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According to Utah Museum of Fine Arts curator Whitney Tassie, "When artist Duane Linklater first told me he wanted to engage with the UMFA's American Indian collection to create his salt 11 exhibit, I was a little apprehensive"—in part, due to a perceived trend of artists appropriating Native American objects for their own sake. Linklater has a degree in native studies in addition to a master of fine art degree and, according to Tassie, "repeatedly addresses the ongoing legacy of colonialism in his work." The customary methods of securing these antique objects are under criticism by artists such as Linklater. Additionally, such objects are often presented simply as ethnic artifacts in museum collections. Without authorship, they're treated less as works of art than as something "other," to be looked at simply for their different-ness, and not for the sake of any historical artistic quality. The process through which Linklater approaches these objects from the UMFA collection—re-creating them with a 3-D scanner to be produced in off-white plastic resin—is a process that evokes the Western objectification of Native American art. Taking an object such as Raven Mask (pictured above, right), and looking at it purely for the sake of its structural qualities, without authorship or historical context, and because it belongs to the UMFA, is akin to looking at Linklater's own "UMFA1981.016.002" (pictured above, left) simply for the sake of its formal qualities. It is an object made like any other, and its Native American context should neither be glorified nor subverted. (Ehren Clark)
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Utah Museum of Fine Arts
- 410 Campus Center Drive, University of Utah, Salt Lake City SLC-University / Emigration Canyon Utah 84112
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801-581-7332
- www.umfa.utah.edu/
