Collectors and philanthropists Eugene and Clare Thaw are not cultural anthropologists, historians, or natural history museum benefactors. They are art collectors. Eugene Thaw was dealing art by the age of 23. He has had a love affair with the Old Masters that stretches back to the time he spent in Florence after World War II. He is a critic, a collector of Rembrandt and Picasso, and a long time benefactor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And, according to Eva Fognell, the curator of the Eugene and Clare Thaw Collection of American Indian Art, when the Thaws acquired works by North America’s native peoples, they understood that they were collecting art and not cultural artifacts.

Miniature Settee, Woodlands, ca. 1830; Huron (Wendat), Quebec. Birchbark, moosehair, and dye. H: 6 1/2 in. L: 13 in. D: 4 in. Thaw Collection, Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, N.Y. Photograph by John Bigelow Taylor.

It is a key distinction, and as a result, the survey of Native American art, Art of the American Indians: The Thaw Collection, which opens at the Dallas Museum of Art on April 24, highlights virtuosic craftsmanship, powerful spiritual embodiment, and objects that unknowingly engage in referential dialogue to western, European artistic traditions. Arranged in a series of galleries delineated by geographic region – and not time of origin, tribe, or even sub-region – works by Florida’s Seminoles share space with pieces from the tribes that populated upstate New York and Canada. What is emphasized with this organization is a relationship between the objects and the landscape of their origin, pieces in each gallery sharing material, color, and formal qualities. Each room is painted in a color which compliments the setting – a bright, yellowish tan for the Great Plains, sky blue for the works from the southwest. Further divorcing this survey from any anthropological reading, most of the objects are from the 19^th- or early 20^th centuries, which, at times, provides for pieces that sit uncomfortably between a kind of unfettered cultural expression and encroaching European style and taste.

For example, in the first room, a miniature settee made by a member of the Huron tribe in Quebec in 1830 fuses Native American and European styles in an eerily obscure, if visually exquisite object. The tiny sofa is emblazoned with an extraordinarily intricate floral pattern made of embroidered moose hair, a virtuosic display of craftsmanship applied to the creation of an object that was likely a novelty or plaything brought back to Europe as a souvenir. In the next gallery, displaying works from the Great Plains, a child’s saddle is draped in panels of woven glass beads, decorated with both traditional geometric patters and intersecting American flags. It’s positioning a few feet from a leather gun case, dripping with four foot long brown tassels, and a magnificent headdress, its feather train stretching on forever like a royal bridal gown, creates a curious interplay between the ornate, ceremonial function of the cultural objects and their cooption into a new American myth born out of the collision of cultures, enshrined in the epic American Western films of the 1950s.

Basket, California and the Great Basin, Left: ca. 1915, Right: ca.1920; Left: Louise Hickox (1896–1962), Right: Elizabeth Conrad Hickox (1872–1947); Karuk, Klamath River, California; Left: Beargrass, maidenhair fern, and dyed porcupine quills. H: 7 in. Diam: 8 in. Right: Black maidenhair fern and dyed porcupine quills. H: 3 3/8 in. Diam: 3 3/8 in. Thaw Collection, Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, N.Y. Photograph by Richard Walker.

Indeed, many of the pieces hail from a transitional phase in American Indian craft, between object’s functional or spiritual use and a market-driven use of the objects as souvenirs or collectable art objects. In the gallery dedicated to works form California and the Great Basin, the most astonishingly woven baskets on display date to the second decade of the 20^th century. These were produced not as the ceremonial or functional vessels, but as collectables sold to tourists or Native American art aficionados. Likewise, in the Southwest gallery, fired clay pots are autographed showpieces of exceptional quality, their style is the same as the pottery you can still purchase during the weekly markets held in Santa Fe’s Old Town Square.

What is fascinating about this period of Native American craft is that it represents a rapid transition in the nature of traditional craft-making, a lightning-fast emergence of both artist and art work into a modern understanding of artistic objects. Whereas for generations these kinds of objects derived value from communal, spiritual relevance, in the newer works on display here, we suddenly see an understanding of the objects as rarified aesthetic expressions – art in the same way we call paintings and sculptures art. With the later period pieces we begin to know the artists’ names. When these objects were purchased around the turn of the 20^th century, they came with certificates of authenticity, stating that they are in fact the work of a prized producer of fine craft. Two of the finest of these artists are Lousie Hickox and Elizabeth Conrad Hickox, who each have a basket in the exhibition – tightly woven, meticulous objects that are shaped into formal perfection, exemplifying both singular individual skill and an accumulation of artistic understanding handed-down through generations.

Feast Bowl, Woodlands, ca. 1780; Northeastern Woodlands. Wood and pigment. H: 7 3/4 in. Diam: 16 1/2 in. Thaw Collection, Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, N.Y. Photograph by Richard Walker.

But there are also many objects of unknown origin in the exhibition which predate this craftsman-to-artist transition. One such piece is a feast bowl from the Northeast woodlands, molded into a wide-bottomed spherical shape, two sculpted heads representing deities looking out from the brim. There is an unspoken power to this piece, a seriousness to its religious symbolism that offers a glimpse into a mysterious spirituality. A war club in a glass case a few feet contains a similar aura, headless men etched into its wooden handle, at once boasting of success in battle while memorializing the victims with Homeric respect.

War Helmet, Northwest Coast, ca. 1780–1840; Tlingit, Southeastern Alaska. Wood, human hair, and pigment. H: 9 3/4 in. W: 8 7/8 in. D: 11 3/4 in. Thaw Collection, Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, N.Y. Photograph by Richard Walker.

In the Great Plains gallery, a title card in front of a tasseled leather shirt, decorated with thick strands of dark hair and colorful geometric patterns, directly addresses this spiritual power. Indeed, the lingering sense of the object’s transcendental efficiency is like a smell that sticks to the piece. It is a sentiment that you can take to numerous objects in the show – from war clubs, to statues of gods, horrifying daggers, helmets sculpted to look like the faces of terrifying animals, tiny whale tooth amulets – which emit the kind of ancient, mysterious power that makes encountering such objects a confrontation with a grave, sobering aspect of humanity that is kept politely out of view by the habits and mores of a rational, decidedly un-mystical contemporary world.

Is that power lost with the later, meant-for-market pieces? Or is this perceived mystical emanation a product of our own imaginations, reading Rousseauian idealism into the simple sincerity of these spiritual pieces in the same way that Gauguin and the primitivist painters of the late 19^th century became infatuated with the art of the Pacific islands? These are the kinds of fascinating – and likely unanswerable – questions that revolve around an exhibition like Art of the American Indians. And while these questions do not produce answers, they do help foster greater sensitivity to the communicative power of objects at hand.

Goggles, Arctic and Subarctic, A.D. 100–500; Old Bering Sea, Alaska or Siberia. Walrus ivory. H: 1 1/2 in. W: 5 1/4 in. D: 1/2 in. Thaw Collection, Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, N.Y. Photograph by Richard Walker.

In the final gallery room, devoted to art from the Arctic, a pair of wooden Eskimo goggles from the 19^th century sits about twelve feet from another case containing a similar pair of goggles, only that piece dates to 100 AD. Suddenly, through this juxtaposition, we can feel something of the weight of time, the entirety of Western history, from Rome to electricity, bracketed by these two remarkably similar, unassuming objects. We begin to feel what is most moving about the encountering of work by ancient peoples: the presence of work deeply engaged in a spiritual world, free from the burden of history.