–Emilie Chedeville with Elizabeth Hutchinson

(editor’s note:  Larry Ahvakana was born in Fairbanks and raised in a North Slope Iñupiat community in Point Barrow.   While it is important to acknowledge the the Inupiat are not a monolithic homogenous culture, it is meaningful to draw comparisons across their communities because of broadly shared cultural traditions and a long history of exchange within their territories. Work remains to be done identifying differences and specificities in the tradition amongst artists and communities. The purpose of this discussion of Ahvakana’s work is to explore how the artist negotiates his commitment to traditional Inupiat aesthetics and the contemporary cosmopolitan idea of the artist.  Along the way, this text will also explore how indigeneity has both created opportunities for Ahvakana to make work and set limitations on his career.  This essay focuses in particular on artworks by Ahvakana which take up Iñupiat dance as their subject matter, not only because this subject connects his work to the drawings in this exhibition, but also because of the important place of Native dancing in both indigenous and non-indigenous ideas about “traditional” Alaska Native culture.)

Larry Ahvakana’s work is clearly inscribed within the tradition of Inupiat ivory carving and customs. He has chosen for main topic the “traditional” Inupiat customs such as whaling, sewing, and dancing, what he sums up in the expression the “emotion of living a subsistence lifestyle.”1 It worths noting that all these diverse activities are all linked with each other despite their variety. Therefore, numerous sculptures of his production represent a Drummer or a Dancer (Fig. 3) both inspired from participants to and performers of the Wolf Dance.  Indeed, dance offers a comprehensive approach to Inupiat culture, because of the diverse fields involved within the danced performances. Dance is not only linked to Inupiaq’s religion, but it is also a gathering after the hunt, and it thus informs the ritual concerning Inupiaq alimentary traditions, and the respect of this people toward the animals they extract their primary vital materials, food or clothes. The trade is also at the center of the Messenger Feast. Dance is all about the natural balance, between different villages, but also between the cosmos and the Human beings, between animals hunt, but killed with the respect of traditions and of the path of their spirit. This comprehensive approach of the Eskimo culture is to be found in our drawing. Indeed, the whole process of whaling is represented. It includes the preparation of the food to the releasing dance for the animal spirits. And dance is not only a peculiar event during the Inupiaq cyclical life, it is its impulse, the one allowing the rest of the year to be developed correctly. The cyclical repartition of Inupiat activities is another reason to the comprehensiveness and essentialization of Inupiaq’s culture thanks to dance. That is probably the reason why Inupiaq and Yupik, and more generally Northern artists insist on this peculiar aspect. For us, it is a ritual ceremony, out of the ordinary. We should consider it now more as the first step for the whole year to come, and as a peculiar, crucial moment of Inupiaq way of life, linked to the ordinary.

Though Larry Ahvakana mainly centers his work on traditional Inupiat way of life, his artistic output is not entirely traditional, in the extent he uses modern techniques and often materials not directly existing in the Inupiat natural resources.

Technical Rules:  the struggle between tradition and modernity

Native art has been first presented to Western audiences through the work of anthropologists, and not by Native people offering their own conception and self-definition. Native culture, which is essentially something living and moving, processing, has been thereby fixed by a theoretical approach. Thus, Native culture moved from the status of something alive and experienced to the status of something past, even disappearing or lost, and as something “objectified”, was hierarchically placed lower than the colonial culture.2  With the raise of Native claims at the post-colonial era, the theoretical approach of Native culture has been reappropriate by several Native peoples, in order to enhance the efficiency of their claims, thanks to an accurate definition of one’s proper Nativeness.

The process of making art is a main factor to determine the “authenticity” of a Native work of art. Indeed, because the edicted rules supervised and dictated the entire process, Native art has to be the result of this precise process, to comply with the expectations underlying the “Native” appellation. It is even more, in the extent that art making process is the ultimate means of transmission of Native culture, because of the comprehensive artistic approach and because artistic creativity is linked to everyday experience. Carving includes indeed singing, storytelling, and embodiment of the legend. It is thus related to whaling and hunting and to religious practices as well. Aware of the destruction of this culture due to Western colonization, many Native artists, or Natives in charge of the artistic productions and rules such as academics of political chiefs, feel the need to transmit and to revivify these traditional artistic practices. It implied thus a conservative approach of artistic creativity, attached to the respect of these compulsory stages.

