AP® Art History · Unit 5 · Topic 5.2
Transformation, Beadwork, and Blackware
Indigenous American artists built objects that physically perform transformation or absorb outside materials: a mask that mechanically splits open mid-dance, beadwork grafted onto a soldier's pouch shape, and clay turned black by smothering its fire.
A Pacific Northwest transformation mask is carved as a closed animal face, a raven, an eagle, a wolf, but it is built as a machine. Hinges run along the sides and strings thread back to the dancer's hands. Mid-performance, the dancer pulls the strings, the hinges swing open, and the outer animal face splits to reveal a carved human face underneath, often representing an ancestor or spirit. The transformation happens once, live, in front of the audience, because the mask is one hinged object, not two masks worn in sequence. The mechanism is the meaning: the dance stages the ancestral claim that human and animal identity are one being wearing different faces.
Bandolier bags, made by Great Lakes and Prairie nations such as the Lenape and Ho-Chunk, took their shape from a European and American military accessory, the soldier's ammunition pouch slung across the chest on a wide strap. Native beadworkers kept that borrowed silhouette but covered it edge to edge with dense, geometric floral beadwork in glass seed beads, turning a colonizer's object into a garment of prestige and identity, often too laden with beads to hold anything at all.
Blackware pottery, developed at San Ildefonso Pueblo by potters including Maria and Julian Martinez, starts as ordinary red-orange clay. Firing it in open air with oxygen keeps that color. Smothering the fire, piling on dung or ash to cut off oxygen, forces a smoky, low-oxygen state that deposits carbon through the clay's pores, turning the pot black all the way through rather than just on the surface. Like the mask and the bag, the object's physical process carries the meaning, continuity of technique passed through a community over time.
Key terms
- Transformation mask
- A hinged Pacific Northwest mask that opens mid-performance to reveal a second carved face underneath.
- Bandolier bag
- A heavily beaded shoulder bag made by Great Lakes nations, shaped after a European military ammunition pouch.
- Blackware
- Pottery fired in a smothered, low-oxygen atmosphere so carbon turns the clay black throughout, pioneered at San Ildefonso Pueblo.
- Smothered firing
- A firing technique that cuts off oxygen, usually by covering the kiln with dung or ash, to force a smoky reduction atmosphere.
Watch it explained
- How it worksWalk me through the strings and hinges that snap a transformation mask from raven into human.
- Worked exampleShow me a bandolier bag laying a beaded floral grid over a shape borrowed from a soldier's pouch.
- How it worksHow does smothering a firing in dung turn a red clay pot black all the way through?
- Going furtherWhat changes about a painted elk hide when the scene is made for tourists rather than for the camp?
- Common mistakeWhy isn't a transformation mask just two separate masks worn one after the other?
Check yourself
End of topic.