referring to Stuart Hameroff, the conference director. It didn’t take long before the whole auditorium was screaming, Na, Na, Na, Na-na-na Na, Hey Stu.

(image: logbase2.blogspot.com)

Following the poems, attendees can offer one or more verses of the Zombie Blues (which I think was originally written by Dave Chalmers), to a very forgiving band that is expert at helping non-experts sing their lines. Chalmers

always starts it off singing the original lyrics: “I act like you act, I do what you do, But I don’t know what it’s like to be you. What consciousness is, I ain’t got a clue, I got the Zombie blues.” While not as rich and varied this time as in past conferences, the zombie blues session is still a highlight.

There were too many other fascinating speeches and papers read to be summarized here, but I filled up half a notebook with ideas to follow up on, so that in itself makes the whole thing worth the exhausting effort. I’ll be back next time.

Rethinking Andy Warhol

I recently saw an exhibition of Andy Warhol prints at the Tucson Museum of Art (www.tucsonarts.com) that runs through July 3, 2010. Warhol prints are vastly overexposed in popular culture, so even though I have admired the Marilyns and the Elvises and the Campbell’s Soup before, I had low expectations. But I guess I was not as familiar with his work as I thought, and the diversity of work in this exhibit gave me a new respect for the artist.

No photography was allowed so I can barely remember what I saw. Most, or maybe all of the works were from the Bank of America Collection, one of the largest corporate collections in the world. All ten of the Campbell’s soups were there, and I think one Marilyn.

Somehow I had never been aware of the wildflowers, a set of about a dozen prints of four wildflowers at macro range. The color combinations were an essay in human consciousness. It was impossible to pick a favorite.

Then there was a series of prints of Muhammed Ali that I had never seen. They were thoughtful and intimate. There was an odd group of prints that seemed to be a riff on the work of Keith Haring, on the theme of commercial art and the commercialization of society. I didn’t quite get that bunch.

A set of ten large prints called “Endangered Species” was a knockout. Photographs of the ten chosen animals were enhanced with line drawing and color, color, color. Again it was the colors that knocked me out. The representations of the animals are standard and not that interesting, but the color enhancements were the star. Unlike someone like J.M.W. Turner, also a colorist, Warhol doesn’t just show color for the sake of color, he articulates it in contrasts and complements. I just don’t have the knowledge or vocabulary to explain what he was doing, but the result is stunning.

There was also a series of images about well-known cultural icons, such as Mickey Mouse, Superman, and Santa Clause. These, I felt, were not only exercises in composition and color, but also carried sociological and political meaning. For example, Mickey Mouse had a glitter background. Superman had a comic-book, line-drawing shadow, and Aunt Jemima was imaginatively done in black on black. This was my favorite series of the show.

There was a biographical video showing which was worthwhile in setting the personal and historical context for Warhol’s work.

Warhol was prolific, and this collection represents only a tiny fraction of his print output, but even so it is diverse enough to give an entirely new perspective.

Contemporary Native American Art

The Tucson Museum of Art is the last stop on the tour of a marvelous exhibit of North American native art. The exhibition is second in a three part series called “Changing Hands”, organized and circulated by the Museum of Arts and Design of New York. The 150 pieces of visual art are stunning in their diversity, creativity, and thoughtfulness. I don’t know what’s going to happen to this show after it’s over on May 11, 2008, so maybe you should just go to Tucson and see it while you can.

I had my doubts about a show called Changing Hands: Art Without Reservation- Contemporary Native North American Art from the West, Northwest and Pacific. I expected familiar images and crafts: Kachina dolls, Haida masks, beaded moccasins, carved ivory amulets, painted Kwakiutl cedar chests, and so on. What I found instead took me by surprise.

Beaded Converse tennis shoes? Uncountable tiny blue glass beads are sewn to the canvas to make the shoes blue. Like nearly every piece in this exhibit, this also presents social commentary. These are not your mother’s beaded moccasins! The struggle for Native Americans between tradition and contemporary life is starkly expressed throughout the show.
("Shoes" [The actual title of the piece is a long Indian word I did not write down correctly, so I had to give it my own name. Sorry. Teri Greeves, 1970])

Rant: Photography is not allowed in the exhibit, a stupid rule, it seems to me. I don’t see how the artists’ intellectual property or the museum’s financial investment is threatened by amateur photography. I had to cull these few pictures from the internet. Perhaps the fear is that a blogger will show pictures of the works without proper attribution to the artist, which is exactly what happens when you have to cull pictures from the internet. Rant off.

