THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
Every visitor to Norwich should visit the Sainsbury Centre. The building itself is a delight and one of the first major public buildings designed by Norman Foster. There is also Robert and Lisa Sainsbury's eclectic collection that forms the foundations of the museum's holdings. It spans time and space, including items from around the world and across the millennium. Not planning a visit to Norwich? The current exhibits provide reasons to go right now.
Empowering Art: Indigenous Creativity
The primary exhibition is Empowering Art: Indigenous Creativity and Activism from the North American Northwest Coast (until July 30). It explores an artistic tradition that expresses the heart of a people and their deep interconnectedness to their environment. It also celebrates their resilience and strength.
The exhibit is visually stunning. On entering the museum, you're greeted by a towering totem pole that extends down to the level below and up towards the ceiling. It is one of the most recognizable elements of the Northwest coast culture. As one descends to the exhibit on the lower level you enter another world, one where the sea meets the forest, a bountiful world that provided the resources for the development of rich cultural traditions. All of the arts, carving, painting, dance, music, and weaving, are interwoven to maintain a people's relationship with the world that sustains it.
Empowering Art exhibits incredible examples of all of these genres. Masks used in ceremonial dances that seem almost alive in their portrayal of human attributes. Exquisite Chilkat blankets made on hand looms from mountain goat wool and cedar bark. Baskets so finally woven that they are watertight. The wood carving is incredibly detailed. And every medium uses the same vocabulary of stylized representations of the beings with whom the nations share the world. They symbolize the clans that define and delineate them including bear, eagle, raven, otter, orca and salmon.
While beautiful, the object of this art isn't just decoration. It is sacred and provides a means to experience, understand and interact with the world. The ceremonies are the pathways to places of healing, power, and integration. This art comes out of a world view that is in many ways the opposite of 'Western' culture. Power accrued to the people who gave away the most, through Potlatch ceremonies, not to those that amassed the most. It was seen as the antitheses of 'modern' European culture and so threatening that it had to be destroyed. And that story too is part of this exhibit.
Empowering Art recounts the efforts to exterminate indigenous cultures in the Northwest; the banning of all traditional ceremonies, the confiscation and destruction of ritual objects, and the seizure of children who were sent to boarding schools where their language and any expression of their culture was forbidden. It is also the story of the strength, resistance and activism that preserved that culture and continues to enliven it today.
The irony is that this culture that the West tried so hard to destroy may hold one of the keys to its own survival; how does one live with and within nature in ways that ensure survival? The Northwest Coastal nations have lived for centuries as part of the environment, to both sustain it and be sustained by it. To be given a glimpse of that world is alone worth the trip to Norwich.
Art, Death and the Afterlife
The other current exhibit at the Sainsbury Centre, Julian Stair: Art, Death and the Afterlife also deals with an existential issue. The exhibit combines items from the Sainsbury Collection chosen by Stair, a leading ceramic artist, to "communicate the universality of death as aesthetic inspiration and philosophical inquiry" with new pieces of his own that explore the relationship between the human body and the clay vessel, and death and its commemoration.
Stair's engagement with professionals working in end-of-life care and the public led to the donation of the ashes of people recently deceased by donors wishing to have their loved ones' ashes incorporated within Stair's works to create permanent memorials. Each of their stories is lovingly told as part of the exhibit. This is a rare opportunity to see the work of a modern master ceramicist joined with objects from around the world in an exploration of one of the great mysteries.
