Exploring Hopi Visions

Dallas Museum of Art spotlights Native American spiritual journey

Seeing the mural “Journey of the Human Spirit” reminded me of some of my most indelible childhood memories when my brother, sister and I would get shipped off every summer to our Aunt Jeanette’s in Arizona.

The six-paneled mural is 5 feet high and 48 feet long and is part of “Hopi Visions: Journey of the Human Spirit,” currently on view at the Dallas Museum of Art through Dec. 2. The painting, by Hopi artists Michael Kabotie and Delbridge Honanie, is complemented by ancient and contemporary objects from the DMA’s collection. This showing marks the first time the “Journey of the Human Spirit” mural has been viewed outside of Arizona and the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff.

My aunt collected primarily Southwest U.S. Native American art and has an extensive collection of kachinas and pottery that always fascinated me and continues to do so now. The style and symbolism were unlike anything I had ever seen and, through my aunt, this would be my first formal introduction to art. The attraction and appreciation of indigenous art is motivated by my lifelong desire to understand the temporal and extra-dimensional boundaries of humanity’s thoughts and concepts of space and time.

Kabotie (1942-2009) is, perhaps, best known for his work as a jewelry maker and for being the son of renowned Hopi silversmith Fred Kabotie. Michael was quoted in a 2009 CNN interview as saying that, “Jewelry is my job. Art and painting is my journey.”

Kabotie, who is also known as Lomawyesa (Walking in Harmony, his Hopi name) and Honanie (b. 1946), also known as Coochsiwukioma (Falling White Snow) and other artists sought to retain Hopi cultural heritage for tribal members, but also to educate and enhance understanding of Hopi culture to the world at-large and to provide a platform for shared ideas and collaboration. The mural attempts to bridge cultural gaps for each viewer and together these artists, along with others, formed the Artists Hopid cooperative to embrace these issues.

The mural, completed in 2001, comprises six interconnected but distinct panels that narrate the history of the Hopi people. The mural begins with the mythic emergence of people into the current world, which was already filled with flowers and butterflies. The people emerged through an opening in the underworld sky, “sipapuni,” bringing with them the shadow side, “powaqa.” The narrative progresses from ancient sites and community migrations to the arrival of Europeans and the historic Pueblo Revolt. In the third and fourth panels, cultural rebirth is represented through a Squash Maiden and a female with corn child, as well as through Hopi kachina (katsina) and the middle path, conceived by Kabotie through parallels with Buddhism. Conflict returns in the coal mining of Black Mesa and modern consumption in Hopi society, represented in the fifth panel. Nevertheless, the mural concludes in the sixth panel with the hopeful renewal of Hopi values in the information age and global community from the mythic emergence, through the arrival of Europeans, to the rebirth of Hopi traditions.

The contemporary mural was inspired by figural wall paintings created prior to European contact and concludes with hope for greater human connection.

In preparation for the mural, Kabotie and Honanie studied ancestral Pueblo wall paintings from the 15th- and 16th-century village sites of Awat’ovi and Kawayka’a on the Hopi Mesas within the Hopi reservation in northern Arizona, as well as from Pottery Mound in New Mexico. In this exhibition, ancient Chaco, Mimbres and Ancestral Pueblo vessels from the DMA and other collections are used to convey the depth and rich heritage explored through the mural narrative and its visual sources. Exhibition displays state that, “The mural is thus set within a community, surrounded by generations of Hopi mural and ceramic arts.”

The exhibition also features works by other contemporary Hopi artists, including Ed Kabotie, son of Michael. Ed’s drawing, “Path to Balance,” featured in the exhibition, is a tribute to his father. The drawing depicts nine universal stages of the human experience inspired by his father’s life, teachings, and example and demonstrated by the metaphor of Hopi clowning.

In addition to the mural, “Hopi Visions” also includes ancestral “Sikyatki” (another ancestral home site within Hopi lands) pottery known for its style of polychrome ceramic vessels and modern kachina dolls, such as one of Palhik Mana — the Butterfly Maiden or Water-Sipping Maiden.

The kachina is a significant spiritual and communal component of Southwestern Native American culture, practiced not only by the Hopi, but also by Zuni and other Pueblo peoples. The kachinas manifest in three different components — the supernatural beings, the kachina dancers (that can be people possessed by the kachina spirit) and the kachina dolls that are representations of the many different kachinas given to children as toys, but also as mnemonic devices to root spiritual practices and ritual identity into the community.

Kachinas are unique because they can represent anything in the temporal world or in any cosmic realm, too. They can be a revered ancestor, an element, a location, a quality, a natural phenomenon or even a concept. And they are understood to have humanlike relationships like brothers and sisters or uncles and grandmothers. They can also marry and have children.

The overall theme of the exhibit conveys how the Hopis and, perhaps other Native Americans, view the world. The essence of “being” means being a part of a larger universe where we all must interact to survive and thrive.

The DMA is open Tuesday-Sunday, and general admission is free.

Visit the DMA on the web at www.dma.org.

Stephan Malick, ISSUE staff writer