I can only describe a few of my favorites, although there were literally dozens of mind-bending works. One was a kind of postmodern totem pole. It was a cubist oil painting of totemic images. The painting was curved into a half-cylinder and displayed vertically in a vaguely totem pole shape. It thus had recognizable totemic images in characteristic Northwest Indian style, but portraying multiple perspectives at once, as cubism can do, simulating the experience one would have of actually walking around a real totem pole. What a concept. Was it a totem pole or not? Was it a memory of a totem pole? Was it a translation of a totem pole? Again, past and present are forced to coexist in tightly wound tension.
(Totemic Theory 2, Clarissa Hudson, 2001)

Nearby was a more traditional 6-foot high totem pole carved from cedar. (This show was very well curated, as the placement of these totem-like pieces indicates.) It told a story in symbols, as all totem poles do, but a modern one. A sun figure was on top, represented as a face-like circular mask. Long cedar bark “hair” suggested rainfall, with the water collected in the base, a black wooden chest with faint images of salmon as if seen through translucent water. Between the sun and the water was an Eagle (which is usually on top) and it was doubled over, reaching down to the salmon below. There were a couple of smaller face-like circular images on stems extending from the “shoulders” of the sun. Possibly they represent humanity, and if so, having them the highest images in the totem, higher even than the sun, would further this hierarchical existential portrait. The piece was called “Rainbow People” so that’s a clue (By Tim Paul, 1999).

Near the totems I sneaked a shaky photo of “Cigar Store Indian,”a wooden cigar store Indian with a small black-and-white TV in place of its face, and on the TV were old westerns from the 1950’s – Indians attacking the cavalry and being slaughtered. (Cigar Store Indian. Doug Coffin, 1998)


Etched glass is not a traditional Native artistic medium, yet glass art is pervasive in the Northwest today so it makes sense to see a traditional shamanic amulet represented in glass. The piece is about 12 inches long and 8 inches high, far too large to be an actual amulet, yet the whale-image is covered in animistic spirit-forms. On the reverse side, not shown, is a stylized human being laid out lengthwise, as if it were either an embryo or a mummy. The modern Indian is thus contained entirely within the spiritual images and meanings of the past. Is it the frozen, departed spirit of the Indian, or is it the new Indian spirit about to be reborn from the hard, cold, modern glass? (Shaman's Amulet. Preston Singletary, 2001)


I’m not sure what to make of this large piece representing racks of drying fish, all in aluminum or steel. The circular drying hoops are about 2 meters across and the thousands of tiny metal fish are suspended from the spanning metal "sticks." The drying of the catch on such racks was the “daily bread” and sustenance of traditional people. Now it is merely a geometric abstraction in steel. I’m not sure what it means. (Eric Robertson, The Hub, 2001)

This dish-shaped pattern was called “Pieces of the Puzzle”. It is an attractive piece in its own right, with small images in Northwest Indian colors and motifs from ravens, frogs, whales, and so forth. However others are pure abstractions, just lines and gestures. Yet those abstractions are more than casual “brushstrokes.” Even the simplest of them incorporates the characteristic curves and shapes that define this kind of art, perhaps suggesting how the traditional forms are so deeply embedded in the artist’s being that even a casual gesture reveals them. (Pieces of the Puzzle. Steve Smith, 2004)

There was a surprising amount of anger in this show. Surprising to me, anyway. Of course artists always try to speak from the emotional core of their being, and I would expect reverence for the past, identity confusion, and even ironic statements about modern life. I did not expect the rage, the deep bitterness, expressed in so many pieces. I’m sure that is just my white man’s naivety, but I was genuinely taken aback.

There is also a good deal of humor, but the sense of heartfelt sorrow over what has been lost is palpable. It is a very edgy show in that regard.

One poignant piece seemed un-self-conscious. It had a rather lengthy artist’s statement on the legend card in which she proudly declared that she cared not at all for tradition and was strictly a modern artist. Yet the piece itself was sort of a Chagall-like collocation of dreamy figures and patterns, with small drawings of teepees and huddled people, all on a large scraped hide. (Native Woman's Dreams. Juanita Padhopony, 1994).