Early in May, a group of curators gathered in the sunny conservation lab at the de Young Museum in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park to examine works that will soon appear in the museum’s Indigenous art galleries. Perched on a worktable was a grapefruit-sized basket by Elizabeth Hickox, a turn-of-the-20th-century basket weaver from Northern California of Wiyot and Karuk ancestry, who remains renowned for her unusual forms and bold patterns — zigzags and lightning bolts rendered in luminous yellows against deep browns and inky blacks.
“These are like Picassos,” said Pimm Tripp-Allen, a Karuk/Yurok scholar and curator, as she admired the contours of the basket. “Though I don’t even want to compare her to Picasso.”
“They are better than Picassos!” interjected Sherrie Smith-Ferri, a curator of Pomo and Miwok heritage. She inspected the delicate woven knob on the basket’s lid, then removed it to reveal a perfect circular pattern within — not a warp or weft out of place.
This exquisite basket, crafted sometime around 1915 out of conifer root and dyed porcupine quills, was acquired by the de Young in 2019 as part of an ongoing effort to augment its collection of Indigenous art. Other recent additions include an elegant bib necklace made from dentalium shells by a contemporary Yurok designer, Shoshoni Gensaw-Hostler, as well as a large canvas by the Karuk painter Brian D. Tripp, who died in 2022, titled “Someday You Might Have to Fight for What You Believe In.” Completed in 1999, the painting features an abstracted human figure surrounded by a black-and-yellow pattern that reads like a modern riff on Hickox’s basket.
The de Young’s recent collecting efforts will come into full view at the end of the month, when its Arts of Indigenous America galleries reopen to the public after a nine-month renovation. Among the changes is a new name. (Previously, the galleries were known as Art of the Americas.) But of far greater importance is the top-to-bottom rethink of how Native works are displayed and contextualized.
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