Heard Museum Marks 75th Anniversary

HEARD MUSEUM TURNS 75 PREMIER SHOWPLACE FOR INDIAN CULTURES, ARTS & ARTISTS

PHOENIX'S HEARD MUSEUM weaves together many threads - like catclaw braided in a basket, like clay coils in a pot, like wool on a loomexplaining native cultures, fostering a market in Indian arts and nurturing the careers of the artists themselves.

This year, the museum celebrates its 75th year.

Consider the case of fifth-generation Navajo weaver Barbara Ornelas, whose career was launched in the artist studios of the Heard Museum in downtown Phoenix. She had come to Phoenix from the reservation originally seeking a business degree, but in her homesickness she rediscovered her own roots and purpose. Recognizing her artistry, the Heard's curators offered her studio space, where she alternately worked and explained her art to curious visitors.

"I owe a lot to the Heard. It really helped start my career," said Ornelas, a Tucson weaver who has helped redefine attitudes toward the intricately woven Navajo rugs.

Her story underscores the vital role the Heard Museum has played in encouraging both Indian art and artists, while building relationships with modern tribes. The Heard's collection of 35,000 objects offers a glimpse of both ancient traditions and evolving reactions to the modern world-all the outgrowth of a wealthycouple's fascination with other cultures coupled to an insatiable appetite for collecting. Here, displays of 1,000year-old ancestral Puebloan pots adorned with abstractions of birds sit alongside colorful contemporary reinterpretations of ancient themes. The “oohs” and “aahs” of tourists and questions of the children suggest that perhaps Americans stand ready to appreciate the deep lessons of the ancient cultures they once tried to exterminate. Phoenix pioneers Dwight and Maie Heard, who turned a collector's passion and a real estate developer's fortune into a celebration of Indian art and culture, would no doubt love seeing what their passion has wrought as the market for Indian art has grown. Artworks that once sold cheaply from reservation trading posts now can draw six-figure prices from avid art collectors, and the museum the Heards founded to house their personal collection has turned to promoting both an understanding of modern Indian cultures and helping to promote the careers of hundreds of individual Indian artists.

Ornelas, a highly skilled Navajo weaver, demonstrates the link between the museum and working artists. She grew up on the Navajo Indian Reservation in New Mexico among the legendary Two Grey Hills weavers. But she thought weaving was a dying art, a stone tied to the ankle of a drowning culture. So she went away to boarding school and did not tell her friends that her mother and grandmother had taught her to weave.

"I was real rebellious, and I didn't care for weaving," she said softly. "My grandmother said, 'You're going to be one of the good ones.' I'd say, 'I don't want to do this. Weaving is old people's work.'" So she graduated from boarding school and headed for Phoenix, resolved to get a business degree. "I lasted about a month, and then called home and said, 'I'm too lonely and sad; I can't make it here.' But my dad said, 'Why don't you keep a loom in your house? Maybe it would help. '" She set up a loom and resumed weaving rugs. When she met her future husband, he loved her work. “I began to see weaving through his eyes - as something special, like a gift to me from my grandmother. From there, I started to find the spiritual balance from my work. I started to find meaning in it.” She married and had children, deciding she would be a weaver so she could work at home. But when she took her rugs to galleries in Scottsdale, she said they laughed and told her they only bought rugs through the trading posts. But her rebellious spirit persisted until she finally convinced one gallery to take a rug on commission. It sold quickly.

Someone suggested she take her rugs to the Heard Museum Guild's annual Indian Fair and Market. The museum then offered to feature her rugs in the Heard Museum Shop and Bookstore. The Heard also offered her a studio as a guest artist, where she spent several years making rugs and talking patiently to curious tourists while her children wandered about the museum under the watchful eye of the museum staff and other artists.

“It was like a family,” she recalled fondly. “We were all just starting out, just getting our bearings in the artist world. Even to this day, we see each other and just remember what we had at the Heard.” In the years since, Ornelas has won the coveted “best of show” at the museum's annual market. She and her daughter, Sierra, provided much of the interpretation for a recent exhibit on weaving, in keeping with the Heard's commitment to utilize a first-person voice and the expertise of working artists. She's just one of dozens of Indian artists who have played that role, including Gail Bird, Yazzi Johnson, Maynard White Owl Lavadour, Kay Walkingstick, Terrol Dew Johnson and Jody Folwell. The Heard relies on basketmakers, jewelers, potters, beaders, painters and other artists to review, interpret and display the huge collection.

Distinguished Native American artists often select work to display for special shows. In addition, whenever the shows, conferences or exhibits bring artists to the museum, the curators seek their help in interpreting the items in the collection. Often, potters or weavers can recognize the clan or family or individual that created a particular piece.

Museum Director Frank H. Goodyear Jr. hopes that kind of relationship with Indian artists, communities and cultures will animate the Heard's next 75 years.

“This is a living museum, a gathering place,” he said, as he presides over the museum's determined effort to expand its relationships with the 21 federally recognized tribes in Arizona and others across the West. “It's part of who we are as Americans, with lessons to be learned and contributions that deserve to be celebrated.” The Heard tries to keep that celebration current by constantly shifting and rearranging its exhibits. Key exhibits include a large room where each of the 21 Indian tribes explains its history and culture, the masterworks exhibit representing each culture through art pieces going back 1,000 years, a hands-on exhibit for children, regular showcasing for one or two artists and rotating exhibits mingling modern and ancient masterworks.

