Tribal plus Contemporary

Douglas Dawson Gallery
400 North Morgan St.
Chicago, il 60642
312-226-7975
douglasdawson.com

As a boy growing up in South Dakota, Douglas Dawson inherited his great-grandfather’s small local museum of Indian artifacts, natural oddities and “just curious things,” which he operated through high school and which inspired his passion for archaeology and anthropology. After stints as a potter’s apprentice in Japan, a field researcher in a Mayan Highland ceramics village in Guatemala, and a studio potter living in a commune in Iowa, in 1982 he opened the Douglas Dawson Gallery in Chicago. Today it is a leading venue for ancient and historical art from Africa, Asia and the Americas.

What’s your approach to presenting this work?
I modeled my ethnographic art gallery on a contemporary art gallery, in that we did thematic exhibitions and had openings and presented things in a somewhat abstracted context. A lot of tribal art dealers fail to realize that the engine that fuels the market in tribal is 20th-century aesthetics. “It looks just like a Rothko, a Klee, a Picasso”—that’s what you hear all the time. So I solicited a contemporary art clientele rather than a primitive art clientele. That worked, and has allowed the gallery to survive for 26 years.

Are there trends in the tribal art market?
Initially I was exclusively textiles, and as decorating with tribal textiles went out of fashion, I moved into ceramics and sculpture. Today the gallery is very catholic, in that we cover lots of areas.

We now represent four contemporary artists [textile artist Frank Connet, jeweler Kiff Slemmons, ceramist Michael Jones, photographer Larry Snider] whose work has a connection with the rest of the gallery. Something I’m sensitive to, and often annoyed by, is the facile appropriation of tribal into contemporary art and craft. The people I represent have a great understanding and utilize their experience with ethnographic art in their work.

What’s the appeal of tribal art for your clients?
My clientele is overwhelmingly over 65, well educated, with some of the same background I had. I know we get tired of hearing about people who came of age in the 1960s, but it is important when I compare them to the people who are not coming into the gallery—basically anybody under 30. Dealers in tribal art lament that there’s nobody behind our current clientele. Young people are not interested—partially, I think, because they haven’t had the experiences their parents did. Their parents traveled a great deal in college; they were more cosmopolitan, less provincial, and had a greater knowledge of the world. They were Peace Corps volunteers, hippies looking for great hashish in Afghanistan. It was sort of de rigueur to be interested in other cultures. What’s sexy now is contemporary art, and those galleries are flooded with young people.

Are people daunted by ancient art?
Some are. It’s my charge to break that barrier down. We have no labels on anything. Some get annoyed by that, but it relieves people of the embarrassment of not knowing where Burkina Faso is, or who the Toraja tribe is. They can experience a piece viscerally, and then I fill in the blanks.