Day 273 - Lakota ceremonial dance dress



December 2, 2021

Gallery 744 is the introductory gallery to a major collection of Native American art, a fairly recent gift of Charles and Valerie Diker. (That said, gallery 745 is a period room from a Frank Lloyd Wright house - so much for the coherence of my numerical ordering scheme, and of the Met's.)  Gallery 744 showcases just two objects: a textile art hanging entitled "Dream Catcher" made out of blankets of various colors that have been cut into hundreds of diamond shapes of different sizes and laboriously stitched together, and the Lakota woman's dance ceremony dress with accessories that is the subject of today's entry.

Several things immediately strike me on seeing the garment. The first is that it must have taken ages to make. Most of the dress  layers beadwork over a leather base and employs thousands of tiny beads of various colors, including mauve, deep blue, crimson, yellow, and orange, arranged in different patterns.  I have no idea how such a dress would be made.  Do the beads come on ready-made strings,  or do they have to be strung together (work that would produce tremendous eye strain, I imagine)? Are the beads then woven on looms, or are the filaments connected in some other way?  Second, the dress must be enormously heavy. I later read that the beads alone weigh 15 pounds; other materials adding to the weight include shells, bones, porcupine quills, and a fringe of hundreds of narrow leather strips.  Third, I wonder what the double-armed cross is doing on the bodice- is it just a geometric shape, or does it have religious significance? Fourth, I can see that the dress was made after Europeans came to Lakota lands, since a row of small brass bells is attached to the bottom of a long piece that appears to drape over the shoulders. The  tinkle of the bells, I think, must have added a great deal to the dance ritual.

Then I read the placard and see that the dress was made in 2006. It was designed by Jodi Archambault. a member of the Lakota/Teton Sioux nation, and produced by family and friends using traditional Lakota techniques. Many hands, I guess, made work lighter, though not light. The dress was made specifically to be worn at powwow dance competitions; presumably, dancers were accustomed to wearing heavy garments at such events. 

Finally, as I'm almost done with the first draft of this entry, I move around to the back of the display case and am struck even more by the fine, elaborate workmanship of the dress. I'm chagrined to think that I might have left without doing this.

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