A show-stopping tour of the old New World

Although they are fascinating enough to be the main attraction, the three colorful tepees on the lawn of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts are just an eye-catching invitation to "Art of the Native Americans," a fabulous show opening this weekend.

The 110 rare objects include such exotica as a pair of ivory goggles carved in Alaska or Siberia before 500 A.D., a 500-year-old effigy jar from Arkansas in the shape of a human head (with multiple-pierced ears!) and a high-style Nova Scotia bonnet from the 1850s decorated with silk cockades and dyed ostrich-feather tufts.

Featuring masterpieces from dozens of Indian nations, the show was conceived as a "tour of North America," according to curator Eva Fognell of the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y., which lent the works.

The continental ambition reflects the collection's origin as the private holding of Clare and Eugene V. Thaw, a former dealer in Old Master paintings and drawings who became obsessed with Indian art after retiring to Santa Fe, N.M., in 1987.

Convinced that American Indian art was the aesthetic equivalent of Asian and European masterpieces -- but a lot less expensive -- Thaw reportedly sold a Van Gogh painting and used the money to buy top-quality Indian work. When the collection outgrew their home, the Thaws donated it to the Fenimore, which in 1995 opened a special wing to house it.

The Thaws' focus on aesthetics is unusual. Most collections of American Indian art were assembled in the 19th century, first by explorers and later by archaeologists, scholars and even tourists fascinated by the myriad Indian cultures that once dominated the American landscape.

Ethnographers studied them for their social and historic significance, rather than as objects of beauty and design. Only in recent decades have art museums begun to collect and display Indian art along side Euro-American paintings, sculpture, furniture and decorative art.

The Minneapolis museum has added mural-sized color photos of landscapes typical of each region -- Alaskan ice meadows, California redwoods, New Mexico cliffs and Maine woods -- to suggest the types of wood, stone, animals and plants that were available to native artists. Galleries also include video interviews with Indian artists and leaders recorded by Joe Horsecapture, the institute's curator of Native Art, who is an A'aninin or Gros Ventre.

Practical, yet beautiful

The sophistication of these objects speaks to the skill and resourcefulness of the Indian artists, and also to their adaptability.

An amazing waterproof parka made from seal gut is a traditional garment of extraordinary beauty and complexity, its white crinkled "fabric" festooned with bits of walrus and polar bear fur that have been dyed red, green and violet.

The artisan who made it more than a century ago first had to remove and clean a mass of seal intestine, blow up sections of gut like balloons, and then dry, cut, and hand-stitch strips of the stuff into a parka and add embroidery. Waterproof and durable, the parka is a practical yet elegant product derived from the limited resources available in an unforgiving climate.

Cross-cultural exchanges

Many items show evidence of the long interaction between Indians and Euro-Americans. Just as war, disease, reservations, religious and educational indoctrination by whites altered traditional Indian life, the introduction of Euro-American designs and goods (cloth, beads) changed their art.

The Haida of British Columbia, for example, are famous for large copper plaques incised and painted with stylized animal designs. But scholars have found no evidence that the Haida mined or smelted copper, Fognell said, which leaves them to speculate that the metal must have been acquired through trade with various explorers -- Russian, Spanish, possibly even Japanese -- who plied the West Coast from the 17th century on.

European-glass trade beads and tin bells mingle with indigenous abalone shell and porcupine quills on clothes, bags, saddles and even gun cases across the continent.

One of the show's more spectacular garments is a French-cut coat made of caribou skin by a Naskapi woman in Quebec about 1785. It could have been the talk of Paris or London.

Like everything in the Thaw collection, the moccasins have a story to tell and a spell to weave. Made about 1850, they were given to the Governor General of Canada, the eighth Lord Elgin (whose father infamously hauled chunks of the Parthenon to London). He shipped them to a family castle in Scotland where they slumbered in a trunk, forgotten, for more than a century. About 20 years ago they were rediscovered and sold at auction. Now they're a show-stopper in Minneapolis. The nuns and the Huron would be proud.

Mary Abbe • 612-673-4431