Two If by Sea

James Panero recounts a recent trip to Mystic, Connecticut, and offers his thoughts on “J. M. W. Turner: Watercolors from Tate” and other developments at the Mystic Seaport Museum.

THE NEW CRITERION, November 2019

Two If by Sea

On “J. M. W. Turner: Watercolors from Tate” at the Mystic Seaport Museum, Mystic, Connecticut.

Sailing to Mystic Seaport is one of those prehistoric memories of my childhood that still inspires limbic delight. How primitive it all now seems: no cell phones or GPS, my father and I dead reckoning on our small cutter-rig Cape Dory. Down in the cabin, I measured the paper charts with a plexiglass navigational plotter. I turned the directional dials on the LORAN radio. Finally we reached the mouth of the Mystic River. We circled and honked our airhorn until the railroad and highway bridges rotated and lifted to let us through. When we tied up at the historic Seaport, a maritime town of preserved boats and buildings, the facility was just closing for the day. That was the best part about it. As transients staying overnight at the marina, we alone could still wander the Seaport village at all hours, past the cooperage, the ropewalk, the church, the tiny school, and the George H. Stone & Co. General Store, like Ishmael on his way to the Spouter-Inn. On my Walkman, I played a cassette tape of sea shanties. Here was the Age of Sail. We were living it.

From the Age of Sail—or at least its recreational variant—to the Age of Screen, the subsequent decades have not been altogether kind to Mystic Seaport. History has gone out of fashion, if you haven’t already heard. So has the sort of immersive history offered by institutions like the Seaport, founded in 1929, where reenactors forge iron, craft barrels, and caulk hulls in its historic structures. In our virtual present, real experience itself has grown suspect, foreign, even dangerous. As a teacher recently explained to me, many children today do not know what to do when their feet get wet. They really don’t know what to do when close-hauled in wine-dark seas. The sport of sailing has suffered. A large outdoor institution dedicated to our seafaring past has suffered especially.

Enter the “reimagined” Seaport. Since the turn of the millennium, the historic institution has proclaimed at least two “Strategic Plans.” The Seaport must be “repositioned.” It must “appeal to new audiences.” It must be “evolving and embracing contemporary culture.” It must be “rebranded.” It must be “relevant.” It all sounded, to me at least, quite alarming.

The Charles W. Morgan (middle), the last remaining American wooden whaling vessel, on the docks of Mystic Seaport. Photo: Mystic Seaport Museum.

Yet the distress calls have been a boon to the consultants, architects, and planners who now school around foundering institutions. One consequence has been the renaming of the Seaport, as it seems every “library” and “collection” and “institute” must be renamed these days, into a “museum.” And so we now have the “Mystic Seaport Museum.” Another consequence has been the construction of a new gallery, the Thompson Exhibition Building, to serve as a Kunsthalle for traveling shows and commissioned installations.

The proliferation of white-box galleries has largely become a blight on our cultural landscape. I suspect we will one day regret most of them, much like the benighted highways that slice through our urban centers, which are similarly designed for maximum throughput but have only invited further congestion. Contemporary art puts greater and greater impositions on its housing and display. Bigger galleries are built to contain it. Then new forms of art develop to overfill these gargantuan spaces.

Often this new art comes in the form of commissions designed to provoke commentary and commotion around some aspect of contemporaneity. At the Seaport we might soon see installations about swirling gyres, or modern-day pirates, or the rising seas. Or what about the history of the salt trade through large salt sculptures? That’s coming next year. You can almost figure it out yourself. The Seaport even brought in the impresario Nicholas R. Bell as its new curatorial director to crank up the institution’s popular reach, as he did at the Renwick in Washington, D.C., with immersive shows where “photography is encouraged.”

Museum leaders rarely lament these modern intrusions on their historic missions, buildings, and collections. Far from it—the “need” turns their hamster wheels. New buildings spur new fundraising that pays for more buildings and so on. What results are new brick-and-mortar (and glass-and-steel) billboards of perpetual presentness. I will never forget the director of one famous collection who proclaimed that her new Renzo Piano addition would finally let people know her institution was a museum. Of course, several generations of patrons managed to find their way there without Renzo. And of course, they still go there for the historic institution, not its mock-industrial appurtenance.

The Thompson Exhibition Building at the Mystic Seaport Museum. Photo: Mystic Seaport Museum.

