The art of the feather (and the downside)

ONE of the most dazzling tidbits in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s big show “The Arts in Latin America 1492-1820” is enshrined in a gallery devoted to silver. A richly ornamented chalice made in Mexico City around 1575 and given to the museum by newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst in 1948, it stands a mere 13 inches tall. But in terms of 16th century Mexican silver, the chalice has everything: silver gilt, rock crystal, boxwood and hummingbird feathers.

Hummingbird feathers?

They’re not easy to see. In a mind-boggling marriage of European and Latin American artistic traditions, an anonymous Mexican craftsman used snippets of colorful plumage to fill the background of tiny boxwood carvings on the chalice’s base and stem. The featherwork has been badly damaged over the years -- probably long before Hearst’s purchase. But sharp-eyed visitors who examine the carvings of Christ’s apostles and other figures can glimpse pinpoints of brilliant turquoise on what remains of the feathers.

“The chalice has all the bells and whistles of its type,” LACMA’s head objects conservator John Hirx says. And that made it an obvious choice for the major traveling exhibition of Spanish Colonial art, which opened last fall at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, traveled to the Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso in Mexico City and runs through Oct. 28 in Los Angeles.

But LACMA’s little tour de force did not go to Philadelphia or Mexico City. No one was willing to risk more damage to the feathers.

“If I have anything to say about it, it will never travel,” Hirx says. “People who want to see it can come to Los Angeles.”

In the world of art, feathers are regarded with a special kind of dread. Collected from a wide variety of birds, they are prized for their color and delicate beauty, and incorporated into a surprising range of objects. But they are, in every sense of the phrase, high maintenance. They fade in improper light. They lose iridescence when their structure breaks down. They get brittle and break if the temperature or humidity doesn’t agree with them. They attract insects -- as well as tough scrutiny from import/export inspectors and cultural watchdogs. And if they fall apart, they can’t be put back together.

Inevitably, they bedevil conservators and curators. And no one knows that better than an intrepid three-person team that’s organizing a landmark exhibition of feather art, opening at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Mexico City in November 2009.

“There’s something I would almost call a fear of feathers out there,” says Diana Fane, curator emerita at the Brooklyn Museum, who is working on the show with Alessandra Russo, an Italian art historian who teaches at Columbia University, and Gerhard Wolf, a German scholar who directs the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, Italy.

“People tell us we can’t possibly do a show,” Fane says. “No one will lend the objects. We will never get the proper mounts for them. They are in too bad condition. Nobody knows how to conserve them. People automatically assume that feathers have to be kept in certain light levels, so you have to grope through the dark to protect them.”

Some of the fear comes from a lack of knowledge about a material more familiar to natural history museums than art institutions. But there’s no denying that feathers are trouble.

At the Fowler Museum at UCLA, a spectacular New Caledonian mask with a body-enveloping cascade of dark gray feathers grabs attention in “Intersections: World Arts, Local Lives,” an exhibition drawn from the museum’s global collections of ethnographic objects. But in the storage vaults, curator Roy Hamilton pulls out drawer after drawer of Maori feather cloaks that probably will never appear in the galleries. The sensitivity of the material isn’t the only problem, he says. Maori people must be involved with any public display of the cloaks, and that would require sorting out differences of opinion among factions of the Maori and dealing with governmental bureaucracies.

The Southwest Museum of the American Indian in Highland Park -- which has one of the nation’s largest collections of Native American art and operates under the umbrella of the Autry National Center in Griffith Park -- has had a different feather problem. Chronically underfunded and housed in a woefully porous historic building, the museum has been infested by insects that graze on feathers and other organic materials. The problem is under control, thanks to a massive cleaning and conservation project that includes freezing hundreds of feathered headdresses, ceremonial objects and kachinas to rid them of pests.

“When we take things out of the freezer and see carcasses, we know how important it is to do this,” conservator Angela McGrew says.

The museum is closed while the staff completes the project and prepares for an exhibition of Southwest Museum highlights at the Autry Center. Feathers are a small part of that effort, but they call for technical skill and a gentle touch. In one case, when an insect tunneled through the shaft of a fluffy little feather on the headdress of a kachina, McGrew caught the damage in time to replace the shaft with a thin strip of Tyvek, a synthetic material made of polyethylene fibers.

An art form wanes

Feathers have come to roost in art and ethnographic museums because many cultures have conferred great value on them. Symbolizing fertility, abundance, riches and power, they have been used as currency or tribute and have been incorporated into ceremonial attire, ritual objects and decorative arts. Hawaiian feathered cloaks and capes at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu are highly symbolic garments associated with the “chiefly class,” says Betty Kam, the museum’s vice president for cultural resources. People who wore them demanded respect.

But the feathers themselves haven’t had a lot of respect in the modern Euro-centric art world. Latin American feather art was in great demand by the Spanish conquistadors who took spectacular examples back to Europe. As Catholicism spread in the New World, the art form was adapted to Christian subject matter, liturgical objects and ecclesiastic vestments. Many of the best pieces were given to popes, kings and noblemen who shared them with an appreciative audience. No less than French 18th century philosopher Voltaire praised Mexican craftsmanship, including featherwork, for having “the most beautiful patterns with the variety of their colors and tones.”

But featherwork began to decline in the 17th century and, over time, all but disappeared. Today, works made of feathers tend to be regarded as curiosities or bizarre exotic objects.

Reviving a dormant tradition

The curators of the exhibition-in-process, “El Vuelo de las Imagenes: Arte Plumario de Mexico y Europa, 1300-1700” (The Flight of Images: Mexican Feather Art and Europe, 1300-1700), hope their project will stimulate interest in the little-known art form. The show will be the first to focus on Mexican feather mosaics -- images composed of tiny bits of feathers -- created by native craftsmen in the 16th and 17th centuries. About 120 feather mosaics will be accompanied by related pre-Columbian and European works in an exploration of feather imagery common to the New and Old worlds.

It’s a daunting project that got its start in research and writing by Russo, who first encountered featherwork in 1994, when she came across reproductions in a book. Intrigued, she began to read about the subject and found a feather mosaic in her hometown museum, in Bologna, Italy. Brought there from New Spain in the 16th or 17th century, she says, it was probably received as a rare and beautiful treasure. For her, “it was an object that inspired an idea.”

Eventually she teamed with Wolf and they invited Fane to join them. They applied to the Getty Foundation for financial assistance and in 2002 received a $194,000 collaborative research grant. In anticipation of the exhibition, the Getty money allowed the curators to travel, do research and conduct a survey of museum policies on the transport and display of feather art.

The grant also supported a seminar on feathers, organized by the curators and held in New York in 2004. One of the participants, Ellen Pearlstein, academic coordinator of the UCLA/Getty program in archaeological and ethnographic conservation, presented a survey of feather conservation practices and identified a host of topics needing further study.

As for the exhibition, it hasn’t been easy to secure loans of objects for which there are no guidelines for conservation, travel and display. Loans that cross national borders must conform to regulations ensuring that international trade in specimens of wild animals and plants does not threaten their survival. One big remaining concern for the curators is how to display the objects so that their iridescence is shown to the best advantage without causing damage.

But it’s all part of the process of learning to deal with a complicated and unfamiliar art form.

“People used to say that European panel paintings and works of art on paper couldn’t be lent,” Fane says. “Now there are very good guidelines for just what happens to them after a certain exposure to light. If you display them properly and rotate them between displays, it’s perfectly safe.”

suzanne.muchnic@latimes.com