(Zarco Guerrero) Proceed towards the front of the exhibition to the Tienda store. Perhaps this exhibition has whet your appetite to collect masks. Many people do, even purchasing them on Ebay. There are many things to consider when collecting masks: aesthetics, craftsmanship, origin and authenticity.
But, the value of a mask is often subjective. Masks made as folk art to be sold often have different characteristics than those made for religious purposes. And this, too, can differ between communities.
After listening to Martin Kim, Program Coordinator and Director of the ASM store, explain these differences and what commonly determines value, try the buyer beware game on the computer.
(Martin Kim) Narrative character is one of the most interesting components of masks that have come out of the Mexican tradition. Now, there are also ceremonial components to masks. And then they're just pure market plays. I have Zapatac Indian masks, for instance, from the Oaxaca region, that show that high, high quality painting style that they've made famous in their folk art carvings, but, in fact, they have absolutely nothing to do with folk village traditions. They're just like tremendous pieces of sculpture, like this crocodile mask.
At one point I had a mask that I brought in from central Mexico, the Mexico City area, in one of the small villages outside Mexico City whose eyes were not penetrated. And yet, it was an older mask. And it showed a little bit of wear in terms of oils and staining around the outside edge. It was incredibly distorted; wrinkled brow and forehead. It was just a very weird, weird looking human face. And I asked the trader what its story was. And they said, well it was never meant to be danced. It was yet another function of masks.
This one was distorted because it was meant as a talisman you hang it in your home if you're pregnant. And then, in order that you do not get a baby who is born with horrible features and a distorted body and what have you, this draws that energy out so that your baby will have a nice clean, healthy body.
One of the more interesting sets of masks that we carry, of course, are the ones that cross over between cultures and those are the Yaqui and Mayo Indian masks from the villages in northern Sonora. A lot of our visitors look at these and they say, "oh, made in Mexico." Sometimes they see that stamp on the back, you know, which is a trademark because the Mexican government requires it before you cross the border with an object. But, while they are made in Mexico, part of our mission is to decode that for our visitors so they don't go away thinking they are Mexican masks, per se.
Craftsmanship abounds, you know, in any medium. And you're—you're going to run across artists who are very, very good at their craft in any given medium. But, I think that the thing that distinguishes cultural crafts in general is the cultural content. And so, I tend to be drawn more towards an object that has an interesting story. And maybe whose story is intact because the iconography that is still associated with the object has survived, in many cases, centuries and centuries of use. And it's fascinating to see how sometimes things change and how sometimes things don't change through those centuries of use.
We have, for instance, images in our collections that date back to 800 A.D. that are scraps of Hopi payback plaques, basket arts that are still practiced in Hopi today. And, when you put them next to each other, a photograph—and we have a lot of educational materials in the store to represent these same things—a fragment of a basket from 800 A.D. next to a fragment of a basket that's contemporary in nature and you see virtually no change.
Continuity in craft under the pressures of a marketplace for close to a thousand years—usually will force an enormous amount of change into the finished product. So, when you see sustained continuity, it speaks very, very strongly for the credibility of the cultural content that is the major content of the objects being produced today.
Matter of fact, I'd say that that's among the many stories we share in the museum store as a larger story, that's probably the thing that has impressed me the most. Because, as a working craftsman, I always tell my visitors that I had great freedom when I was in my studio, just as a working artist. I could go in. I could make anything I wanted to as America. But, then I had to turn around and convince my community it actually had some value. When you get some of the arts from the native peoples in this region, their communities recognize the value of that object instantly. There's no effort to convince them what that value is. And, that is really the exact reverse of the way it is for American craftsmen today. I often suggest that American art and craft is about 90% about the artist. And maybe, if you're lucky, it's 10% about the culture. And we can all kind of share some part of that story. But, with native, regional arts like the ones that we have here represented in our exhibits and in our collections, it's like 90% about the culture and then 10% about the artist.
(Erich Healy) We hope you enjoyed listening to this audio tour of the Arizona State Museum's Masks of Mexico: Santos, Diablos y Más exhibition as much as we enjoyed creating it. Thanks for joining us at the University of Arizona, and please visit the Arizona State Museum again.
Special Thanks to Gateway for their support of this project.
Many thanks also to the University of Arizona Disability Resources Center for transcribing the tour episodes.
indicates link opens in a new window.
