Where the Two Came to Their Father – A Navajo War Ceremonial

January 31 - August 5, 2012

www.eober.org

This exhibition features stencil prints from a 1943 portfolio by Maud Oakes (1903-1990), an artist and ethnologist who recorded the Diné (Navajo) ceremony called Where the Two Came to Their Father. Essential to the performance of Diné ceremonies are temporary images, popularly labeled “sand paintings.” Oakes made her original watercolors, and wrote down the narrative of the ceremony under the direction of Jeff King, a Hataalii (medicine man or singer). Having come to trust Oakes, King related or “gave” the ceremony to her over several meetings in 1942 and 1943. The prints are exhibited here, with excerpts from the story King gave for each image.

The texts and paintings were published in 1943 as a book and a set of prints, as Bollingen Series No. 1 by Princeton University. The publication was and still is the most complete first-hand account of a Diné ceremony available and its commentary by noted mythologist Joseph Campbell placed them in a larger global context. A browsing copy of Where the Two Came to Their Father (Bollingen Series I, 3rd Edition, 1991) is available in the museum's Olive Anna Tezla Library.

Lent to the museum for exhibition, the portfolio was collected by the Oberholtzer Foundation, named for Ernest C. Oberholtzer (1884-1977). An early caretaker of what is now the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, Oberholtzer was also a student of American Indian lifeways. The exhibition of these prints offers an opportunity to better understand the complexity of Diné ceremony and the function of visual images within it.