Does anyone know of an artist who works with masks?

[Amy R]

For my GCSE mock exam, I've chosen to focus on mask making and its uses in disguising various aspects of the wearer's identity. Does anyone know where I can find information on an artist who is known for working with masks?

[Brian P]

Seek no further than Picasso.much of his early work was influenced by an exibition of African Tribal Art in the early 20th C.His later drawings and etchings of artists and models include the mask as a theme.

[edanddeb98]

Artist, Craftsman, Director, Mask Maker, Mask-Maker, Other Performing Arts, Other Visual Art
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Lillian Pitt (Yakima/Warm Springs/Wasco), Warm Springs Stick Indian, cast crystal, 18" x 9" x 6", 2006

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While maskmaking today among Native Americans is not nearly as universal as it was in ancient America, the art and craft of creating these unique tools for human expression did not disappear, and in fact their creation is once again expanding. Indigenous maskmakers of North America today are as varied as the art they make. Some have made masks from the beginning of their art careers; others segued in from other mediums— painting, sculpture, etc.; some went in search of their cultures; others were surrounded by it.

All made remarkable journeys, meeting crucial moments and crossroads where their lives changed forever because of their art. Despite the obstacles, they live today and face tomorrow with their heritage and their unique worldview essential to their lives as artists.

lillian pitt
The matriarch of modern Native American maskmakers, Lillian Pitt (Yakama/Wasco/Warm Springs) has a long career as an artist, and no collection is complete without one of her memorable pieces. That wasn’t always true. Some 25 years ago, she was rolling curlers in a hair salon until she suffered a back injury.

Pitt was soon in community college, where her life took an exciting turn: ceramics class. “I fell in love with clay; it was so magical!” she exclaims. “I never considered myself an artist when this all started. I took some clay home and said, ‘Hmm…what should I do?’ And I thought, ‘Let’s make a mask!’ Then my teacher said to ‘raku’ it. My response was, ‘What’s that?’ It was like being a clean slate; I knew nothing about it.”

It was Pitt’s naiveté that helped her get her first big break, when R.C. Gorman blew into Portland, Oregon for an exhibition meet-and-greet, she recalls. She went up to him and showed him photographs of her school projects. “He bought my first two masks and got my work into a gallery,” says Pitt, who still sounds amazed about it after all these years. “It was all [because of] his nurturing and wonderful generosity. Up until then, I was a community-college student on my way to a four-year social-work degree; but he changed all that.”

Pitt’s artistic inspiration comes from her ancestors, she says. “I have a 10,000-year-long history in the Columbia [River] Gorge—that’s how long my people have been there. It’s where I find some of my designs, in the petroglyphs there; [I also find my designs] in our other traditional things, such as basket designs, beading designs, and our legends and stories.”

The Portland-based artist is now working in bronze and cast glass, producing masks (as well as prints, scultpture and jewelry) that are both beautiful and subtle, yet wildly unique. You can see her latest work at the Gary Farmer Gallery in Santa Fe this summer during Indian Market.
Lillian Pitt’s work is shown at the Bonnie Kahn Gallery in Portland, OR; Sunbird Art Gallery in Bend, OR; Northwest by Northwest in Cannon Beach, OR; Jeffrey Moose Gallery in Seattle, WA; and Images of the North in San Francisco, CA. Details: 971/212-5067 or lillianpitt.com

jerry laktonen
Ask maskmaker Jerry Laktonen what inspires his art and he’ll tell you a sad story with a happy ending. The fifty-something Alutiiq grew up on the shores of remote Larson Bay near Kodiak, Alaska, never seeing much of his culture.

“I never saw my people’s traditional arts until I was a young adult, when I saw pictures from the early 1900s of village beaches covered with kayaks,” says Laktonen. “My dad told me that 20 years after that—when he was a boy—he never even saw a kayak paddle. That means many of our cultural items disappeared in just one lifetime.” Curious about how this occurred, Laktonen found that many adults were wiped out by diseases, so an untold number of children, including his father, were sent to missions or boarding schools, breaking the cultural continuum.


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Jerry Laktonen (Alutiiq), Octopus, yew and cherry woodcarving, 27" x 18" x 4", 2007.

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Laktonen began researching the history of his people’s arts and was stunned by the depth and beauty of Alutiiq fabric and wood cultural artifacts—including large bodies of work held by Russian and French collectors. “The extreme beauty of it—I was amazed,” he says. “It was just out of this world—highly imaginative and technically advanced.”

