Curio Cabinet

It's Flashback Friday! Enjoy this favorite from the Curio Cabinet archives.
 

These aren't the Native Americans we're looking for. The work of First Nations multimedia artist Nicholas Galanin, like the above Things Are Looking Native, Native's Looking Whiter, occupies a precarious position in the art world, and the world at large. Expectations of "Native art" tend to pigeonhole Galanin and other contemporary Native American artists into recreating the animal carvings, basket weaving, and blanket knitting of yore in order to express their cultural and visual artistry. "Culture is rooted in connection to land; like land, culture cannot be contained," Galanin once wrote, and, as a Tlingit and Unangax̂ from Alaska who went to college in England and New Zealand, his worst enemy may just be what people are expecting his art to address. At a time when fashion trends seek to appropriate Native American artistry, elucidating the cultural connection between a Star Wars rebel princess' hairdo and its Tewa tribe and Southwest indigenous origins enriches everyone's understandings of sacred histories.

 

Below: for the most recent American Indian Heritage Day, we're taking a look at a few of Galanin's other works which embrace contemporary mediums—with a twist; Inert Wolf, and God Complex.
 

Image credit & copyright: Nicholas Galanin, Hyperallergic, My Modern Met
 

It's Flashback Friday! Enjoy this favorite from the Curio Cabinet archives.
 

Title: Young Omahaw, War Eagle, Little Missouri, and Pawnees
Artist: Charles Bird King (1785-1862)
Created: 1821
Medium: oil on canvas
Dimensions: 36.12 x 28 in (91.77 x 71.12 cm)
Current location: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.
 

When we talk of great American portraits, like Gilbert Stuart's stately image of George Washington, we must include the Native American leaders painted by Charles Bird King in the discussion. The artist portrayed Young Omahaw, War Eagle, Little Missouri, and Pawnees as part of a series commissioned by his friend Thomas McKenney, head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Out of a popular fear that indigenous people might be going extinct, McKenney enlisted King in 1822 to immortalize Native American leaders visiting Washington, D.C., as subjects on canvas. What resulted was a 20-year body of work compiled of over 143 paintings. In Young Omahaw... the noble posture and stand-out red coloring give the Native tribesmen an air of honor often not afforded to them in more racist depictions by European descendants. Thankfully, this work and others were collected in the Smithsonian Institution, and in a three-volume book set entitled History of the Indian Tribes of North America—a work that continues to stand out for its unusual and wonderful marriage of western portraiture and Native American subjects.
 

Below: more of King's portraits of Indigenous leaders, including Hayne Hudjihini (Eagle of Delight) Otoe, Petalesharo (Generous Chief) Pawnee, and Shaumonekusse (Prairie Wolf) Otoe.
 

I guess we have to address the elephant in the room. This adorable mother and her calf are wading through water hyacinth. Although the pair look like they've been dipped in chocolate, they're just wet! Beneath the verdant aquatic plants and lavender blooms is a source of freshwater. Water hyacinth, known as "million dollar weeds," and is a favorite snack of Asian elephants. Photographer Kunal Gupta captured this moment in the Kaziranga National Park. Situated in the northeastern Indian state of Assam, India, Kaziranga has nearly 43,000 hectares of land preserved for local wildlife, like one-horned rhinoceroses, tigers, water buffalo, and Ganges River dolphins. "Smiling Elephants" was a runner-up in this year's Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards, a contest that encourages "conservation through competition." I don't know about you, but these precious pachyderms, and the other entries, certainly brightened my day.
 

Image credit & copyright: Indian elephants. Kaziranga, India. Kunal Gupta/Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards 2020
 

Below: the winner of the competition. Terry the Turtle Flipping the Bird. A sea turtle in Queensland, Australia. Photo by Mark Fitzpatrick, Courtesy of the Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards 2020
 

It may look like lightning and rainbows, but this isn't a new weather event—it's the inside of a common glassworm! Thanks to this colorful photo, Ukrainian photographer Andrei Savitsky recently won first place in the Close-up Photographer of the Year contest's "Micro" category. Every detail of the transparent glassworm, the larvae of a midge fly, is on display—from its large dark eyes to the vessels running through the inside of its head. The two prominent, bean-shaped organs on the photo's right side are tracheal bubbles. These bubbles expand or contract in response to light, helping the glassworm swim or float depending on weather and time of day. Amazingly, Savitsky took his winning shot on a smartphone with the help of a Biolam R-11 microscope. The image's stunning colors come from two photography techniques: darkfield, which creates contrast inside a transparent specimen by trapping light inside it, and polarization, in which a filter is used to suppress glare and emphasize color saturation. Fly larvae never looked so glamorous!

Image credit & copyright: Andrei Savitsky
 

Written by: Maria C.
 

Below: third place winner of the Animals category, Bufo Bufo by Mathieu Foulquié and first place winner of the Animals category, Eel Larva by Galice Hoarau.
 

