Art of the American Indians: The Thaw Collection
In the Dallas Museum of Art’s first Native American exhibition in nearly twenty years, more than 100 works of art from the renowned Eugene and Clare Thaw Collection of American Indian Art at the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, New York, will be on view beginning April 24, 2011, in the Museum’s Chilton Galleries. Art of the American Indians: The Thaw Collection explores the extraordinarily diverse forms of visual expression in Native North America. Organized by geographic culture areas, the works of art in this exhibition date from well before first European contact to the present and celebrate the continuing vitality of American Indian art. This major traveling exhibition reveals the exceptional variety of Native artistic production, ranging from the ancient ivories and ingenious modern masks of the Arctic to the dramatic sculptural arts of the Pacific Northwest, the millennia-long tradition of abstract art in the Southwest, the refined basketry of California and the Great Basin, the famous beaded and painted works of the Plains, and the luminous styles of the Eastern Woodlands, including the Great Lakes. IMAGE SHOWN: Nepcetat Mask, Arctic and Subarctic, ca. 1840–1860, Central Yup’ik, probably Lower Yukon River, Alaska. Wood, swan feathers, old-squaw duck feathers, snowy owl Feathers, fox teeth, sealskin thong, reed, blood, pigment, ochre, and charcoal (feathers and teeth replaced) H: 22 in. W: 33 in. D: 3 3/4 in. Thaw Collection, Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, N.Y. Photograph by John Bigelow Taylor. Object ID: T0231