Then a disaster struck, damaging the local ecosystem, crippling his livelihood and making worldwide headlines: the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. An amateur woodcarver, Laktonen had been a fisherman for years, but after the oil spill he had to find another way to feed his family; he found it making Alutiiq items from the past.

Now based in Granite Falls, Washington, Laktonen conjures masks from yellow cedar, quartz, cabochons, angora, aged red ochre, amber, carnelian and curly maple, to name a few of the materials he incorporates into his work. They evoke the same pleasure as a gourmet meal from the hands of a master chef. More importantly, Laktonen says he’s happy to contribute to the appreciation of Native art, tradition and culture.

Jerry Laktonen will be showing at the 2007 Santa Fe Indian Market. Details: 360/691-7772 or whaledreams.com


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below, left to right: Fierce One, Becky Olvera Schultz (Azteca/Kickapoo), clay, horse hair, turkey feathers, deer tail, bone and glass, 14"h x 12"w, 2003; Mask by George Bettelyoun (Oglala Lakota); Alma Guerrero, Zarco Guerrero (Juañeno/Acjachemem), carved mahogany, 12" x 6", 2005.


becky olvera schultz
Sometimes tragedy can bring about good things in your life. That’s what happened in to Becky Olvera Schultz (Azteca/ Kickapoo) when her only brother committed suicide in 1992.

Calling that a “life-altering experience” and seeking a way to heal the pain in her life, Schultz recalls that a friend encouraged her to take a drum-making class. “I rejoiced in working with my hands again; I had forgotten how therapeutic and centering it is,” she says.

Since then, Schultz has found a special niche in Native art, maskmaking, in work that is inspired by “all peoples indigenous to the Americas.” Schultz says she finds the faces she uses in her masks in the features of Native people, faces she finds to be “intriguing and beautiful, no matter what age, gender or group.”

With five solo shows to her credit and her work in a variety of leading galleries, Schultz works in terracotta and white clay, using acrylic paint, horsehair, bison fur, leather and beads to create vibrant and thoughtful masks that are delightfully titled. She adds, “I take satisfaction in my creations knowing that each person viewing my work will respond in their own way to each piece.”

Details: Becky Olvera Schultz, P.O. Box 217, Aptos, CA 95001; 831/688-0694 or native-expressions.com

george bettelyoun
If you do an Internet search on George Bettelyoun (Oglala Lakota), you’ll find his sports career near the top of the list, as he was named last year to South Dakota’s “1980s All-Decade Team” in basketball. That doesn’t mean he isn’t a true artist, however.

“‘Mister basketball’ aside, I got old—you can’t do basketball all your life—and I had to fall back on something and that was my art,” explains the thirty-something resident of Minneapolis.

A former fashion model with a bachelor of arts degree from Mount Marty College in Yankton, South Dakota, Bettelyoun remembers that his biggest push in art as a child growing up on the Pine Ridge Reservation came from an uncle, who was a cartoonist with Hanna-Barbera. Another inspiration, says Bettelyoun, was the Native Arts Circle, a Minnesota-based arts advocacy group. “They provided me with an outlet for my creative expression,” he says. “I was doing art before, but I didn’t know that it—art—was who I was, or that I had a talent to do it and make a living from it.”

Leather is a big player on his materials list, he says, along with textiles, paper, beads and feathers. “I just finished a piece for an art show—two masks of jingle dress dancers—and I used the last two wild-goose feathers from the dozen someone gave me last year,” he says.

Bettelyoun has always liked drawing faces, which he put in many of his two-dimensional works. As he matured and developed an interest in performance, maskmaking came naturally. “I was, and still am, so amazed at how much facial expressions can tell a story.”
George Bettelyoun’s work is featured at Two Rivers Gallery at the Minneapolis American Indian Center. Details: 612/879-1780 or maicnet.org

zarco guerrero
The future looms bright for maskmaker Zarco Guerrero (Juañeno/Acjachemem) of Mesa, Arizona. In September, he’s having a one-man show at the Mesa Arts Center and he’s just released a DVD, Caras y Máscaras, a 30-year retrospective of more than 200 works of art and his mask performances.

Taking images of the past, Guerrero transforms ordinary paper and clay into scowling visages of ancient gods. Many of his art masks are of magnificently carved wood, including cypress, mahogany and cedar. The Fariseo and Pascola masks of northwest Mexico’s Sonoran region, used in traditional ceremonies, are his specialty. He credits his interest in maskmaking to his childhood in southern Arizona, where he attended Na

[CARLY E]

i dont know of an artist but i know of venetian masks you know venice italy and also mardi gras masks