Art: Celebrating Native Talent
By John Levesque February 27, 2015
This article originally appeared in the March 2015 issue of Seattle magazine.
New yorkers charles and Valerie Diker, among the foremost owners of American Indian art in this country, have long celebrated intrinsic appeal and visual impact by distinguishing art from artifact. The Dikers carefully curated collection directs viewers to appreciate the visionary creativity and technical mastery of works that fairly demand to be esteemed as much for their aesthetics as for their functionality.
Appropriately, a new Seattle Art Museum exhibition of 122 works owned by the couple is titled Indigenous Beauty: Masterworks of American Indian Art from the Diker Collection. Organized by the American Federation of Arts, the traveling exhibition captures the visual richness in an exhaustive review of objects ranging from sculptural carving to ornate weaving. It continues on to Fort Worth, Atlanta and Toledo, Ohio, after its inaugural presentation at SAM this spring.
This collection is renowned as one of the largest, most comprehensive and exquisite of Native American art in private hands, says SAM Director and CEO Kimerly Rorschach.
The exhibition shows how practitioners learned new techniques, discovered new materials and explored new production methods as they became exposed to different people and cultures.
*Through 5/17/15. Times and prices vary. Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave., Seattle; 206.654.3100; seattleartmuseum.org.
Wait There’s More: The Local Connection
Showing concurrently with Indigenous Beauty at SAM is Seattle Collects Northwest Coast Native Art, an exhibition of 60 works drawn from local collections. It features masks, carvings and textiles by native artists living along the Pacific coast and its inland waterways and looks at the distinctive nature of Northwest coastal art across many media and multiple generations. J.L.