Back at Mystic Seaport, maybe it’s the case of a stopped clock being right twice a day. Or maybe a favorable wind still blows over my beloved institution. Despite my dire predictions, through storm-tossed seas the Seaport has remarkably reached safe harbor. With a major exhibition of Turner watercolors on loan from the Tate, which opened here last month and remains on view through February, I might even say the institution has discovered a triumphant new world.1

Designed by Centerbrook Architects and Planners, the 14,000-square-foot Thompson Exhibition Building, which opened in 2016, is better than feared, even as it nevertheless presents a “distinct departure from the Museum’s traditional architecture.” Wood-framed in the shape of a hollow wave, the building references the Seaport’s collection of ship hulls in its fittings—although with its oversized patio and cavernous interior, the structure most resembles a mountaintop ski lodge. Stephen C. White, the Seaport’s president, says he wanted a building that would say, “Something’s happening here. Things are moving forward.” Such pathetic pleas aside, the museum sought a building that would be “good enough for Turner.” And here is Turner. There are also plans afoot to open up the Seaport’s extensive watercraft collection, with some eighty-seven boat designs, to public view. If this building boom ultimately leads to more open storage and more Turner, the results would be welcome indeed.

There is nothing quite like seeing a Turner, such as A Shipwreck in a Stormy Sea (ca. 1823–26), after just witnessing a reenactment of a nautical rescue by “breeches buoy,” as I did on my recent visit to the Seaport. The former United States Life-Saving Service, one of our government’s smartest creations, patrolled beaches day and night to rescue shipwrecked sailors. The breeches buoy was an ingenious system of ropes and pulleys that could be fired from a small cannon hauled down the beach from the lifesaving stations (which were themselves beautifully designed). Attached to the mast of a ship run aground, the buoy had a pair of shorts sewn to it that held passengers in place as they were hoisted ashore. Tens of thousands of lives were saved this way.

J. M. W. Turner, Whalers (Boiling Blubber) Entangled in Flaw Ice, Endeavouring to Extricate Themselves, 1846, Oil on canvas, Tate.

Through its artifacts and displays, the Seaport reveals the true challenges and terror of life at sea. Whaling ships like the Seaport’s prized Charles W. Morgan, the last remaining American wooden whaling vessel, were closer in experience to today’s floating oil rigs than to the romantic visions they might now inspire. They were factories at sea. American ships like the Morgan were the first to be able to harvest, process, and store whale oil, all without touching land, due to their set of shipboard try pots, which could render blubber while underway. “Voyaging in the Wake of the Whalers,” an ongoing and must-see exhibition at the Seaport, explains it all while matching a historic film of whaling with passages from Moby-Dick. Whalers (Boiling Blubber) Entangled in Flow Ice, Endeavouring to Extricate Themselves (1846), a stunning Turner painting at the center of this exhibition of watercolors, likewise shows those boilers firing away even as their ships sit stranded. Like a real-world Ahab, the American whaler was always determined.

While the watercolor exhibition is centered around a selection of maritime images, this is more than a “Turner and the Sea” show. The exhibition brings to America close to one hundred works from the Tate’s 1856 Turner Bequest, which ended up conveying just about everything the artist left behind, hook, line, and sinker, into Britain’s public trust. Selected out of some thirty thousand watercolors and sketches by the Tate’s David Blayney Brown, the exhibition presents the full arc of Turner’s astonishing fecundity. The artist began as a precise draftsman in such works as View of the Avon Gorge (1791), Durham Cathedral: The Interior, Looking East along the South Aisle (1797–98), and Holy Island Cathedral (ca. 1806–07). He ended up the atmospheric dreamer we famously know in such meditations as Venice: Looking across the Lagoon at Sunset (1840), Rain Falling over the Sea near Boulogne (1845), and Stormy Sea with Dolphins (ca. 1835–40).

J. M. W. Turner, Venice: Looking across the Lagoon at Sunset, 1840, Watercolor on paper, Tate.

The exhibition makes the compelling case that watercolor was the medium in which Turner developed and tested these stylistic innovations. An accompanying catalogue of revealing essays and interviews assembled by Bell (who will soon be leaving the Seaport) looks at how Turner began his career as a painter-like watercolorist and ended up a watercolorist-like painter. In resplendent works such as Venice: San Giorgio Maggiore—Early Morning (1819), we can see how Turner’s uncanny sense for luminosity on canvas first developed in the white ground of watercolor, as did his gauzy building-up of scrims and layers.

