France is in for a treat on 4 July when the Chateau Musée in Boulogne-sur-Mer celebrates the opening of Alice Rogoff’s impressive collection of Alaska Native art. This collection, assembled over more than 20 years, includes carvings on walrus ivory and bone, woven baskets, carved masks, paintings and sculpture. In short, it’s a magnificent display of contemporary Native fine art.
Rogoff, former publisher of Alaska’s largest newspaper and currently the publisher of the news outlet Arctic Today, first came to the largest US state more than 30 years ago when on a tour with friends. Traveling by air to small, isolated villages, she came across beautiful carvings and ordinary household items including knives and hair clips that had been elevated to the realm of art by painstaking and skilled weaving and beadwork.
After meeting the artists and discovering how little they were paid for their work, Rogoff and others established the Alaska Native Arts Foundation with the purpose of introducing these artists and their work to a larger audience. With this increased visibility, the foundation attempted to create a fair market for this work which previously had been viewed as interesting but low-priced trinkets.
“I saw beautiful items such as intricately woven baskets that took perhaps six months to create being sold for almost nothing. In the days when these villagers lived in a barter economy, this perhaps was understandable,” she says. “But with modern life arriving in even the most isolated villages, the need for cash was undeniable.”
That’s because sled dogs had been replaced by fuel-burning snow machines, and modern conveniences had become very expensive. To reach a hospital or health-care facility, tickets on bush-planes had to be paid in cash. Alice and the Native Arts Foundation brought a bright spotlight to the art and artists of the state, and the price paid for the artwork has increased significantly.
Rogoff’s love of art comes naturally. Her mother, Shiela Rogoff, studied art in New York in the 1930s and helped paint a WPA mural for a post office in Manchester, TN. Art was a part of her ongoing life. Alice’s father, Mortimer Rogoff, was an international industrialist and inventor whose work paved the way for the development of GPS and the electronic navigation chart. Whenever her family traveled, Rogoff recalls “that the first order of business in any new city was a tour of local museums and galleries.”
Rogoff also had visited Nantucket, an island off the coast of Massachusetts, where the work of artists carving on whale bone – known as scrimshaw – demanded very high prices and where the artists were treated with respect and even adulation, which led to the issue of economic fairness. “It upset me terribly to visit small Alaskan villages and see these magnificent works of art – that took months and even years to create – being sold as tourist trinkets and oddities. This is real art, created by real artists who should profit from their work accordingly,” she says.
Rogoff fell in love with Alaska and became a citizen of the state several years after she first visited. Eventually, she became a major power in the state’s orbit of politics and journalism. She purchased a website called Alaska Dispatch.com which later evolved into owning the state-wide daily newspaper. All this while she was buying and collecting Native art for herself and for the Alaska Native Arts Foundation.
To increase visibility of these artists, Rogoff and her associates opened galleries in Anchorage and New York and hosted shows in department stores and even in the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC. “We would buy two pieces for the Foundation, and I might buy one or more for myself. I gave this art to my friends, my business partners and colleagues – all hoping to spread the gospel of Alaska Native Art.”
Why is her collection being bequeathed to a museum in France?
In 1871-1872, a French explorer, linguist and ethnographer, Alphonse Louis Pinart, travelled to Alaska and brought back a treasure trove of Native art – hundreds of bowls, spears, canoes, carved hunting hats – including several stunning ceremonial masks. The masks, made by Alutiiq artists in the Kodiak archipelago, were more than art to the local Alutiiq (or Sugpiaq) community: they featured carvings of ancestors, mythological beings and even animal spirits, and were used in ritual songs and dances, to transmit traditional stories, honour ancestors, bestow success on future hunts, and communicate with the spiritual world. They were seen as powerful spiritual objects or mediums, and were often discarded after the ceremony. Somehow, Pinart accumulated a large collection and returned to France to general acclaim, winning a gold medal in Paris for “the world’s most important geographic discovery” reported around that period. He handed the collection over to the Chateau Musée in Boulogne-sur-Mer, his hometown in France, where they remained quietly on display for more than 100 years.
