Frayed treasures woven together

The trials and tribulations of the Southwest Museum have been widely chronicled in the past decade. If the beloved but chronically underfunded institution wasn’t reeling from the misdeeds of former director Patrick Houlihan -- who in 1993 was convicted of selling valuable baskets, textiles and paintings from the museum’s collection -- it was desperately seeking a sugar daddy who never materialized.

During the past year, most of the news has spun off a controversy over the museum’s possible partnership with the Pechanga band of Luiseno Indians in Riverside County or the Autry Museum of Western Heritage in Griffith Park. The matter was settled in late November, when trustees of the Southwest and Autry voted to merge. Touted as a union of cowboys and Indians, the new arrangement will put the impoverished, 95-year-old Southwest Museum under the umbrella of a 14-year-old institution with a $100-million endowment.

What has been at stake in this long-running drama is the Southwest Museum’s 350,000-piece collection, which is one of world’s best holdings of Native American art and artifacts. But beyond noting the collection’s priceless value and high reputation, the news hasn’t offered much insight into what, exactly, is in the collection or why its endangered status has struck such fear in the hearts of the cultural cognoscenti.

The collection is so vast that it may never be fully displayed or studied, but a hefty new publication delivers a ray of light along with hope for the future. Underway for the past 10 years -- and supported by a patchwork of grants, goodwill and hard work -- this massive research project reveals what some of the fuss is about.

“Southwest Textiles: Weavings of the Navajo and Pueblo” presents more than 250 Native American textiles, photographed in color and described in detail, between the covers of a handsome new book. But behind every book, there’s a story. And this one is particularly complicated.

The textiles were woven as blankets, rugs, tapestries, ponchos and dresses in a profusion of geometric patterns or pictorial narratives. The compositions range from relatively simple stripes to bands of zigzags, checkerboards and diamonds. Over the years, natural dyes were supplemented with yarns in synthetic hues, and the artists’ compositional vocabulary expanded to include flags and maps of the United States.

All these woven works were collected over 100 years by dozens of people who admired them as art or wanted to preserve remnants of a “dying culture” but knew little about the culture itself. Usually buying and gleaning tidbits of information from dealers, the collectors rarely met the weavers. Inevitably, the documentation that accompanied their donations was sketchy at best.

Had the museum been wealthier and more professionally managed when the bulk of its collection was gathered, the staff probably would have filled in some of the gaps. But as the Southwest’s art holdings grew, its financial resources dwindled. Meanwhile, the textiles piled up in the tower of the museum’s Spanish revival building on Mt. Washington. Curators could barely see the weavings, much less do the research required for a scholarly catalog.

All that may change now that the Southwest Museum is merging with the Autry. If the partnership evolves as planned, the textile book will be one in a series of major publications on the Southwest’s collections, museum director Duane King said.

Nonetheless, “Southwest Textiles” is the first and it’s a publishing landmark. It was written by Kathleen Whitaker, who was chief curator at the Southwest Museum from 1991 to 2000 and now directs the Indian Arts Research Center at the School of American Research in Santa Fe, N.M. It contains essays on the colorful characters who founded the museum and shaped its collections, a list of donors and a glossary, along with a page or two on each of the textiles. An accompanying CD-ROM provides an analysis of the fiber and construction of weavings featured in the book and a complete inventory of the museum’s 2,160-piece textile collection.

“This is the first major treatment of our Native American textiles since 1934,” King said, referring to a classic publication on Navajo weaving by Charles Avery Amsden, the museum’s curator and secretary-treasurer from 1927 to 1941. “And this far surpasses that. It’s a definitive work, with as much information as could be put into a single volume.”

The biggest challenge was finding time to do the project, Whitaker said. But far from the only challenge. The book wouldn’t have been published if she and her associates hadn’t solved daunting physical problems and dug up answers to hundreds of questions, or if the Norman F. Sprague Jr. and Mildred E. and Harvey S. Mudd foundations hadn’t provided the funds.

The project started in 1992 with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to photograph 200 of the more than 1,300 Navajo rugs and blankets in the museum’s collection, Whitaker said. As she selected examples to be documented, she became aware of conservation problems throughout the collection of Navajo and Pueblo textiles and decided a thorough survey was needed. A 1994 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services launched the conservation study. During the same year, the Ahmanson Foundation provided funds for a three-year lease of a space in Pasadena, where the staff could spread out the textiles, examine them, recommend cleaning and treatment, and plan a new storage system.

