French sculptor Auguste Rodin’s mastery of human anatomy, unconventional working methods, and creation of emotionally complex pieces marked him as the founder of modern sculpture.
Auguste Rodin: 10 Breathtaking Sculptures You Should Know
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Xiaomi’s Top-End Smartphone Will Make Shutterbugs Drool
The expensive end of the smartphone market has gone a little crazy. More affordable hardware means mid-range phones are enough for most people, and phone makers are scrambling to justify the premium tier. The answer is impressive camera systems meant to nix your need to ever buy a professional camera, and the Xiaomi 13 Ultra epitomizes this trend.
There are a grand total of four cameras on the back of this smartphone, honed through a partnership with Leica. It’s no one-trick pony either. You might primarily associate Chinese phones with value, but Xiaomi’s flagship boasts quality in every department and is ready to go toe-to-toe with the best smartphones. Sadly, it’s not sold in the US, and you need to jump through hoops to sort out the software, but when the hardware is this good, it may be worth the effort.
Top Class
Photograph: Xiaomi
High-end smartphones tend to be disappointingly conservative in design (aka boring), so the unusual look of Xiaomi’s flagship is refreshing. You can’t miss the colossal circular camera module, but the surrounding golden chamfer is classy against the olive green of the faux leather back (it also comes in black or white). The textured finish is comfortable and enhances grip, which is just as well, because I almost dropped the phone a couple of times trying to get used to the weight—the upper half of the back bulges out, making the device top-heavy when you hold it.
Corning’s Gorilla Glass Victus protects the screen, and the phone has an IP68 rating, meaning it’s decently scratch resistant and can survive a short dip in water. However, I worry about the camera module, which the phone naturally rests on when you lay it down. I suggest using a case. Thankfully, there’s a slim one included in the box that adds a protective rim around the camera.
The 6.73-inch AMOLED display is among the best I’ve laid eyes on. It boasts a top resolution of 3,200 x 1,440 pixels with a 120-Hz refresh rate. Xiaomi claims a peak brightness of 2,600 nits, but this is a bit deceptive, as the entire screen rarely (if ever) goes that high. It doesn’t really matter, as I never had any trouble with it in direct sunlight. Even at the lowest default settings, this display looks great.
With a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor inside, backed by 12 GB of RAM, the Xiaomi 13 Ultra is a smooth operator. Taps and swipes are slick and responsive, as is the in-display fingerprint sensor. It had no trouble running games like Real Racing 3 or Call of Duty: Mobile. The 13 Ultra also has the stamina for long gaming sessions, and it kept cool when I played Kingdom Rush Frontiers for several hours. It handles movie and music streaming equally well, and the stereo speakers offer a surprisingly balanced sound.
Adweek Creative 100: 2023
Lost, but now found: Getting lost in the woods in New Zealand while working as a forestry consultant made Loebner reevaluate his career, indirectly leading him to marketing. He went back to school and took positions at Young and Rubicam and Edelman before addressing inclusion and accessibility at digital marketing agency Designsensory. “I saw that trade publications for advertising and marketing weren’t speaking to the disability community in a way that went beyond, ‘Hey, here’s a tentpole ad in the Super Bowl that features someone with a disability,’” he told Raconteur last year.
Committing to change: Wunderman Thompson hired Loebner last year. He lauded the agency’s work with Unilever in creating a Degree deodorant that was easier to apply and handle by people with vision loss and upper torso disabilities. “If what is being concepted, developed and built isn’t inclusive, diverse, equitable, accessible and sustainable, then whatever is launched into the world won’t reach as many people, may be inauthentic, unattainable, and won’t have the staying power to translate into success,” Loebner said at the time.
Starting at home: Earlier this year, Wunderman Thompson said it will use Level Access’ software to develop inclusive websites and mobile apps for its clients. “This new partnership will further us on our mission to build a better future for our people, our planet and our communities,” Loebner said. — Jason Notte
Read more about all of the agency leaders who are paving the way forward.
A Sculpture Of Lord Buddha & Jewellery From The Eighth-Century Found In Puri
Residents of the Lendu village in Puri discovered a sculpture of Lord Buddha and some stone jewellery from the eighth century.
UConn Photography Professor Shares Story of Yellowstone in Words and Pictures
Ask Janet Pritchard about her favorite spot inside Yellowstone National Park and she’ll tell you it’s wherever you can find the fewest people that day.
Not that the UConn photography professor abhors standing beside other visitors to take in the magnificence of the country’s first national park.
Rather, she likes to regale others with stories about how, to her ear, the bugle of a bull elk sounds like a double reed instrument in an orchestra and how bison outgassing smells much like marijuana.
She just doesn’t want to be shoulder-to-shoulder with other visitors, preferring the comfort of being behind a camera lens documenting the scenery in near solitude or fixing on others who offer a buffer between her and the wild animals.