Water gives and it takes. In his 1950 book The Enchafèd Flood: or, The Romantic Iconography of the Sea, W. H. Auden writes that the sea represents “that state of barbaric vagueness and disorder out of which civilization has emerged and into which, unless saved by the effort of gods and men, it is always liable to relapse.” In his watercolors, Turner likewise mixed the waters of content and medium for his own deep dive into compositional disorder.

J. M. W. Turner, Arundel Castle, on the River Arun, ca. 1824, Watercolor on paper, Tate.

But Turner was not a pure abstractionist, despite the claims made by “Turner: Imagination and Reality,” Lawrence Gowing’s 1966 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art that has long left us with an unfair retrospective view of Turner’s achievements. Nor was Turner a proto-Impressionist, an ultra-Romanticist, an anti-Industrialist, or whatever other school or cause he has been attached to. Turner began as an empiricist. As his compositions dissolved into formless shapes and blinding light, he became even more so, capturing a fuller vision of nineteenth-century life at the outer reaches of experience.

Born into the lower classes, through his own hard-driving career Turner maintained a respect for industry and the experiences of those who build, forge, sail, and render. His sense for awe reflected the real lives of hardworking people of the kind we still see at Mystic Seaport, which you can still reach by land or by sea.

1 “J. M. W. Turner: Watercolors from Tate” opened at Mystic Seaport Museum, Mystic, Connecticut, on October 5, 2019, and remains on view through February 23, 2020.

Venice's Last Judgment

James Panero on the beginning and end of the Most Serene Republic, occasioned by "Venice's last judgment" from the September 2019 issue.

THE NEW CRITERION, September 2019

Venice’s Last Judgment

On the beginning and end of the Most Serene Republic.

The Venice Biennale, that strange pageant of contemporary fashions, offers the opportunity, if not the necessity, to explore the real art of La Serenissima. At the furthest extreme from the latest forms on display in the Biennale’s Giardini are the ancient mosaics of the Church of Santa Maria Assunta, on the distant lagoon island of Torcello. I brought my family to Torcello’s desolate piazza on what proved to be the hottest morning of a hot Italian summer. Torcello is an hour by vaporetto water bus from the Fondamente Nove, on the northern edge of Venice’s sestiere of Cannaregio. We cut the time in half by water taxi and sped past the islands of Murano, Burano, and Mazzorbo before idling up to Torcello’s Ponte del Diavolo, where the narrow canal becomes too shallow for navigation.

Since we arrived early, we had to wait for the church lady to unlock the doors of the basilica. We fed the languid fish schooling by the abandoned quay of a nearby channel. Then we huddled in what shade we could find on this barren deposit of alluvial silt. Torcello’s tiny Locanda Cipriani, the fabled retreat where Hemingway wrote Across the River and into the Trees, was closed for the day, so the negronis would have to wait. At one point, we begged someone inside the island’s archaeological museum for some shelter from the sun. Mi dispiace, he said, closing the shutters on us. Our water supply started running low, as did my party’s patience. In the Italian custom, the attendant for Torcello’s lavish municipal bathroom had overslept and missed his ferry, and no one else had the key.

The privations no doubt made the sight of Santa Maria Assunta, once we were let inside, all the more thrilling. On its western wall, the golden vision of its “Last Judgment,” which received a full cleaning and restoration in February, is as profound as any art in Venice. With six vertical registers, the mosaic is filled with an awe-inspiring amount of visual information: scenes of the crucifixion, anastasis (resurrection), deesis (Christ with Mary and John the Baptist), and psychostasis (the weighing of souls) all rest on vignettes of heaven and hell divided in the lowest registers.

The Last Judgment, ca. twelfth century, Gold and glass mosaic.

The decorative splendor of this mosaic barely holds its dynamic forces together. In the upper registers, an expressive Christ pulls the souls of the Old Testament up from limbo to heaven by their wrists. Below, a snaking line of judicial plumbing leads down to increasingly explicit visions of hell. Two demons try to tip the scales of Saint Michael with their pitchforks while pouring out sins from bottles and bags. Meanwhile the damned are subdivided among the lustful, gluttonous, wrathful, envious, avaricious, and slothful, where they endure fiery and icy torments, when not being eaten by worms.