Dawid Ryski, Maciek Polak

2020

KNOxOUT paint

Warsaw, Poland

 
Americans aren't the only ones feasting this week! This recently-completed mural, in Warsaw, Poland, actually "eats" pollution. Designed by Polish artists Dawid Ryski and Maciek Polak as part of the Converse City Forests project, the mural features urban motifs, such as buildings, alongside detailed vegetation. Smiling daisies tower over and curl around monochrome buildings against a contrasting backdrop of blue leaves. In the center are the words "create together for tomorrow". It's an appropriate sentiment, since the mural was created to fight pollution. In fact, the enormous art piece was produced using "KNOxOUT paint", a kind of photocatalytic paint that converts nitrogen oxides in polluted air into water, carbon dioxide, and calcium nitrate. According to Converse, it would take around 780 trees to pack the same cleaning punch. In a recent interview, Ryski said that pollution-eating art is just one environmentally-friendly step he'd like to see cities take. "In my dream future city, billboards would disappear, and everybody here would switch from cars to bicycles," he said. With artists like Ryski and Polak on the job, cities may well be headed in the right direction!

 
Written by: Maria C.

 
Below: two photos of Ryski and Polak's pollution-eating mural being painted.
 

To Infinity and beyond! On this day in 1995, Pixar's Toy Story blasted the realm of computer animation to previously unseen heights as the first feature-length computer-animated movie in history. Although Toy Story forever changed the animation industry, and launched a successful franchise, its production wasn't all sunshine and slinky dogs.
 
Pixar didn't start out as an animation studio. It began as a computer technology division of Lucasfilm in the 1970s. Pixar didn't become an independent company until Steve Jobs purchased it from Lucasfilm in 1986. Co-founders included Ed Catmull, Alexander Schure, Loren Carpenter, and Alvy Ray Smith. The company's name came from Smith's love for Spanish verbs that looked like English nouns, like "laser". Smith created the word "pixer", meaning "to make pictures," and Carpenter mixed it with the word "radar" to give it a high-tech ring, hence: Pixar.
 
Over the next two years, Pixar produced several computer-animated commercials and short films, developing new technology to make rendering three-dimensional characters easier. In 1988, Pixar developed a proprietary animation system called Marionette, which allowed for more accurate environment modeling. Renderman, a new kind of rendering software, allowed animators to show more realistically detailed surfaces. Using both of these programs, Pixar produced its third short animated film, Tin Toy, about a one-man-band toy reckoning with its new owner—a human baby. After premiering at the Ottawa International Film Festival, Tin Toy became the first computer-animated film to receive an Academy Award.
 
After officially hopping on the computer-animated toy train, Pixar decided to create a half-hour holiday special, in which the one-man-band character from Tin Toy would team up with a ventriloquist dummy. The project fell through, but toys remained a popular animation subject at Pixar. When Pixar signed a deal with Disney to make feature films, it was natural to expand upon their original holiday-special. The one-man-band toy was replaced with a more relatable action figure, Buzz Lightyear. The ventriloquist dummy became Woody, the pull-string cowboy, at the request of Disney CEO Michael Eisner, who thought a dummy might be too "creepy" for kids.
 
Because Toy Story would be an entirely new kind of feature-length film, both Disney and Pixar wanted an engaging plot to hook audiences. Unfortunately, the two companies didn't always agree on what that meant. When Pixar presented its first storyboard, Disney executives felt that the characters were too cookie-cutter and wholesome. There was even talk of shutting down the project. However, Pixar managed to secure a three-month grace period, during which time they completely rearranged Toy Story's plot. According to Pixar writer Pete Docter, the Pixar team decided that "if we're gonna go down, let's at least go down doing what we believe in." Their dedication paid off, and Disney agreed to let the project move forward.
 
With the film's characters and plot nailed down, the technical part of production began...and immediately proved more difficult than Pixar had anticipated. It was originally thought that Toy Story would only need eight animators, since computers would be largely aiding the process. Instead, the project ended up with a team of over thirty animators. Time and computing power were also grossly underestimated. Pixar originally estimated that the film could be made in 20 months, using 53 processors. Instead, it took five years and 300 processors.
 
The hard work was worth it. Toy Story was an immediate hit upon its release in 1995, making over $191 million in the United States and turning Pixar into one of the most successful animation studios in the world. Toy Story was nominated for three Oscars and received a Special Achievement Academy Award. The biggest impact of its success was on the animation—computer-animated movies were suddenly seen as the "wave of the future", and other studios rushed to follow in Toy Story's footsteps. Today, computer-animated movies are the most common type of animated film—an industry-wide change owed entirely to Toy Story.
 
Image credit & copyright: The Toy Story Creative Team storyboarding the film. Deborah Coleman/Pixar/Walt Disney Photo Archives

 
Written by: Maria C.