“The way I often describe it is, in the park, many of the people are their best selves,” says Pritchard, who over a lifetime has cumulatively logged several years in Yellowstone and the surrounding area and who used that personal expertise in her 2022 book “More than Scenery: Yellowstone, An American Love Story,” which recently was awarded an IPPY silver medal.
That’s also the sentiment written on the back of a turn-of-the-century postcard Pritchard picked up around 20 years ago and provided the impetus for assembling the book. It states, in part, about the park, “in some places it is so beautiful that the men take off their hats & the women are silent!”
Among those beautiful places, Pritchard says, is Lamar Valley in the Northern Range, which is one of the most biodiverse areas of the park – and country, for that matter – with herds of bison and elk frequenting its lush vastness, and bears and wolves on the prowl.
“It’s not quite as spectacular in terms of geothermal features, although the extinct geyser Soda Butte Cone offers quite a sight. Most people don’t bother to walk around the back, but they should. They’ll see a bison wallow in the mud and mud swallow nests tucked up at the top. This kind of stuff is spectacular,” she says.
Park visitors who enter through the northeast entrance go through Cooke City, Montana, with a year-round population of fewer than 100, and into Lamar Valley, which shows evidence of glaciers on top of a volcanic landscape in contrast to the rest of the park.
“Private automobiles weren’t allowed in until 1916. Prior to that, in order to get into the park, you had to take a stagecoach tour,” Pritchard explains, noting that people on those tours often had printed guides specific to one of the five entrances detailing what they would see along the way. “It always makes me think of Stations of the Cross. If you come in at Gardiner, this is what you’re going to see first, this is what you’re going to see next. The souvenir postcards that they made were also numbered to correspond to the guides, so you could buy a set of postcards for the north entrance that would go with your tour.”
By 1916, when private vehicles were allowed, the road system was mostly set – although it has been revamped, rebuilt, and readapted many times in the years since, including after damaging floods last year – Pritchard says, sharing the fun fact that a public relations person in the 1920s nicknamed the main route through the park Grand Loop Road, a name that stuck, specifically in reference to the 19th century idea of the Grand Tour of Europe.
Natural Wonders and Beauty, But Still with Scars
Most of the features visitors see in the park are from the road, in part because of Yellowstone’s 2.2-million-acre expanse, the unquantifiable dangers of the wild the further one goes alone, and the duration of one’s vacation time.
“If you go up to a ranger in the park and say, ‘I’m here for a day, what should I see?’ They’ll say Old Faithful, the Lower Falls, and the wildlife,” Pritchard says – but in conversation she also notes places like Obsidian Cliff, Roosevelt Arch, Overhanging Cliff, Artist Point, and the Madison River Valley.
“The natural wonders are why it was preserved,” she says, adding that economics also figured into the origin story.
She goes on to say that Philadelphia banker Jay Cooke, a financier of the Northern Pacific Railroad, needed a destination for his rail passengers. In search of that location, he funded Thomas Moran’s participation in Ferdinand V. Hayden’s first government-funded survey of the Yellowstone area in 1871.
They returned with evidence of its beauty, in Moran’s watercolor sketches and “proof” of geothermal wonders in William Henry Jackson’s photographs, which persuaded Congress to preserve it through national park status, the first in the world.
Of course, 49 Native American tribes with ancestral connections to the park would have been the first to acknowledge it as a sacred place.
One of the most famous outcomes of the Hayden expedition was Moran’s painting “The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone” from 1872 – repeated in 1893 for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago – which depicts Lower Falls and hangs in the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.
Pritchard says the Hayden expedition, which Moran joined, was on the north side of the falls, whereas the paintings show the view from the south, meaning Moran had to have imagined the view from that position simply for the sake of the paintings’ composition – another fun fact she offers.
“People can be really generous and enjoy sharing stories and tips and tricks of things to see,” she says of visitors to the park. “Other times, there’s a tremendous amount of what I call ‘species arrogance’ in terms of how they relate to the wildlife. They don’t appreciate, understand, or even care about the fact that when you go to the park, the park service refers to you as a visitor for a reason. It’s not your home, it’s the animals’ home, their environment. Don’t think we’re superior when we’re just another part of the natural world.”
Perhaps there’s no better way to consider this than through the story of the Yellowstone wolves.
By 1926, federal and state governments had exterminated the last of the wolves that lived in and around Yellowstone, only to realize 20 years later in the mid-1940s they’d made an ecological mistake. Re-establishment didn’t start until the mid-1990s, however, with the use of acclimation pens located in remote areas away from ranchers and others who opposed their reintroduction.
The remains of only one of those pens still exists at Rose Creek, a physical reminder of the story of the wolves that to this day draws pilgrimages of people to the site to pay their respects.
“I’ve seen people standing up there crying they were so moved,” Pritchard says.
She also recalls the story of the pack that lived on Druid Peak in the Lamar Valley, the “rock stars of the wolf world” until they succumbed to disease, mostly mange from dens and caves still infected with parasitic mites from the 1920s extermination project.