Today Torcello is an overlooked shoal in the northern lagoon, but at one time the island nurtured the first seeds of what became the great Republic of Venice. Torcello flowered as the original center of activity in the Veneto, before its channels silted up and its inhabitants relocated to the nearby islands of Burano, Murano, and the high ground of the Rialto. A millennium ago, at its apex, there were some ten thousand inhabitants on Torcello. Today, only about a dozen remain. Torcello’s “Last Judgment” therefore offers genuine revelation. The end times here have already come.

There was a period when Torcello was the crucible of Venice’s unexpected beginnings. In the final days of the Western Roman Empire, barbarian hordes descended on the old Roman towns still clinging to the shores of the northern Adriatic. As Attila the Hun surrounded the town of Altinum in 452, its residents fled to the sandbars of the nearby lagoon. These Roman holdouts and refugees from the other Veneti towns became lagoon dwellers, incolae lacunae, just three miles south of Altinum on the shifting delta sands of the River Sile.

Today the view from Torcello’s campanile does not look all that different from what those settlers first saw fifteen hundred years ago. In The Stones of Venice, John Ruskin called the sight “one of the most notable scenes in this wide world of ours. As far as the eye can reach, a waste of wild sea moor, of a lurid ashen gray; . . . lifeless, the color of sackcloth, with corrupted sea-water soaking through the roots of its acrid weeds, and gleaming hither and thither through its snaky channels.”

A close-up of “the Envious,” The Last Judgment, ca. twelfth century, Gold and glass mosaic.

The Venetian lagoon has always been an alien landscape, but its separation from the mainland provided essential protection from Italy’s drawn-out period of Germanic incursions and the collapse of the Byzantine Empire. In their exodus, the settlers built houses on pilings of hardwood driven into the mud flats. All of Venice was built this way. It is said that the baroque church of Santa Maria della Salute, the towering domed memorial to the devastating plague of 1630 by the Punta della Dogana, rests on a million wooden piles. The Venetians also organized their new community along Roman republican lines. Rather than be ruled by an emperor or king, they elected their leader—dux in Latin, duke in English, doge in Italian. In this way the Veneti of the lagoon formed their mighty maritime republic that endured for over a thousand years. In the Republic’s final days, before its destruction by Napoleon, the Venetians even counseled the architects of the United States on the secrets of their Republic’s endurance.

The foundation stone of the Torcello basilica was laid in 639, a year after the town’s bishop had a vision that his flock should abandon what remained of Altinum. As Torcello rose in importance, its basilica became a prominent cathedral. The nearby channel, now little more than a shoaled-up estuary that harbors those languid fish, was once Torcello’s bustling Grand Canal. The relics of Saint Heliodorus, the Altinum bishop who accompanied Saint Jerome and was martyred in 390, were carried off from his Roman town and laid to rest beneath the basilica’s altar. His golden reliquary can still be seen there today. Since the Torcello basilica predates the construction of even the first cathedral of San Marco in Venice by some two centuries, one legend maintains that the body of Saint Mark was first interred here, perhaps in the crypt’s Roman sarcophagus, after two Venetian merchants alighted with the Evangelist’s remains from Alexandria, Egypt, which was then under the dominion of the Abbasid Caliphate.

About the time of the height of Torcello’s predominance in 1100, the interior of the basilica received its cycle of golden mosaics, which includes a sorrow-filled image of the Virgin and Child in the main apse above a swirling, tessellated marble floor. Byzantine in form, the selection of a Last Judgment scene for the opposite towering western wall, through which congregants once entered and exited, is said to have been a particularly Venetian touch.

Torcello reveals Venice in its true provisional strangeness, where art gives vision to immanence and relics buoy the faithful to the final days. The great works of Venice have always conveyed these contingent qualities—as a world between worlds. Rather than gaze up to some idealized beyond, the art of Venice looks out to proximate, felt, rough-and-tumble revelation.

A close-up of “the Gluttonous and Avaricious,” The Last Judgment, ca. twelfth century, Gold and glass mosaic.

