My friend and I went to the SAM (Seattle Art Museum) yesterday, in hopes of getting into the Picasso exhibit, but on arrival we found that they only had tickets for a timed entry five hours ahead. So we poked around the regular galleries instead since it had been a while since I’d seen those. This will shock you, I know, but I love the oldest art the best.
They have several rooms with Native art, but there was a new addition since I’d been there last. Behind the Scenes: The Real Story of the Quileute Wolves is, as you can probably guess, Twilight-related. On the one hand, yay, teaching Twilight fans some real cultural information! On the other, I wasn’t sure about the museum’s choice to display primarily wolf-related objects. It felt to me like they’d gotten fans’ attention, and then tried to drag it somewhere good…and then stopped halfway. Can’t we have some non-wolf-obsessed pieces of art, too? There were other parts to the culture too!
The other thing that caught my attention was some small baskets made by Quileute to sell in Forks and other Twilight-related gift shops. Those who know me from my college days know that I did my master’s thesis on archaeological basketry on the Columbia Plateau. (Eastern Washington and Oregon primarily, following the Columbia river over to the Rockies.) It’s even online, which is an endless source of amusement to me. I have made my academic mark in a small and insignificant way!
Anyway, it was an interesting sense of history repeating itself, because in the timeline of baskets I studied, when the Europeans arrived out here you suddenly get all kinds of new styles of baskets (like tea cups, and other quite interesting juxtapositions) because the basketmakers were creating them to sell to Europeans. The baskets at the SAM were examples of that happening once more for the twilight fans. I think any renewed interest in Native crafts is awesome, whatever causes it.
There was one that bothered me a little, though. It was an exact replica of a dreamcatcher that Jacob gave Bella in the movie, or so said its tag. (I haven’t seen the movies). While I think that artists should do exactly what they want–commercial, or non-commercial, traditional or modern–a careful copy of a fakey Hollywood prop based on a terrible book just seemed frustrating to me.
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