The Arts of Transformation in the Americas

The Arts of
Transformation in
the Americas

Faculty
Christopher B. Donnan Moche Masks from Northern Peru
Janet Brody Esser Mi Otro Yo, My Other Self. Mexican Masks Today: Myth, Status and Identity
William Fitzhugh Masking Traditions of the Circumpolar North
Jill Leslie McKeever Furst Transformation, Identity, and Spirit in Ancient America
Peter Roe Social Masks: Managed Identity and Gender among Native South Amerindians
Polly SchaafsmaTransformation, Travel, and Images in Stone

Synopsis of Lectures

Moche Masks from Northern Peru
Christopher B. Donnan

Moche civilization flourished on the north coast of Peru between 100 and 800 CE. Although the Moche had no writing system, they left a vivid artistic record of their beliefs and activities, including numerous portrayals of individuals with human bodies and animal faces. Are these depictions of humans wearing masks, or supernatural creatures that combine human and animal attributes? Several masks have recently been excavated in Moche tombs. These, combined with careful study of the way masks are depicted in Moche art, and systematic analysis of the Moche masks in collections throughout the world today, provide fascinating insights about the use of masks in Moche society.

Christopher B. Donnan, Ph.D. is the longtime director of UCLA's Fowler Museum of Cultural History. He is best known for his contributions over more than 35 years to our knowledge of ancient Peruvian art and archaeology, especially of the great Moche civilization. Dr. Donnan earned his doctorate in 1968 at the University of California at Berkeley. He was responsible for three major museum exhibitions: Moche Art of Peru (1977), also the topic of a documentary film for which he was principal investigator; Ancient Art of Peru (1992); and the most famous, Royal Tombs of Sipan, for which he served as co-curator with his Peruvian colleague, Walter Alva. Dr. Donnan has published more than 85 articles and books on ancient Peruvian art and archaeology. His most recent works include a detailed study of Moche fine-line vase painting and the documentary film, Eduardo the Healer, about the late Peruvian folk healer Eduardo Calderon. Dr. Donnan is writing a book on portraiture in Moche art. In recognition of his contributions to Peruvian art and prehistory, the president of Peru recently awarded Dr. Donnan the Great Cross of the Order of Merit for Distinguished Services.

Mi Otro Yo, My Other Self. Mexican Masks Today: Myth, Status and Identity
Janet Brody Esser

This presentation explores Mexican masks and mask-drama as they exist today among several regional cultures. Ties to past and present will be examined as will the multi-valent role masks play in small-scale, traditional Mexican societies. In large-scale societies, as for example in the case of European beaux-arts balls or various carnival celebrations, the mask is perceived as a disguise which confers upon the wearer the right to engage in licentious and/or libidinous behavior while preserving anonymity.

In many small-scale societies, however, Mexican village and barrio societies among them, masks serve to reveal rather than conceal, and to expand and expound upon roles, statuses, and relationships to living and dead, present and past. Representations of "old" men and women, of black men and women, of beautiful men and women, of ugly men and women, of priests, of devils of every description, and more, will all be discussed and analyzed in relation to village social and political structure and to religious, mythic, and secular beliefs. As the shaman reveals knowledge to those who know how to hear, Mexican mask-drama is filled with vital information.

Blond and pink mask, carved wood, represents Conquistador, Highlands of Guatemala, used in folk dances.

Since June, 1999, Janet Brody Esser has been professor emerita of Latin American Art History and associate director emerita of the Center for Latin American Studies at San Diego State University, where she has taught since 1975. She has a Ph.D. in Art History from UCLA. Since 1970, she has been deeply involved in field and archival research on Mexican village ceremonial arts with an emphasis on masks and mask-drama in the present and in the historical and mythical past.

In addition to a long teaching career, Dr. Esser has published numerous books, monographs, and articles and has presented many lectures in international, national, and regional symposia and conferences. Her publications include a study on Mexican masks, Máscaras ceremoniales de los tarascos de la sierra de Michoacán, published in Mexico City by el Instituto Nacional Indigenista and Behind the Mask in Mexico, published by the Museum of New Mexico Press. The latter publication was winner of the 1988 Hubert B. Herring Memorial Award for the best book of the year on Latin America. She was senior consultant for the exhibition of the same name, which opened at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe and subsequently traveled to the Heard Museum in Phoenix.

Brown mask with black hair, carved wood, represents Conquistador, Highlands of Guatemala, used in folk dances.

At SDSU, Dr. Esser introduced a number of courses on Latin American art history into the curriculum. She serves on the board of the Latin American Arts Committee of the San Diego Museum of Art and recently was invited by that institution to deliver a lecture on the history of Mexican folk art in conjunction with the exhibition, El Alma del Pueblo. She is currently researching the role of the Spanish Inquisition in the evolution of Mexican mask-drama.

Masking Traditions of the Circumpolar North
William Fitzhugh

The masking traditions of northern peoples are discussed from Paleolithic times to the modern day, using archaeological and ethnographic examples of northern Europe, Siberia, Japan, and northern North America. Special emphasis is given to the changing role and meaning of masking in ceremonies and decorative ethnic arts as northern peoples shifted from hunting to domestic animal production to tourism and art market production.

Northwest Coast Shaman's mask, wood with human hair, 19th century.

A central question will consider whether "meaning" derived from ethnographic and historical masking traditions is "non-transferable" or if it can be used to inform traditions of the ancient past.

William W. Fitzhugh is director of the Arctic Studies Center and curator at the National History Museum, Smithsonian Institution. He earned his Ph.D. in anthropology from Harvard University in 1970.