Art has always played a central role in connecting the Venetian experience to the cosmic story. The particular hardships endured by the disease-prone city can be seen through its adoration of the “plague saints”: San Rocco, in whose scuola and church, in the sestiere of San Polo, Tintoretto painted one of the world’s greatest cycles of Christian image-making; and San Sebastiano, in whose church, on the site of a medieval hospice in the sestiere of Dorsoduro, Veronese painted some of his own masterpieces. For the Scuola Grande di San Marco, which now serves as the entrance to Venice’s hospital, in the sestiere of Castello, Tintoretto painted his breakthrough Miracle of the Slave (1548), along with his famous depictions of how the body of Mark came to Venice (and its miraculous rediscovery after the Evangelist was, for a time, temporarily misplaced).

Art holds a particular power over the city, just as the city conveys a particular power to art. Undoubtedly this is the reason why many contemporary artists come to congest Venice’s art-filled walls: to claim the city’s revelations, even if what they themselves purport to reveal may be facile and false. Of course, the science-fiction didacticism of the group show in this year’s Biennale, full of blinking lights and spinning whirligigs, speaks little to the art of Venice’s resonant past. In our secular age, so enraptured with the present moment, how could it? Yet sometimes connections can still be made: in the United States Pavilion, the sculptures of Martin Puryear, which draw together the classicism of many sculptural traditions, are fraught with memory; an exhibition on “The Nature of Arp” at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection speaks to the aquatic forms of the lagoon; “Pittura/Panorama: Paintings by Helen Frankenthaler, 1952–1992,” at the Palazzo Grimani, returns the great modernist to Venice some fifty years after she dazzled in the United States Pavilion with her aqueous compositions; and at Ca’ Pesaro, “Arshile Gorky, 1904–1948” reveals the tragic vision of the American abstractionist who lost his family in the Armenian genocide.

Through plague and pestilence, rising sea waters and sinking salt marshes, in Venice the end has never seemed all that far off. Today the flood that troubles Venetians most is the tourists pouring out of grandi navi, the massive cruise ships that wreak havoc on the Giudecca Canal and may soon be banned, not the city’s frequent inundations of acqua alta, which locals take in watery stride. Last November, when I was previously in Venice for the Tintoretto exhibitions at the Palazzo Ducale and Accademia museums, the high-water siren sounded at daybreak. The sirene allertamento acqua altanow broadcast from twenty-two points across the historical center and islands of Venice. From my window overlooking the Accademia, I listened as the signal broke the morning spell from the alarm atop San Trovaso. As my water taxi motored up the Grand Canal, the flood waters compounded with the morning rain and washed over the calliaround the Ponte di Rialto.

Thirty-five years ago Venice installed its first flood alarm on the campanile of San Marco. A new alarm developed by the Centro Previsioni e Segnalazioni Maree now uses a wireless network and digital signals of various tones to indicate the height of the rising tide. Venetians also sign up for emergency notices by text message, giving them a few extra minutes to slide in the low metal barriers at the bottom of their doorways to hold back the headwaters. In the months of fall, as the sirocco southern wind, the full moon, and other hydrological effects converge on the Adriatic to push water into the lagoon, many Venetians now simply leave the barriers in place.

The waters of the lagoon have always offered protection and destruction in equal measure. With its canals framing an architecture of exquisite lace, the city’s liquid light gives evanescent form to the miraculous story of survival that began, and ended, on humble Torcello. “Without making this excursion you can hardly pretend to know Venice,” Henry James said of his own visit to that island. “It is impossible to imagine a more penetrating case of unheeded collapse. Torcello was the mother-city of Venice, and she lies there now, a mere mouldering vestige, like a group of weather-bleached parental bones left impiously unburied.”

People Persons

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, May 29, 2019

People Persons

A review of “The Story Box: Franz Boas, George Hunt and the Making of Anthropology” at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery , Through July 7

New York

Cultural anthropology has lately been buried in politics. Critics have blasted its study of non-Western societies as patronizing if not far worse. But anthropology’s record of cross-cultural exchange deserves to be dusted off and put on display. Its history can be deeply humanizing, offering groundbreaking ways of understanding a people’s art and customs on their own terms.

This point is vividly made in “The Story Box: Franz Boas, George Hunt and the Making of Anthropology,” an exhibition now at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery. George Hunt and Franz Boas were the odd couple of American anthropology. Hunt (1854-1933) was an English-Tlingit guide who married into the Kwakwaka’wakw (pronounced KWOK-wok-ya-wokw) people of British Columbia. Boas (1858-1942) was a German-Jewish scholar living among the university people of New York. Over 40 years their collaboration and friendship faced down Canadian injustice toward the Kwakwaka’wakw to lay the foundations of a modern anthropology, one that truly valued the richness of indigenous cultures and societies.