Many Native artists however, in addition to their claimed Nativeness, have often called to their own right to be modern, as well as a traditional artist, seeing there neither antithesis nor contradiction. This statement is possible also because of the Western origin of the “tradition” concept. Alaskan art has been studied by Susan Fair with the guiding word of “continuity.” Tradition infers a reflexivity, and is often synonym with the abandon of the uses summarized by the term “tradition”, as well as with a nostalgic feeling about it. However, Susan Fair clearly explained that “tradition is not a product” and that “an object or technique is neither traditional nor contemporary”, it is rather “a puzzle-piece in a long process.”3 Even though the elders are responsible of the tradition’s perpetuation, their own interpretation and artistic enactment of this tradition allows a renewal of this tradition, accompanied by the non transmission of certain parts of this culture. We can see here how much the subjectivity, and the embodiment of tradition is an advantage, allowing more flexibility than it first appears. The traditional aspect of Native art mainly comes from the storytelling. This narrative part of artistic creation reveals how much it is a concretization of the mythological stories, and how art for its own sake is a concept nonexistent in Native culture. Native artistic output traditionally concerned functional objects, used and shared by the whole community9, not a possessive approach of the work of art. The communion part of the exhibition’s drawings is clearly expressed by the type used for the faces of the Inupiat performers. A few personal features appear, but the figures are mainly represented by their Inupiaqness.

In addition to that, the main aspect of contemporary Native art is his contact with the Western concept of modernity, whose preeminence in Western culture shaped most of the artworks realized during the last half of the Twentiest Century, and even before. Modernity is generally synonym with adoption of Western visual forms, such as abstraction or new medias, all of them being considered as a betrayal and forgetting of the Native process of making art, from a conservative point of view. The nostalgic approach toward contemporary Native art as the last expressions of a vanishing culture is not only reserved to Native. Obviously, the Western assimilative will has been responsible for a part of the reduction of Native art to his ancient and traditional aspect, stereotypical. The technical question raised the global issue of the authenticity of Native art, for both Native public and non-Native observers.

Modernity is often expressed through the use of new techniques, which enhance the productivity of the artwork. However, the artwork’s subject remains traditional, precisely the one I have stated as marker of Nativeness. Therefore, Larry Ahvakana is often cited as a contemporary artist, because of his use of traditional patterns and subjects materialized thanks to Western techniques, such as bronze casting, or marble carving, both natural resources non existing in his Native land. The simplicity of his work of art seems to be the solution of the struggle between modernity and tradition, by clearly stating his debt to Inupiat traditional art.

The importance of the visibility of Native Identity in the art market

Ahvakana’s approach to his work was shaped while studying in academic art programs, first at the Cooper Union in New York and the Rhode Island School of Design and then at the Institute for American Indian Art (IAIA) in Santa Fe, where he worked closely with Chiricahua Apache sculptor and painter Allan Houser.  Founded in 1962, the IAIA was not only a place supposed to define the characteristics of modern Native art, but also a place whose assimilative function recalls the Foucauldian disciplinary school. Since the birth of the school, the courses present two different parts, a technical one aiming at the mastery of traditional techniques such as glassblowing, sewing or carving, and another part whose economic and managing component is representative of the commodification of Native art and of Nativeness. The business courses intended to transform “art talent” into an economic ressource for both America and the artists. Artistic skills’ exploitation would thereby constitute a viable path to economic self-suffiency for Native artists, as stated by the press release before the opening of the Institute. 4

Added to this entrepreneurial use of Nativeness, the Institute taught a very conservative conception of Native art, despite its claimed openness to modern artistic vocabulary. Several exhibitions organized for the Institute’s students implicitly but neatly shaped the artistic output of the exhibiting students, by imposing an obvious “Native” appearance to the works of art presented. The 1964 Philbrook’s annual American Indian Artists Exhibition specified that works running for the exhibition “should be documentary representational painting depicting an Indian theme” and that all sculpture “must relate to the Indian culture and/or have an American Indian theme.”5  Nativeness becomes thus a strategic tool, useful to create a particularly visible identity on the art market.

