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At the top is 'Every piece has a story' Indian art show at SOU's Schneider Museum reflects an Ashland couple's close connection to the legends of Northwest native cultures By BILL VARBLE When they started collecting the works of Inuit and Haida artists in Canada 20 years ago, Ron and Susan Crowell would take the artworks home to Naples, Calif., where Ron was practicing medicine, and install them in their home. It was powerful medicine. "I had never been in a home with an art collection before," Ron Crowell says. Today the collection fills four galleries at the Schneider Museum of Art at Southern Oregon State University in Ashland, and that's not even the entire collection. The Crowells are remodeling their Ashland home to accommodate everything. But this is not the kind of collection that aims for any kind of completion. Rather, the Crowells say, each artwork is something they feel a personal connection with, something that spoke to them, bewitched them. Advertisement "Every piece has a story," Ron Crowell says. "Boy with Salmon," a large totem pole created by Haida artist Victor Reese, has two stories. The first is a Haida story of a boy who went fishing with his father and kept feeding bait to an eagle. His father told him to stop, but the boy kept feeding the eagle. When it was time to leave the island for the winter hunting grounds, the father told the boy he had to stay behind for the winter. His grandmother stayed with him out of fear the boy would not survive. Soon they were starving. Then they heard a great flapping. It was an eagle bringing them salmon to eat, then thousands of eagles and thousands of salmon. When the clan returned, they saw what had happened. Now you can see it in the totem pole: boy, eagle, salmon. Ron Crowell has his own story to go with that one. When he'd seen and bought the totem pole in Canada he'd been awestruck. But when it arrived at his home and he tore open the huge packing crate, something was missing. Impact. "It didn't speak to me," he says. He even thought of trying to return the gigantic thing. Then he had it stood up. Bingo. The connection was back. "I just couldn't see it when it was lying down," says Crowell, an emergency room doctor. "It's the way our brains our built. When somebody is lying down in the emergency room, I can't see them the way I do if they're standing up. "When it was standing up, it spoke to me again." The first piece the Crowell's ever bought has a story that was a harbinger of things to come. It was August of 1986, and the couple were on a cruise of the Inland Passage. Ashore and prowling the art galleries of Vancouver, B.C., each, apart from the other, came upon a dancing bear carved of soapstone. Each was drawn to it, and neither knew about the other's attraction. "It was happy," Susan Crowell says. "Joyous. We both came back to it separately." They sailed off on the cruise thinking that was the end of the story. But the bear's spell was a strong one. Two days later they were on the ship-to-shore phone to buy the piece for $13,000. "That started this voyage," Ron Crowell says. Twenty years later, the Crowells' collection encompasses Inuit sculpture, contemporary American Indian artworks from Vancouver to the Queen Charlotte Islands and the blown glass sculpture of William Morris. "These are our children," Ron says. "If you have children, you can't have this." Ron Crowell grew up in the Bronx, became a doctor, worked in the Indian Health Service in Oklahoma and was attracted to the American Indian sense of family and to the ways in which traditional values and mythology were woven into the life of the community. It was about the time that he and Susan, who came from rural Kentucky, were married that the art-collecting thing got going. Most of the pieces in their collection have shamanistic or transformational themes, they say. In some cases that's obvious. Like Robert Davidson's "Frog Bronze," by the Tlingit artist Ken McNeil, which they saw in a private home, and which today sits in their home. It is a rounded, magical amphibian crouched Buddha-like on a stand. Some pieces have an aura of fate around them. Several years ago, visiting New York City for the theater, the two had a night when they weren't seeing any plays. Susan happened to see a notice for an Eskimo festival nearby. "What are the chances?" she thought. They went. Among the Inuit artists they met was Judas Ullulaq, whose "Walrus Hunter" they bought. The piece depicts a man doing just what the title suggests, in a lethal dance of uncanny strength and grace. "Our life has been just things like that happening," Susan says. From the beginning, the Crowells were interested in Indian people and culture as much as artworks. In a half-dozen trips to the Queen Charlotte Islands in the 1990s, they stayed with friends in small villages on remote islands and attended weddings and potlatches where they saw how dancers and masks embodied the myths. A totem pole is not an arbitrary thing. The imagery of each clan's totems belongs to that clan. "I can't carve your story," Ron says. "And you can't carve mine." The Haida population was decimated by smallpox brought by whites in the 1800s, and their culture further decimated by white-imposed bans on native art, religion, clothing and even language. "A lot of people love the art and not the people," Ron says. "I don't understand that." Reach reporter Bill Varble at 776-4478 or e-mail [email protected] . Mail Tribune Home | Local News | Sports | Business | Obituaries | Life | Opinion AP News | Archives | Site Map | Community | Classified Copyright © 1997-2006 Mail Tribune, Inc. All rights reserved. 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