An exhibit catalog, which this book is, should aim to be more than a description of the exhibit; it should expand beyond the confines of the exhibit space to provide enlightening context and relevant details in an effort to deepen the museum experience. The best museum catalogs accomplish this function but also can serve as a significant contribution to the academic topic covered. In this day when museums and other non-profits feel squeezed to maintain the bottom line, many museums have opted not to create exhibit catalogs, which are famously expensive to produce. Fortunately, the Kennedy Museum of Art at Ohio University chose to create this rather amazing catalog.
I did not attend the exhibit in Flagstaff, the site this Ohio University exhibit traveled to in 2007, so I do not know how the catalog differs from the exhibit. The catalog presents five well-informed and insightful essays, which were likely not included in the exhibit since they would have taken up a lot of plaque space--and in exhibits, one mantra is to limit the reading, since viewers typically are there for immediate, visual understanding and walk away from wordy plaques. That one of the artists, D. Y. Begay, was a co-curator of the exhibit reflects the positive museological trend of the last two decades to provide voices and perspectives of experts from both inside and outside the traditional life being documented. In fact, it appears that the Kennedy Museum invited Begay at the inception of the idea to help conceptualize and structure the project. So, simply, the process in creating both the catalog and the exhibit exemplify the best in collaborative work between museums and their communities.
The catalog has five essays followed by a gallery of plates. Interspersed among the essays are pictures of specific weavings, archival photos, photos of the artists, photos of interview settings, and other illustrations. The short introduction preceding the essays provides a concise framing of the evolution of this collection and the exhibit, while the essays cover different understandings of Navajo weaving tradition, either from an academic viewpoint or from a Navajo weaver’s. There is variety even in the categorized voices: the academic voice is conveyed by the museum curator, a professor, and a museum educator. The Native voices come from Begay (who stands liminally as both artist and organizer) and from one of the weavers, Diane Taylor Beall. Appropriately, no attempt is made to standardize the voice in any of the essays, so the authentic tone and individuality come through clearly. Each of the essays is wonderful, but wonderful in a different way, which makes the catalog that much richer. This exhibit, as the catalog presents it, balances perspectives to allow the viewer multiple ways to understand the weaving and its tradition, even when the perspectives might conflict (although typically they intermesh).
The exhibit and the catalog cover the weaving tradition in up to four generations within three Navajo families in Arizona and New Mexico. (A minor point: the introduction says there are four families of weavers, while Begay in her essay states that the exhibit represents three families and that she is related to each of the families.) A genealogical chart showing the relationships would have helped, especially since one focus is on the transmitted and individualized weaving traditions among women in Navajo families. Being of that kind of mind, I also would have liked to have seen a map, since the represented weavers are not all of one community. But the excellence of the catalog is dimmed only slightly by these points (and I have been told many times by one particular colleague that my love of maps and genealogies is distinctly personal, not widespread).
The essays truly shine in this catalog. Jennifer McLerran, the co-curator of the exhibit and the editor of the book, provides a superb overview of Navajo weaving historically and cross-culturally. She notes that it has always had dual signification for the Navajo and the Western tastes it markets itself to; she makes the strong point that although the weaving tradition has always had a commercial market outside Navajo society, the act and process of weaving has solidified Navajo women with one another, their environment, and their society throughout the generations, and continues to do so. She invokes Dean MacCannell’s tourism theory and the museumization of work, particularly in the trading post outlets for Navajo weaving, but emphasizes that the Navajo women saw such work as allowing them to deepen and perpetuate their tradition. Ultimately she makes the point that weaving has deep meaning within the society, connecting women to women, women to family, to medicine men, to healers, to the land, to the supernatural, and to community. Janet Berlo, a well-known writer on Native American art, reiterates some of McLerran’s points, particularly the Navajo connection to the land through use of plant dyes and the invocation of the Southwest’s distinctive color schemes, and how Navajo women integrate plant, land, family, the woman’s world, and community through the deeply symbolic representations in the textiles. She delineates the aesthetic principles involved in Navajo textiles (primary is dynamic symmetry, but included also are repetition, alternation, movement, and contrast), and includes sections on Navajo abstraction and representation, individual creativity, materials used, and the global/local marketplace. As in McLerran, a consistent thread of her analysis is the importance of the land and environment in the Navajo woman’s conceptualization of her woven work.
The next two essays are by Navajo weavers. First, D. Y. Begay, as co-curator for the exhibit, explains how she became involved in its conceptualization. She also notes the importance of the Kennedy collection (particularly in terms of its mission to serve as an educational resource to perpetuate the Navajo textile traditions). As artist and Navajo, she explains how she is related to each of the Navajo women textile-artists in the exhibit, as understood through a Navajo kinship system. Diane Taylor Beall writes an exquisitely evocative piece connecting Navajo experience to the larger world, but also to land, family, community, and self. Understood in one way at least, her piece embodies in one short, poetic statement all the concepts and details delineated by McLerran and Berlo, and thus serves as a perfect collaborative complement in explicating the art. The final essay is by the educational curator, Donna Delgado, who explains that her job is as mediator between the exhibit and the public, which comes to the exhibit to understand the meanings within and behind the art. She, like the others, explains that the art itself serves as communication on many different levels--within the Navajo community, between Navajo women, within families, between the Navajo and the outside world, between the artist and her complex environment--and her role is to facilitate the communication to her public.
Ultimately and inescapably, the message of the catalog is that weaving truly is life for these women artists. But it is more as well, for if we as outsiders can begin to understand the art, we can understand the fullness of that life. Although a very short book, Weaving is Life provides a very clear understanding of Navajo worldview through its variety of essayistic explications and through its beautifully illustrated plates and illustrations. If you read through this quickly and scan the pictures, even then you will get a glimmer of that understanding. However, if you read it with care and truly look at the pictures with an aim to understand, you will so integrate the Navajo worldview that you will begin comprehending the world in a different way.
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[Review length: 1253 words • Review posted on January 19, 2009]