Hyperallergenic:

Decades after the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn, Stephen Standing Bear, who participated in the tumultuous engagement, recalled its chaos: “I could see Indians charging all around me. Then I could see the soldiers and Indians all mixed up and there were so many guns going off that I couldn’t hear them.” He also illustrated the battlefield as he saw it in large-scale muslin pictographs, with the largest surviving example currently on view in First Person: Remembering Little Bighorn at the Philbrook Museum of Art’s downtown branch in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

“The number one question I’m asked about this muslin is: ‘which one is Custer?’ And you don’t see Custer on the muslin,” Christina Burke, Philbrook’s curator of Native American and non-Western art, told Hyperallergic. “If you look closely at the figures, all of the soldiers look exactly the same, and that’s from the Lakota perspective. The details were in identifying the warriors, their shields, their headdresses, the paraphernalia, all of those are real three-dimensional people. The enemies all look the same because it didn’t matter which one Custer was, they were all enemies encroaching on Lakota territory and their way of life.”

For those who can’t make it to Tulsa, an online interactive allows users to scroll through the muslin and click on points of interest, which highlight this detail of individual warriors. Two Lakota members of the Stokà Yuhà (Bare Lance) Society hold crooked lances in their right hands, while a member of the Miwátani Society has his red sash staked in the earth, a sign that he was going to stay and fight to the death. A member of the Brave Heart Society is “counting coup” with his eagle feather lance, an act of bravery that required a person to get close enough to hit an enemy by hand.

Carving of a head inv. 30001, Mammoth ivory/bone, c.26,000 years old, Provenance: Archaeological excavation 1936 Dolní Věstonice.
Lent by: Moravian Museum, Anthropos Institute, Brno, Czech Republic

The above head of a woman, carved in Mammoth ivory, and found in Moravia in 1936 (or 1937) is thought to be 26,000 years old and represents the oldest portrait of a human being ever found.

It is one of a large number of items being featured at the British Museum’s current exhibition titled (Gawd help us!):”Ice Age art: arrival of the modern mind,” running 7 February – 26 May 2013.

This handy on-line catalogue, was published as a kind of legal formality, listing loan items immunized by the British Tribunals, Courts, and Enforcement Act of 2007 from seizure resulting from opportunistic contemporary litigation.

Nesting Canada Goose, Copley Fine Arts Auctions, Sporting Sale, July 15-16, 2009, sold for $661,250

Maine Antique Digest thoughtfully informs us that, too bad! we’ve already missed major Massachusetts events devoted to the work of the renowned Cape Cod decoy carver A. Elmer Crowell (1862-1951) whose carvings have repeatedly set new records for auction prices.

Running curlew, sold at Copley in 2007 for $186,500, setting a decorative bird record

The Massachusetts Audubon Visual Arts Center in Canton had a symposium, Elmer Crowell & Beyond: A Gathering of Collectors & Enthusiasts, alas! on May 2nd, associated with a tremendous (now concluded) Crowell exhibition titled A. Elmer Crowell: Master of Decoys & More.

The good news is that an exhibition catalogue is in the works which will be available from Mass Audubon in the Fall sometime. The title will be A. Elmer Crowell: Master of Decoys. Contact Amy Montague at Mass Audubon.

Meanwhile, another Crowell exhibition A Bird in the Hand: The Carvings of Elmer and Cleon Crowell at the Heritage Museum & Gardens in Sandwich, Massachusetts began in April and will be running through the end of October. MAD thinks it is likely to prove very popular and run longer.

Cleon Crowell and his father A(nthony). Elmer Crowell