Before founding the anthropology department at Columbia University, Boas headed field studies among the peoples of the Pacific Northwest that not only collected objects but also recorded intricate social customs. This research went on to advance a new understanding of indigenous cultures. While the reigning theory of social evolution mistook non-Western cultures as mere examples of primitive development, Boas argued for the equality of indigenous art and practice. This novel approach informed the creation of the American Museum of Natural History’s Northwest Coast Hall, which Boas opened in 1899. The institution’s oldest surviving gallery, now closed for renovation, was radical for first considering tribal art on its own terms.

Franz Boas and George Hunt holding a cloth background while a Kwakiutl woman is photographed.

Known as the father of American anthropology, Boas went on to shape his discipline the world over. The structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss credited an early visit to Boas’s hall with inspiring his own methodology. Zora Neale Hurston was a disciple of Boas whose groundbreaking work preserved key figures and folkways of the black South.

In his own fieldwork, Boas was never alone. Hunt was an equal partner in both writing and research. Their work culminated in “The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians,” their extensive 1897 monograph of Kwakwaka’wakw culture that remains a case study in its thorough documentation of ceremonies, songs, language, stories and artifacts.

The Kwakwaka’wakw, meaning those who speak the language of Kwak’wala, comprise 18 independent village groups residing on the central coast of British Columbia, one among several nations that developed along the resource-rich coastline of the Pacific Northwest. “The Story Box” takes its title from a letter that Boas wrote to Kwakwaka’wakw chiefs in 1897. “It is good that you should have a box in which your laws and stories are kept,” he said of the cedar boxes used to store ceremonial regalia, which he considered akin to his book. “My friend, George Hunt, will show you a box in which some of your stories will be kept…. Now they will not be forgotten.”

Lion-type mask by an unknown Kwakwaka’wakw (1820) PHOTO: ©TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM

Several examples of the artifacts, notes, recordings and photographs the two used in their research are gathered in this exhibition, enhanced with superb descriptions and digital displays. These include Hunt’s personally annotated edition of “The Social Organization,” comparisons of book illustrations with Boas’s own source photography of initiation dances, artifacts such as the serpent-decorated settee that Boas first documented in the field, and digitized sound recordings originally created on wax cylinders that feature the voice of Hunt himself.

The importance of such remembering is more than just academic. The Kwakwaka’wakw practices that Boas and Hunt recorded were already illegal at the time of their fieldwork under Canada’s 1884 “potlatch ban,” which sought to force assimilation by depriving indigenous peoples of their ritual artifacts and cultural legacy. This infamous law wasn’t overturned until 1951.

As a consequence of the potlatch ban, much of Boas’s fieldwork actually took place during the seven months in 1893 that Hunt and his extended family lived in an ethnographic display organized by Boas as part of the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. This unusual stateside residency allowed Hunt to perform his rituals in safety outside of Canadian jurisdiction.

Among the Kwakwaka’wakw of today, Hunt is a revered ancestor. His work with Boas preserved objects and customs that would otherwise have been lost to the potlatch ban. Their research has allowed contemporary Kwakwaka’wakw to reclaim cultural practices and artistic forms by reconnecting heraldic symbols with ancestral lines. This task of reconstruction began under Hunt and Boas themselves. The two spent decades after the publication of “The Social Organization” correcting and updating their field observations. The work continues today, as Aaron Glass, the curator of “The Story Box,” is developing an annotated digital edition of the book that will bring its documentation up to the present day.

On a morning I visited the show, the multimedia artist Corrine Hunt, a great-granddaughter of George Hunt and an exhibition consultant, was on hand to put the finishing touches on her re-creation of a “Transformation Mask,” a ritual headdress in the form of a killer whale that she made with Kwakwaka’wakw carver David Mungo Knox based on Hunt and Boas’s research. Such contemporary connections to Hunt, Boas and the people they documented over a century ago add poignancy to this small but compelling show, which will next go on view at the U’mista Cultural Centre in Alert Bay, British Columbia. “The Story Box” tells a story across time and cultures that is out of the box and urgent.