The Spirits Are Back in Force in Brooklyn

For generations, one of the first things visitors to the Brooklyn Museum encountered was the Hall of the Americas, the two-story rotunda right off the main lobby. And when you were in it, you knew you were home. Its towering, glowering Northwest Coast totem poles were city landmarks the way the New York Public Library lions were. Its fantastic kachina dolls radiated a celebrity glow. The 2,000-year-old “Paracas Textile,” one of the world’s rarest Andean weavings, was high on the list of best-kept art secrets in town. Knowing its value made Brooklyn regulars a society of connoisseurs.

When the museum began reassigning its exhibition spaces a few years ago, art of the Americas moved out of the hall. Other things moved in, most recently African art and a sampler of highlights from the institution’s holdings. But we still missed what had been there, especially since the Americas material, a jewel in Brooklyn’s crown, seemed to have been lost in the redeployment shuffle. It stayed in storage for five years.

Now it’s back on view in new quarters on the fifth floor, looking, if anything, more jewel-like than remembered, despite, or maybe because of, changes in presentation. The galleries — three and a sliver — are old-style spaces: roomy and square, with some handsome mosaic work in the floors and high ceilings. (The tall totem poles aren’t out yet but will be, the museum promises, in a couple of years.)

The new design, by Lance Singletary, is minimalist and ice blue, with a few boxlike cases in the center of each room. The only quasi-ethnological touch is a faint soundtrack of heartbeat drums and breathy flutes. Years ago I would have sniffed at such atmospherics. But if they pull people in and get them looking, great.

And great is what they’ll see in “Life, Death and Transformation in the Americas,” an installation of just over 100 objects. The stuff is hypnotic, one spellbinding fever dream after another. The arrangement is by theme rather than by date or ethnicity, with the basic premise that everything here is charged with some form of spiritual agency and conceived to be forcefully interactive: to cure disease, resolve social strife, enforce political power; to transport you, harrow you, center you.

That we’re going to be seeing art of extremes, of first and last things, is clear from the start in two startling images, created centuries apart, that stand near each other at the entrance to the first gallery. One is the museum’s famous Huastec “Life-Death Figure,” carved from sandstone in Mexico between A.D. 900 and 1250. On one side it depicts a sturdy, youthful male deity, eyes alert, mouth open as if speaking. On the other, we see his alter ego, a skeletal figure radiating the malignance of mortality.

The other introductory object is more recent and gives the pre-Columbian life-death concept a Christian overlay. Made in Taos, N.M., in the late 19th or early 20th century, it’s a miniature version of one of the death carts pulled in processions by Roman Catholic penitent societies in Mexico and the American Southwest during Holy Week. Some carts carry images of the suffering Jesus. This one has a female passenger, Doña Sebastiana, the Angel of Death. An apparition of fleshless bones and hair, she’s ethereal and horrific, an awful, eaten-away beauty.

Images of death’s heads recur in the widely scattered cultures the installation encompasses. A skull carved from cedar by a Heiltsuk artist in the 19th century, then painted black and topped with a bear-fur hairpiece, is chillingly realistic. It was made to shock wild young men into sober adulthood.

By contrast, the grinning features on a cotton funerary mask, woven and painted in Peru around 200 B.C. and designed to be attached to a mummy, are almost abstract, almost sweet. Here the visage of death takes its power from what surrounds it: double-headed snakes and supernatural felines like bold and aggressive tattoos.

The ideal of a peaceful or natural death doesn’t get much attention in the warrior-elite worldviews here. Instead there are serial images of decapitation. Tiny trophy heads dangle from the belt of an expertly carved male figure on a Chimu mirror handle from Peru. From Costa Rica comes a half-life-size ceramic male head, naturalistically modeled right down to the signs of its having been cleanly sliced off at the neck.

 At the same time, the Americas have consistently produced art saturated in the beauty of nature. It’s everywhere in this installation, studiously, painstakingly, lovingly caught: in tiny stone Inca llama figurines so smooth they might have been rubbed and caressed into shape; in an Aztec pendant in the shape of a grasshopper, shaped from aquamarine as clear as water; in butterflies, creatures of springtime, flickering over the surface of a 20th-century Hopi jar vase; in a Northwest Coast Tlingit shaman’s rattle in the shape of an oystercatcher, a shore bird that effortlessly negotiates the realms of land, sea and sky.

The border of the “Paracas Textile” is a miniature Eden stitched in thread. Figures abound, mortal and immortal. But the wonder is the depiction of lush vegetation, flowers and fruits, cultivated and wild, all identifiable by name. Each tree, and there are forests of them, is stitched leaf by leaf, with leaves overlapping to create what amounts to a three-dimensional relief. You have to be entranced by the world, devoted to it, hungry for it, to recreate it so closely, to make it come to life and grow in your hands.

A vision of existence as a state of constant, dynamic change may be the real binding element in all of this art. Wherever you look, forms appear mutable, identities seem in flux. Did the ritual use of hallucinogens by many religions in the Americas contribute to this sense of reality as ductile and sometimes disturbingly unstable?

The bodies of men and eagles merge on a monumental Heiltsuk house post. A man turns into a fox — or is it the other way around? — in a sixth-century vessel found on the north coast of Peru. Crocodiles, bats and humans fuse into heroic hunters on a hammered-gold plaque from pre-Columbian Panama.

The museum’s grand 19th-century thunderbird transformation mask, another New York City star and the piece that brings the installation to a close, shows transformation in action.

Made by a Kwakwaka’wakw artist in Alert Bay, British Columbia, this mythological being has both avian and human attributes. By pulling cords attached to hinged panels, a dancer wearing the mask can open the bird’s head to reveal a human face inside, symbolically shifting between spiritual and material realms in the twinkling of an eye.

A once-standard and still common view of non-Western cultures, ancient and modern, is that they are entirely shaped, explained and (the implication is) limited by fixed religious beliefs. But this isn’t so. A very different “Art of the Americas” might have been made on the theme of family and domestic life, or agriculture, or politics and war, in all of which religion would play a part, though not necessarily a dominating one.

It remains, however, that much of the most visually gripping art that survives in the Americas is religious in inspiration and use. And by focusing on that art, and culling extraordinary examples from premier holdings, the organizers of the Brooklyn installation — Nancy Rosoff, curator of Arts of the Americas at the museum, and Susan Kennedy Zeller, associate curator of Native American art — have turned the static format of a permanent collection display into a dynamic experience, an agent of change. Or, rather, the great artists of the Americas have.