When Pinart visited Alaska, it had been just four years since Alaska was purchased by the United States from Russia. Over the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the region of Alaska where the artifacts were produced had witnessed an influx of Russian and later American settlers who changed the ways of the Natives and their artistic endeavors. As a result of cultural assimilation, often forced, almost all knowledge of the culture that produced these items disappeared by the late-1800s, and Pinart might have been among the last to witness and document some of the traditional Alutiiq (Sugpiaq) ceremonies.
Approximately 30 years ago, a Sugpiaq artist named Helen Simeonoff, then employed by the Anchorage Police Department, discovered that many of these articles, including the Alutiiq masks, were housed at a museum in France. “I saw a beaded headdress from my mother’s village of Old Afognak,” she said in one newspaper interview. “It could have been my one of my ancestors who made that.” She saved money for six years and flew to France where she spent five days taking notes and photographing the collection. “It was almost embarrassing that I had to travel to France to see our culture,” Simeonoff said in a newspaper interview.
Upon her return to Alaska, her effort to draw greater attention to the collection in Boulogne received additional thrust and support from Perry Eaton, a businessman-turned-artist, and Sven Haakonsen, an artist and museum director, both from Kodiak. Their collaboration and outreach led to a series of visits by Alaska Native artists from Kodiak to Boulogne and by museum staff to Kodiak, as well as exhibitions of the Pinart collection from Boulogne in Kodiak and Anchorage. It marked the development of an extraordinary and unexpected relationship, based on amity and mutual respect, between an Indigenous community from Kodiak in Alaska and a coastal fishing town in northern France.
Eaton was later an artist-in-residence at the museum in Boulogne and recollected in The Capilano Review that he had “nothing but the greatest respect for that Museum”, which, after some initial reservations, “had given us access beyond all reasonable expectation”. In an earlier interview with the Anchorage Daily News, Simeonoff suggested that Pinart inadvertently ended up being the “real tradition bearer”: having grown up with no traditions or any books about their culture, she observed, “We have reference materials thanks to that man.” The rediscovery of the collection in France had triggered a wave of cultural revitalisation back in Alaska, contributing to greater knowledge about the cultural history and traditions of the Alutiiq/Sugpiaq and informing contemporary mask-making practices of Alutiiq/Sugpiaq artists like Eaton.
Alice Rogoff discovered this story from Simeonoff at a dinner in Kodiak and later saw Pinart’s collection when it came to Alaska in a visiting exhibit. “This was not just an art exhibit,” Rogoff says, “it was bringing a lost culture back to its home.” So, when Rogoff decided to find a home for her collection, she contacted the Chateau Musée in Boulogne. “It’s the obvious choice,” she says. “The museum was critical in keeping the original artifacts safe and on display. It’s an important cultural repository for Alaska Native Art. I couldn’t be more pleased that the museum has accepted my gift and seems excited about the upcoming opening.”
The entire collection – La Collection Rogoff – will be shown for the opening celebration Mondes Arctiques being convened by Boulogne-sur-Mer’s Mayor, Frédéric Cuvillier; Adjoint à la Culture, Julien Championnet; and Conservation Director of Museums, Elikya Kandot, on 4 July. Among its pieces are a wood and steel mobile, some 6 feet long, by Sylvester Ayek of King Island; several masks by Kodiak-born Perry Eaton; three-dimensional, colorful wildlife paintings by Alvin Amason of Kodiak; images in glass by Larry Ahvakana of Utkiagvik (Barrow); and even a mixed media painting with beadwork by Helen Simeonoff. The collection is a permanent gift to the museum.
By bequeathing one of the largest and most impressive private collections of Alaska Native art to the Chateau-Musée de Boulogne-sur-Mer, Rogoff has also catapulted France’s largest fishing town to the fore of the art and museum world as one of the leading centres of Alaska Native art.