30-Foot Totem Pole Comes To County

2-19-10

By LAURA COX : COOPERSTOWN

A 30-foot-tall Haida totem pole arrived at The Fenimore Art Museum in recent days, to be set up as a permanent exhibit on the museum’s lawn during Memorial Day Weekend festivities.
“It is a made-to-order commission of contemporary Native American art,” commissioned by museum benefactor Eugene Thaw, said Eva Fognell, curator of the Fenimore’s Eugene and Claire Thaw Collection of American Art.
The carver, Reg Davidson, is from Haida Gwaii (formerly the Queen Charlotte Islands) in British Columbia.   Like Cooperstown, the village has about 2,000 residents, mostly of the Haida tribe.
“There are other Northwest Coast items in the collection,” said Fognell. “This is a piece of contemporary art that shows the continued vitalities of Native American art. It is also a very good example of contemporary artists working in a traditional style.”
Davidson has been carving since 1972, when he was 17, under the guidance of his father Claude, then from his brother Robert.  (Davidson’s grandfather, named Edenshaw, has a piece in the permanent Thaw Collection, as does another relative, a contemporary weaver.)
In an interview, Davidson said he went into the woods on obtaining the commission and found a 500-year-old red cedar, which was logged and transported to his studio.  He worked with two apprentices to complete the job.
“At the bottom there is a Beaver, and on the tail is a human face,” he explained, “then a raven who is stealing the beaver lodge – I made the beaver lodge to look like the front of a long house.  On the tail of the raven is a bear, then there is an eagle; on the tale of the eagle is a frog, and at the top is a black-finned whale.”
It depicts the legend of the raven stealing the beaver lodge; at Thaw’s request, the artist told a story in the carving. 
The animals are all associated with the Davidson family crest.
“Everything I do is pretty much traditional,” he said, although he said the red, black and white colors are store-bought paint.  “We’re very adaptable people,” he said with a chuckle.
Davidson has showed his work across the world.  There’s one in Tokyo.  His longest – 40 feet – is in London.
Totem poles are his culture’s flagpoles, he said, showing the crests of the people it represents. “Missionaries thought we worshiped them, and many of them were destroyed. We don’t do that,” he said.
There is usually a big celebration when a Haida totem is raised – last summer, for instance, 1,500 people and a dozen dance groups descended on the village for one such dedication.
Davidson and five other members of the Rainbow Creek Dancers will perform in Cooperstown when this one rises.
“I hope that being out there on front lawn, it will also be an attention-grabber for people to be drawn into the museum to see the rest of the treasurer we have,” Fognell said.