Certainly, the incorporation of aesthetic and technical ideas from ones tribal heritage can be a means of self-assertion.  However, it can lead to a reappropriation by the dominant authorities of this Native identity. The question is particularly topical in American and Canadian cases, since both are ancient colonies, settled by colonizing other peoples. America and Canada had thereby to define a proper identity, differing from the mother country, without completely taking on the Native identity, for evident reasons. However, as Heather Igloliorte has shown it, appropriation of Native culture was a particularly efficient means to distinguish the Western American identity from the European one. She recalls how Inuit art was promoted as “symbol of Canadian sovereignty” because of its specificity and of its ability to differential the North American commonwealth from Great Britain.6  The celebration of Native American art in the United States might be thought of as serving a similarly nationalist purpose.

Larry Ahvakana might be said to have made “Nativeness” part of his aesthetic identity.  Born in Alaska, in Fairbanks, he has been staying in his native location until he was seven, when his parents moved to Anchorage. Thereafter he was schooled and trained within the non-Native world, in Anchorage, Alaska State’s capital. We encounter here again a Native artist who has not received a traditional tribal education, in the extent he was trained in this very official Western institution dedicated to Native artists, the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, at the end of the 60s, less than ten years after its opening.

Ahvakana’s describes his work as deeply tied to his indigenous identity.  For instance, he wrote in the catalog of his 1993 retrospective in Alaska State Museum “my work reflects my cultural identity. Growing up Inupiaq in Barrow, Alaska, gave me an understanding of place and being, within a culture based on subsistence and language, with ceremony to identify our place within the Inuit Nation.”8  Ahvakana considers himself as a memory keeper. Because of the transcendental power of art, which supposedly survives its creator, the Iñupiat artist considers that the disappearing Iñupiat culture will only subsist through its artistic production. This is probably the main reason of his very literal interpretation of Inupiat traditional art30. His approach of Native art is almost secularized, since it comes from a very reflexive and historic way, in the need not so much to perpetuate a tradition, but to state its past existence.

At the beginning of his career, Ahvakana did not consider himself a Native artist, but as a simple artist detached from his Native background. In his own words, “just the idea of being an artist was so important to [him]. The idea of Being a Native artist was a step [he] did not want to take until recently.”7  Cultural belongings and self-definition are not something transmissible by blood but rather a subjective state of mind. And in his case, it is also a whole process, requiring a personal work.  According to a lecture he gave in 1975, it was only after his exposure to the example of Southwest Indian pride and claim that he finally could come back to his Inupiaqness. The path is typical in our global world, when otherness, or more precisely another otherness, allows us to define our own otherness and to better understand the mechanism of self-definition. To take on one’s Nativeness is a way for the artist to distinguish himself among other contemporary artists, to reach a subsequent place on the national art market (and perhaps to justify the apparent formal simplicity of his works).  However, when we look closer at the evolution of Ahvakana’s account of his artistic path, we can observe an significant rewriting of his own history.  Whereas in 1975 he stated that he had to chose to take on his Iñupiaqness, since the 1990s he claims his Nativeness as something obvious, natural and innate.

Fitting and defining expectations of “Native” art

Native art, more than being a simple voice of a given Native culture, rather has to be formally distinguishable from non-Native art in the general mindset. In the same vein, Native artist becomes the exemplary character of his Native people. Thus, an Iñupiat artist amounts to the whole Iñupiaq tribe. Essentialism is the main theoretical factor underlying Native art, when it is addressed to non Native. Jennifer Kramer has shown the consequences for Native artists.9  Native art has to be recognizable in itself, to claim its Nativeness directly and obviously, and to specify this Nativeness.

Ahvakana, like many Native artists of his generation, he chose to return to his culture in his work after passing through the Western art world.  As one critic wrote, “His ability to flourish as an artist necessitated his departure from Alaska, both to learn the arts he now excels at and to find an audience for what he does.”10  Thus the decision to make work that is recognizably “Iñupiat” might be seen as a marketing decision.  It implies that Native contemporary art has to assimilate the Western rules of art to comply with the expectations of the public’s art market. Contemporary Native art is sometimes the direct heir of touristic productions in this approach of Nativeness. Because it was the economic value of art that guided the artist and not his personal expression, some nostalgic though realist critics have stated how much the art market had been responsible for an uniformization of visual codes in Native art.11

The taking into account of the public’s expectations has been the object of a law, aiming at guarantying the quality and authenticity of the consumer’s buying. In 1990, the Indian Arts and Crafts Act was supposed to promote “the economic welfare of Indian tribes and the Indian wards of the government through the development of Indian arts and crafts and the expansion of the market for the products of Indian art and craftsmanship.”12  It imposed some criteria, related to the process of making.gHowever this law was directed in the consumer’s favor rather than in Native artist’s. The taking on of Nativeness also characterized the official policies, at the State level.

