Located in the Great Hall of the Museum of Anthropology is a work by Haida artist Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas consisting of 12 acrylic paintings on plywood trays. The trays are mounted on an apparatus with a handle allowing visitors to turn the trays which read, “A stack of plywood trays built to contain fragments of everyone’s culture” on the upper frame of each tray. The polyptych makes up an image of various human figures, animals, and landscapes, all of which have facial features, within black framed outlines. While the style of the art has clear roots in Haida Gwaii iconography, it also appears to have influence from contemporary art styles such as cartoons, as many of the figures are presented with a humorous tone and comical expressions. Some of the imagery depicted on the trays include a man in a business suit, a line of figures walking into the ocean, and the hull of a ship carrying various flags.
In Jennifer Kramer’s article on Figurative Repatriation, she describes the artist warrior as an artist who challenges what limits contemporary indigenous expression and responds to the expectations of “authentic, ‘Indian’ art” (Kramer, 173). An artist warrior aims to disorient museum-goers and offer them a new perspective on Native art. As well, by being exhibited alongside older Native cultural objects, these artists “reference the past, but in new ways (Kramer, 174). I believe that Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas definitely fits this description, as his piece displayed amongst older cultural objects strives to tell the importance of contemporary indigenous art in the processes of figurative repatriation.
The work itself could be interpreted as a critique of the collection and display of native cultural objects, as well as the oversimplification of indigenous cultures. The quote, “a stack of plywood trays built to contain fragments of everyone’s culture”, speaks to how absurd it is that something as complex and nuanced as an individual’s culture could be ever be contained. The fact that the images on each tray connect to the ones next to it are representative of how one tray, one artifact, alone cannot portray the whole picture. The nameplate beneath the work displays a quote by Yahgulanaas on the piece, “Here is a relic, a skeletal structure for once fleshy things …” This quote provided by the curatorial staff adds to the statement the piece makes: older cultural objects alone can’t tell the complete story of a culture still alive today, contemporary artists need to have a space in museum exhibits. Yahgulanaas’s piece communicates to museum-goers that what they see in a display is not all there is to know about indigenous cultures.
