This Andy Warhol work is part of the American pop artist’s Cowboys and Indians series (complete works in the series, below).
The Northwest Coast Mask (36 x 36″) is one of 10 screenprints from Warhol’s Cowboys and Indians Complete Portfolio, published in 1986. In the series, Warhol explored the American West as it exists in popular imagination rather than historical reality. He juxtaposed mass-media icons such as John Wayne, Annie Oakley, and Teddy Roosevelt with Native American imagery, including Indian Head Nickel 385 and Plains Indian Shield 382.
On auction at Heffel Fine Art in Vancouver, the mask “stands as a compelling intersection of Pop Art aesthetics and Indigenous cultural symbolism.”
A hand-carved Moon Mask created in the traditional Kwakwaka’wakw style, Bearclaw Gallery, Edmonton
Warhol references the traditional, spiritual, ceremonial masks of Indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest, the subject of extensive artistic creation today (see above and previous mask-related articles on the Art Junkie, here)
Instead of aiming for historical accuracy, Warhol filters the subject through the visual language of Pop Art, “inviting viewers to reconsider how cultural artifacts are transformed when removed from their original context,” Heffel says.
The work is online at Heffel, here.
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This is now called ‘cultural appropriation’. It is also absolutely against the tenets of coastal first Nations art-making. I can feel the ancestors seething.