Alaska as patron of “Native Art”:  the Percent for Art program

As a response to the National Endowment for the Arts program, Alaska State passed a law in 1975 aiming at dedicating a “Percent for Art” in the general construction costs of official structures. With specific rules for both artist and commissioner, the Percent for Art is a means to publicly exhibit one’s work and to respond to the global tendencies of official contemporary art of the 1970s.13 The key word for the program is continuum. Intended to be praised by the general public and by artistic connoisseurs, the Percent for Art is thus a means for the representation of Alaskan people at different levels, regionally as well as nationally. The State indeed prefers representations of Alaska’s essence, among them its landscapes, its animals or its traditional activities. An iconic commission is Amason’s sculpture Welcome to my world, commissioned for Anchorage airport. It clearly states the specificity of Alaskan identity to the outsider and its place within the multicultural American society. The pluralistic essence of the American society, and its visibility was one the claimed goals of the Art in Public Places program, at the national level, as John Beardsley stated it “we come to recognize that our society is pluralistic and that competing social, political and religious values coexist within it.”14 On the contrary, at the State level of Alaska, the multiculturalism is considered as a more global context, into which Alaska has a role to play. We find here again an essentialist approach to Nativeness, because of its necessary efficiency and exemplification. The works of art have to be neither too traditional, nor too modern, in order to be praised by the broadest public possible and to represent the proper essence of Alaska. Dance is well represented among the different commissions and can thereby be seen as a constitutive and specific character of the Alaskan way of life, from the Native point of view. Therefore it is not only an essentialist projection of Western scholars. To choose a ceremonial dance as representative of a spirit to be displayed in an official location is far from irrelevant, as dance is simultaneously an important form of cultural preservation and appealing to tourists.

Location is the major stake when art is supposed to address a specific statement, because it determines and conditions its audience.  Situating Native art in public spaces gives it a peculiar significance and is a means to express the Native voice, which is so often mute or unheard.   Ahvakana is one of the first artist having been commissioned a public work for the Alaskan State in 1974. His sculpture Barrow Ceremonial Dance (Fig. 9) is located in the lobby of Alaska State Court, since its creation. This work of art claims its traditional inscription, since it includes within the wall nineteenth-century masks and contemporary dresses. Ahvakana seemed to have thus be willing to show a comprehensive view of Inupiaq culture and temporality, by linking its past to its contemporary life. The political meaning is due to the location of the work of art, and of its inscription in one of the city’s most disciplinary locations.

He has also completed commissions for the Anchorage Municipality, such as the sculpture Drummer and Dancers Welcome Dance (Fig. 10), dated 1997, displayed on the courtyard of Muldoon Elementary School in Anchorage. It is here again the Percent for Art Program. This particular work of art broaches the question of self-representation, but also the question of transmission of, and education within a given culture. School is indeed a major site for the perpetuation of a culture, and for the objectification of the specific Alaskan cultural identity.  In addition to decorating schools and courthouses in Alaska, Ahvanaka’s work has been included in several exhibitions of the State Department’s Art in Embassies program.16

The Percent for Art Program is grounded in the concept of art as an means of improving everyday life. This theory is officially stated by the Alaska State Council on the Arts, in the statement of program goals, among which we find: “to offer a variety of visual experiences in varied styles, methods and medium to further humanize our man-made surroundings with the artistic statements of living artists; and to provide a supportive working environment and the opportunity for personal creative accomplishment.”15

“Nativeness” and cultural revitalization

Alaska believes that art can not only benefit humanity in general but also help spur Native cultural revival by offering opportunities to create work for official commissions.  Ahvakana’s turn toward Iñupiat aesthetics after his time in East Coast art schools was coincided with his undertaking community responsibilities.  For example, he often participates to his village’s whaling activity, and regularly performs with a dance group.16 It echoes thereby his artistic production. His two different activities are clearly entwined and nurtured by each other.