One of the most haunting exhibits examines the impact of the boarding schools originally established by reformers to “save” Native Americans by instilling the dominant culture and language. Recorded, first-person recollections—all full of sorrow, laughter, pride and loss—dominate the display of uniforms, dorm rooms, photographs, journals and other artifacts. A line of speakers provides commentary. “One night when it was almost finished and before we opened it to the public, I spent an hour looking at it,” recalled Goodyear. “It’s the only exhibit in my life which moved me to tears. It’s a tragic story, but in the end it’s a triumphant story.” Dr. Ann Marshall, the Heard’s director of collections, education and interpretation, recalled, “One Navajo woman came up to me and said, ‘Now I understand more about my father and why he is as he is.’ They didn’t want their children to go through that and so didn’t teach their children their native language. Sometimes, it’s hard for them to express the sorrow they’ve gone through.” Such a mingling of triumph, loss and insight runs throughout the Heard’s collection, the history of which has mirrored the shifting perceptions of Indian art and culture.

Certainly, when Dwight and Maie Heard moved to Phoenix in 1895 in hopes the dry climate would ease Dwight’s lung ailments, most Americans viewed Indians as primitives, their cultures reduced to curiosities. Heirs to a fortune spawned by what became True Value Hardware stores, the Heards became leading citizens in the sleepy farm town of 4,000, built along the maze of canals abandoned in the 1400s by the Hohokam Indians.

The Heards bought 7,500 acres at the base of South Mountain and planted alfalfa, citrus trees and cotton and assumed their civic duty in an era in which wealth carried obligations of service. They moved in 1903 to Casa Blanca, a house they built at Central Avenue and Monte Vista Road in one of the neighborhoods Heard developed. They supported the Boy Scouts, Camp Fire Girls, YWCA and Woman's Club of Phoenix and donated land where the Phoenix Art Museum stands today for the city's first Civic Center.

Dwight Heard also became a major Phoenix-area developer and political force. He lobbied for the Salt River Project, published and owned the dominant Arizona Republican newspaper (which later became The Arizona Republic) and ran unsuccessfully for governor in 1924.

The Heards also undertook grand tours and collecting trips throughout the Southwest and then on to Africa and the Middle East. At first, they merely brought back curios to show their friends, filling their home with artifacts. Increasingly fascinated, they hired collectors, held open houses and stored a collection that grew eventually to 3,000 items. Next door to their home, they built a museum for their collection and opened it in 1929, just months after Dwight died at age 60 of a heart attack.

The museum remained Maie Heard's passion, in a life brimming with good works, until her death at age 83 in 1951.

The museum has grown ever since. Its collections expanded 10fold and its exhibit space mushroomed from 12 rooms around a tree-shaded courtyard to 138,000 square feet with an education center, artist studio, library and archives, 350-seat auditorium and assets exceeding $34 million. The $6 million annual operating budget relies heavily on donations and grants and the labors of 700 volunteers and docents.

The museum's anniversary celebration begins June 13 with free admission, birthday cake, history exhibits, performances by champion hoop dancers, tours, artist demonstrations and a special commemorative gift for each visitor while supplies last. A redesign of the Heard's signature exhibition will open at the end of the anniversary celebration in spring 2005. The planned exhibit represents the latest evolution in the museum's philosophy, which has both led and reflected the public's growing appreciation of Indians' profound sense of spirit, place and artistry. Guided by Native Americans from many different cultural groups, the new display will showcase 2,000 of the finest pieces from the Heard's collection.

A visit to the Heard's 18,000-square-foot gallery will offer a firstperson voice that speaks to a sense of place and of home and an introduction to the cultures of the Southwest-including the people of the New Mexico pueblos, the Colorado Plateau and central mountain region, the Colorado River and Sonoran Desert. The exhibit turns on the words of the artists, makers and keepers of the culture who honor the past without being confined by or marginalized by it.

So a delicate, richly decorated 800-year-old Chaco mug sits next to a ceramic vessel by contemporary Pueblo potter Lucy Lewis. A blocky, century-old Black Nataska Hopi kachina intended to teach little girls about the sacred spirits of their culture stands next to an intricate carving of the same spirit by modern Hopi carver Brian Honyouti. A Navajo chief blanket, also 100 years old, made with the muted colors of natural dyes is draped alongside weaver Evelyn Joe's contemporary design inspired by those same patterns.

Meanwhile, a new generation of guest artists works in the Heard's artist-in-residence studio, updating a tradition so ancient that the flurry of change in the Heard's 75 years seems but a moment.That working arrangement deeply satisfies Barbara Ornelas, who often weaves for more than 10 hours a day, laboring until perhaps 4 A.M., the still hours, when a slumbering world cannot overwhelm the spell of the loom. She weaves and thinks of her grandmother and perhaps of Spider Woman, who gave the People the gift of weaving by gathering colors from the four sacred mountains and putting lightning in the stick and rain in the string.

Ornelas' daughter, now at the University of Arizona, wants to make movies. But her 20-year-old son wants to be a weaver, the sixth generation of Two Grey Hills weavers.She thinks he will do well. After all, last year he won the "best of show" award at the Heard Museum Guild Native American Student Art Show and Sale. Al

Peter Aleshire of Phoenix has written four history books about the Apache Indians, but says he learns something new and surprising every time he visits the Heard Museum.