By 1996, work was well underway but far from complete. “We are indebted to the Ahmanson Foundation for extending its grant for three more years,” Whitaker said. With additional help from the NEA and a private donor, the textiles are now rolled on acid-free tubes, wrapped in protective sleeves and stored on metal racks at the museum, where scholars have easy access to them.

While the conservation work was underway, research produced new information about many items in the collection. Chemical tests on fibers and dyes helped curators establish dates of manufacture. Classic publications on Navajo and Pueblo textiles by Amsden and George Wharton James, along with many other printed sources, helped to clear up questions about the works’ origins and provenance.

“We reviewed each museum piece in terms of our records on its cultural origin and date of manufacture, and then compared our findings to information in every previous publication,” Whitaker said, recalling an intense period of fact-checking and discovery.

In many cases, she and her associates had little to go on. “Once something is transferred out of the hands of its maker, the last thing we usually know -- and maybe the only thing -- is who the buyer was and how much was paid for it,” she said. “That’s the way of the world in material culture.”

The book proves her point and can make a present-day collector weep. A Navajo rug with a complex crystal pattern could be purchased for about $1 a square foot in 1911. Relatively simple blankets worn by Navajo women could be had for $5 apiece in 1929. A late 19th century Navajo “eyedazzler” tapestry, with a serrated diamond motif outlined in contrasting colors, cost $30 in 1943.

Other pieces were more highly valued. Charles Fletcher Lummis, who founded the Southwest Museum in 1907, began collecting historic and contemporary Native American textiles in the 1880s and bequeathed 34 of them to the museum. Among the finest is a Navajo poncho made between 1840 and 1859. In a 1925 book by Lummis, he doesn’t reveal the amount he paid, but says he bought the poncho “in 1889, after weeks of diplomacy.” The seller, Martin de Valle, who was governor of Acoma Pueblo, “bought it 30 years earlier from a Navajo war-chief for a lot of ponies and turquoise.”

A Navajo serape from the same period, also purchased from De Valle, “is worth two hundred dollars, and not a dozen of them could be bought at any price,” Lummis wrote. “You can easily reckon that the thread in it cost something, at six dollars a pound, and the weaving occupied a Navajo woman for many months.”

Lummis was a writer, photographer, ethnologist and an editor at The Times who left his home in Chillicothe, Ohio, in 1884 and walked to Los Angeles, arriving the following year and settling into an unorthodox lifestyle. He traveled widely in the Southwest and kept a daily journal, in which he wrote about his passion for traditional Native American textiles.

He had enthusiasm for the Indians he met and what he called their “primitive” existence. The museum’s archives contain a photograph of a barefoot Lummis in a Navajo poncho and another of him posing with a group of Navajos at El Alisol, his home in the Arroyo Seco. Still, like many collectors at the time, he bought and sold textiles according to his taste and was more dilettante than scholar.

The museum’s collection evolved through the generosity of many, including Anita M. Baldwin, daughter of “Lucky” Elias Jackson Baldwin, who built Santa Anita racetrack in Arcadia and named it after her, and Fred Kimpton Hinchman, a Southwest curator who built a huge personal collection and donated 311 textiles to the museum.

The benefactors range from vacationers who picked up souvenirs on their travels through Indian country to those who tailored their acquisitions to a serious purpose. Most of the donors, however, kept incomplete and inaccurate records, especially when it came to the artists themselves.

Amsden, a Harvard-educated archeologist and ethnologist who elevated the museum’s professional stature during his 14-year curatorial tenure, was an expert in Navajo textiles, but even he was rarely involved with the weavers or Navajo society.

“They were interested in the objects, not the people who made them,” Whitaker said.

As a result, the artists’ names have not survived with their work. “Language played a role in that,” Whitaker said. “The collectors couldn’t speak to Indians and couldn’t understand or write their names.”

One thing the researchers could do was add ethnographic names of textiles to the English versions in the book. A Navajo pictorial rug, for example, is a beeldlei; a Hopi white cotton kilt is a kokom vitkuna. “We tried to incorporate the native voice,” she said.

Praising Whitaker’s accomplishment, King said her book “will have a shelf life for centuries.” But she makes no such claim.

“We did as much as we could in the time available,” she said. “But this is such a phenomenal collection, it could be researched forever.”