A specialist in circumpolar anthropology and archaeology, Dr. Fitzhugh has spent more than 30 years studying and publishing on Arctic peoples and cultures in northern Canada, Alaska, Siberia, and Scandinavia. His archaeological and environmental research has focused on the prehistory and paleoecology of northeastern North America, especially on the problem of Eskimo and Indian cultural development across the forest-tundra boundary in Labrador.

Tlingit mask representing the Sea Bear Monster, 19th century, wood and fur.

Transformation, Identity, and Spirit in Ancient America
Jill Leslie McKeever Furst

Masking is an ancient tradition in the Americas, and it served many functions. Sometimes a mask created an interior state which allowed a spirit to share the human body for a time. It conferred a new identity on the wearer, and with it, powers to heal or to descend into the underworld. Or, it revealed the true nature hidden beneath the human veneer. In some cultures, a mask transformed a corpse into a generic and inert being that could not re-enter this world. A mask might establish a link between human and spirit or animal realms.

	Masks took many forms. They were worn, suspended, sewn on clothing and headdresses, enlarged, or miniaturized. Whatever its size, shape, or material, a mask was the external appearance that embodied spirit and held the power of what it represented.
Precolumbian hollow clay sculpture of a dog wearing a human mask, 100 BCE -100 CE, from Colima, western Mexico.

Jill Leslie McKeever Furst earned her doctorate from the University of New Mexico. Currently she is professor of Art History at Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia, and consulting scholar in the American section of the University of Pennsylvania Museum. She also holds an appointment at the University of Pennsylvania School of Dental Medicine, where she teaches about conceptions of the human body in Eastern and Western cultures.

Dr. Furst has written numerous articles on the precolumbian manuscripts painted in the State of Oaxaca, Mexico, and on the relationships of religious ideology to natural history among the ancient Aztecs. She is author of The Natural History of the Soul in Ancient Mexico, and co-author of North American Indian Art. Her most recent books include one concerned with 19th century Mojave ceramics and another with Aztec beliefs about death and the afterlife.

Social Masks: Managed Identity and Gender among Native South Amerindians
Peter Roe

Societies like those in native South America, both in the highlands and in the lowlands, display a careful management of self-identity, social masks which everyone wears that hide one's true feelings. Coupled with a value on taciturnity, the reluctance to express emotions verbally, this construction of a "public face" vitiates the need for real masks, although the later are present in a bewildering variety of media and forms.

Claude L�vi-Strauss long ago recognized that between the unmediated, but managed, public face and the actual artifactual mask lies elaborate face painting, a network of intricate designs that also transforms the unique physiognomy into a rule-bound social mask. Such "mask cultures" draw upon cosmology to generalize the specific, no more so than in the complex choreography of the interaction of the two peoples of society: men and women through the masks of gender.

Chimu culture, gold funerary mask, Peru, circa 1100 CE.

This paper addresses the cultural continuum from the expressionless face to face painting and then gourd and feather mosaic masks of the Shipibo and Tapirap� of the Amazon to the transculturative metal helmet masks of the La Diablada dance of Bolivia, all from the author's collections and fieldwork.

Peter G. Roe is past-president of the Latin American Indian Literatures Association and a founding member of the Advisory Board of the international Society for Astronomy and Culture. Since 1993, he has been a professor at the University of Delaware.

Dr. Roe's interests center around the inter-relationships between material culture and ideology, including aesthetic anthropology (visual, verbal, and performative arts), pre-industrial technology, cosmology, and ethno-archaeoastronomy. His most recent book is Arts of the Amazon (1995), a study of lowland feather art, and his latest book chapters appear in the volume Ta�no: Pre-Columbian Art and Culture from the Caribbean (1997). His latest articles are in the Proceedings of the International Congress of Caribbean Archaeology (1999). Since 1998, he has contributed monthly special features in Spanish for the Puerto Rican newspaper El Mundo.

Spirit of Place Mask, Wayana, from Brazil, framework with wax and raffia, 20th century, contemporary.

Transformation, Travel, and Images in Stone
Polly Schaafsma

To quote Ruth Bunzel (1932:825): "The katcinas are very intimate and affectionate supernaturals. They like pretty clothes and feathers; they like to sing and dance."

Colorful masked dances, or kachina dances, are an ongoing source of delight and pleasure in Pueblo life. The beautiful aspect of the kachina complex, however, is balanced with a dark side, as the mask itself is closely associated with both danger and death.

Pueblo stories pinpoint the mask as the source of the power of kachina ceremonies, as they also describe the risks inherent in the game of masking. This lecture examines the origins of these associations, the symbolism of and kinds of death, as well as the types of transformation linked with kachinas.

Polly Schaafsma has conducted archaeological research in the Southwest since 1961, with a focus on rock art. A selected list of research projects includes rock art studies in the Navajo and Cochiti Reservoirs with the Laboratory of Anthropology, Museum of New Mexico, 1961-1967; research on the Donald Scott photographic files on Utah rock art, Peabody Museum, Harvard University, 1968-1969; followed by field survey of major Utah sites for the Utah State Park Commission and Governor's Commission on Historic Sties, 1970.

In 1971, she conducted a state-wide survey of New Mexico rock art under a grant from the State Planning Office. Recently she has participated in a joint rock art research project between the Office of Cultural Affairs, Museum of New Mexico, and INAH, Chihuahua, Mexico

From 1985 to the present, she has been a Research Associate at the Laboratory of Anthropology/Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, Museum of New Mexico. In addition, since 1989 she has been engaged as a seminar leader and instructor for numerous rock art field seminars for the School of American Research, Museum of New Mexico, Crow Canyon Archaeological Center, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, and the Four Corners School of Outdoor Education.