Indigenous cultural revival has been dependent on colonial forces, including the objectification of Native culture and the establishment of colonial institutions such as schools.  Because of this, aspects of traditional practice, such as the integration of artistic production and spiritual life,  have been interrupted.   At the same time, we might see the influence of artistic revivals on community revitalization, because the recovery of artistic traditions is an essential component of the recovery of the ceremonial practices to which art was historically tied.  While colonial audiences would see art objects as autonomous aesthetic objects, Native artists can return to an understanding of the creative process as interconnected with other means of asserting and renewing indigenous identity.  In turn, the revival of cultural rituals favors the renewal and improvement of Native art. Because Iñupiat art fundamentally is an art meant to be experienced, part of a broader process, it must  be included within the whole everyday ritualized life. Because of continuing process and of the entwining of artistic and everyday activities, both nurture reciprocally.

Cultural revival allows also a rediscovery of the natural resources of one’s Native territory and can support struggles for land rights.  especially a Indeed a more respectful treatment of for instance a stone or wooden sculpture by Ahvakana or one of his peers, thanks to ancient carving traditions, results in an understanding of the natural balance. It is here a back to the very roots of Native artistic activities, to represent the cosmos balance between human beings, and between nature and mankind.

 

[1] L. Ahvakana. Ahvakana: A Retrospective / New Work.  Anchorage: Anchorage Museum of Art, 1994: 4.

[2]  J. Kramer. . Switchbacks: Art, Ownership, and Nuxalk National Identity . Vancouver, 2006: 49

[3]  S. Fair. “Traditional and Contemporary Native Art: Inventions, Opinions, Mysterious Disappearances”. J. Decker (ed.). Icebreakers . Anchorage, 1999: 104

[4] Joy L. Gritton. The Institute of American Indian Arts: modernism and U.S. Indian policy . Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000: 87

[5]  American Indian Artists Exhibition , 5-3 May 1964, Philbrook Art Center. Call for Entries, IAIA Archives. Cited in JoyL. Gritton. The Institute of American Indian Arts: modernism and U.S. Indian policy . Albuquerque, 2000: 119

[6] H. Igloliorte. “Arctic Culture/ Global Indigeneity”. L. Jessup (et al. ) Negotiations in a Vacant Lot: Studying the Visual in Canada . McGill UP, 2014: 158

[7] Larry Ahvakana in Nathaniel Tarn, Roger Lang, Bill Vaudrin, Richard Burmeister, and Larry Ahvakana speak at the Native Arts and Literature Conference held in Sitka , Alaska in December 1975 (online record). (20”10′)

[8] Larry Ahvakana, cited in J. Decker (ed). Icebreakers: Alaska’s most innovative artists . Anchorage: Decker Art Services, 1999: 118.

[9] J. Kramer. Switchbacks: Art, Ownership, and Nuxalk National Identity . Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006: 56

[10] P. Sims. “Lawrence Ahvakana and the Art of Tradition”. Ahvakana: A Retrospective / New Work.  Anchorage, 1994: 3

[11] Joe David. “Notes on Masks”. R. Wright and K. Bunn-Marcuse (ed). In the Spirit of the Ancestors . Contemporary Northwest Coast Art at the Burke Museum . Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013: 63

[12] M. A. Caro. “Owning the Image: Indigenous Arts since 1990”. Manifestations: New Native Art Criticism . Santa Fe: Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, 2011: 57

[13] About the official artistic policy in Alaska see M. B. Jones. “Public Art in Alaska”, in J. Decker (ed.). Icebreakers. Anchorage: 1999: 79-82

[14] J. Beardsley. Art in Public Places: a survey of community-sponsored projects supported by the National Endowment for the Arts . Washington D.C.: Partners for Livable Places, 1981: 9

[15] Alaska State Council on the Arts, online: https://www.eed.state.ak.us/aksca/visual.html

[16] http://art.state.gov/ArtistDetail.aspx?id=137488

[17]  P. Sims. “Lawrence Ulaaq Ahvakana and the Art of Tradition”. Larry Ahvakana . Anchorage, 1993: 3