Caitlin Mahoney: Working at The Met is very special.
It's an amazing collection spanning the globe.
I work on objects from Africa, the Pacific, and the Americas here.
I have an anthropology background so I've always been interested in how objects are
made.
Now I get to ask questions about individual objects—how this individual object was made
and the life it's lived before coming to this Museum.
Conservators always condition check the objects before they come into the collection.
The wood on the Yup'ik mask is driftwood; it's from Alaska.
It clearly had had a lot of use in the past, as well as conservation treatments, so part
of my job was this close looking and figuring out the story behind the piece.
The appendages are easily inserted and re-inserted, and so I wanted to make sure that things were
in the right place and understand what was missing.
These pieces are often connected to living communities.
They often have people still around using similar objects so the opportunity came up
to work with Chuna McIntyre, a Yup'ik dancer, who dances masks similar to this piece.
Chuna McIntyre: I find many of these masks in many museums around the world in a very
sad state.
When it was first created, imagine the brilliance.
What you are looking at here really is the culmination of thirty centuries of life in
our region.
Mahoney: Where do the ideas for these come from?
McIntyre: From dreams and from visions of our medicine people.
But this particular design has occurred over and over and over again, in some way or another.
The seal, which is an essential figure, is emerging out of the kayak.
It's what we humans will recognize as an entity emerging out of the piece.
This hoop is a representation of the universe out there.
This, at one time, held a lot of appendages.
There may have been wing structures and feet.
And these fish, I bet you there were more flounders because we're saying to the universe,
"Please give us more fish."
Mahoney: I don't understand these broken quill bits.
McIntyre: Those probably are kind of like blood spurts.
Mahoney: Oh my goodness!
That's exactly where they go.
McIntyre: Masks this big would hang from the rafters.
A dancer would walk up to it and dance behind it.
Mahoney: And these feathers?
McIntyre: Need to stand like this, with the stars being up here.
Mahoney: So that when the mask is danced at night, you just see these white plumes.
McIntyre: See these stars!
McIntyre: You got it.
Mahoney: They're stars.
And this always escapes people: Why are these little lines here, aside from being decorative?
Black is the realm of night, it's the realm of the spirit, things we don't understand
and we can't.
And why red?
Red is our blood, which binds us all.
Seemingly simple lines imbued with great historical significance to us Yup'iks.
I feel that whenever we can repair and we know what to do, we should repair them.
Mahoney: It helped to have this conversation with Chuna.
We were able to know which things were in the wrong position.
For example, we had two flippers; one of those was a back flipper and one was a front flipper.
When we put it into its proper position, suddenly you see that there's seal coming through this
kayak structure and it has a front flipper as it moves forward and a back flipper.
These pieces, often the treatment has to be guided by what the material is telling you—whether
it can be held in that way or bent or moved or shifted or humidified, really is informed
by what the material is telling you.
The treatment that was attaching the hoop to the mask was failing and it was slightly
moved down, which I realized in conversation with Chuna, that this is something that would've
encompassed all of it; it's the universe.
I shifted the whole hoop.
The two sides really slid into place, and you could tell that's exactly where it was
meant to sit.
The feathers that are attached to the mask had suffered damage so I was able to use the
shaft of a replacement feather, the rakis, as a way to bridge over the breaks and the
loss.
These small things were making the mask sit more correctly, the pieces were fitting better.
The mask is stable.
It's going to be displayed in the American Wing for the first time.
That's why it was a great opportunity to connect Chuna with the piece, to connect it to other
Yup'ik masks that are being displayed.
These things have very extended lives and things change over time.
It was a very unique experience.
Now, it's in a better position to be understood and interpreted.