Despite the Druid pack’s sad demise, there are many wolves now in Yellowstone, especially in Hayden Valley, another biologically diverse area that draws throngs of people stopping to pull over – or sometimes brake in the middle of the road – to spy on an animal.
“Take binoculars and stop and ask people what they’re looking at. There are some parts of the park where you can see big-horned mountain sheep. The mountain goats are only in the very northern part, just before you go into Cooke City,” Pritchard says, adding, “I think it’s super fun to get stuck in elk and bison jams.”
Bison graze along the Lamar River in 2008. The nearly 44-mile-long river is the largest tributary of the Yellowstone River, according to the National Park Service. It was named after Secretary of the Interior Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar, who served from 1885 to 1888 under President Grover Cleveland. The American bison, meanwhile, was named the national mammal of the United States under the National Bison Legacy Act, which President Barack Obama signed in May 2016. (Photo by Janet L. Pritchard)
A woman sits in the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., in 2010, looking at paintings by Thomas Moran. His “The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone” from 1893 is left and 1872 is right. Moran was a member of the first federally funded expedition to Yellowstone, led by Ferdinand V. Hayden, according to the Department of the Interior, and used sketches and black and white photos of the journey to create the paintings. His work to visually capture the beauty of the area that was 500 miles from the nearest train station became strong evidence in 1872 for Congress to name Yellowstone the country’s first national park. “Moran forever carried Yellowstone with him, changing his signature to ‘TYM,’ Thomas ‘Yellowstone’ Moran,” the Interior Department says. (Photo by Janet L. Pritchard)
Anemone Geyser in the Upper Geyser Basin of Yellowstone National Park is two geysers that seem to operate independently, but sometimes appear to be connected, according to the National Park Service. The geysers have an average temperature of 184.8 degrees Fahrenheit. Here they are in 2018. The Upper Geyser Basin contains most of the world’s active geysers, including Old Faithful. Molten rock between 3 and 8 miles underground provides heat for the hydrothermal features. (Photo by Janet L. Pritchard)
A vintage Yellowstone Park tour bus travels through the Lamar Valley in 2009. The Lamar Valley, in the north part of the park known as the Northern Range, is the winter home of elk, bison, deer, and pronghorn, the National Park Service says. North America’s largest wild herds of bison and elk can be found in this area. It’s also a favorite hunting ground of several packs of wolves and has drawn coyotes, bobcats, cougars, and red fox. “This region now contains every large wild mammal, predator or prey, that inhabited it when Europeans first arrived in North America, though not necessarily in the same numbers or distribution,” the park service says. (Photo by Janet L. Pritchard)
Bison: Primordial, Ominous, and Dark
Just like a traffic jam, only with elk or bison, this happens when herds surround vehicles, forcing traffic to a standstill, or a singular animal decides to stand firm on the double yellow line, clogging traffic and causing a backup.
Pritchard says one time she was stuck in a bison jam for at least an hour, “You can’t be in a hurry. You have to go with the flow.”
While stuck in that jam, Pritchard says she was on a narrow road with a steep shoulder on one side and a drop to the Yellowstone River on the other. The bison were coming through the landscape, in a wave-like now-you-see-them-now-you-don’t flow.
“Being in the midst of bison, they’re primordial like sharks. They’re one of those animals that feels ancient,” she says. “In this jam, as I watched them, this feeling came over me. There was something ominous and dark about their presence. I was describing this to a biologist I was hanging out with, and she said the bison’s eyes are not like ours. They do not reflect light, so there is no catchlight and that’s where a sense of life comes from when you look at another animal or a person. That’s not there, so they feel like they don’t have a soul.”
She admits that having wild animals in such proximity can be frightening, mainly because they’re unpredictable and slow moving – until they aren’t. An adult male bison, the largest animal in Yellowstone, can weigh as much as a compact car.
That’s from where the advice to keep someone else between you and the animals comes and the recommendation from another biologist friend to move away if you’re close enough to change an animal’s behavior.
Distance is key.
“You’ll see people standing around with spotting scopes and a lot of them, if they have something in their frame, will let you look if you don’t have your own,” Pritchard says. “People with high-end binoculars will get only 10x magnification, whereas spotting scopes are more like 60. That’s how you get a really good view.”
Still, some of the tiniest creatures in Yellowstone – the thermophiles that thrive in the heat of the geothermal springs and give places like the Morning Glory Pool its vibrant color – need only the naked eye to see their brilliance.
Biggest Threat is People
Millions of vacationers visit Yellowstone annually, oftentimes for the trip of a lifetime, putting lodging at a premium especially during the height of the season from mid-June to mid-September when public schools are generally on break.
Pritchard says the roads get plowed, allowing for vehicular traffic, in mid-April and stay open through mid-October, which means the slow season – and by that she means still busy but not as crowded – is generally before Memorial Day and after Labor Day, the best times to avoid masses of people.
People have been the biggest enemy of the park since the 1880s, she explains. Not only have they thrown trash into places like Morning Glory Pool, muting its exquisite colors in the process, but in the late 1800s people were taking home parts of the park as souvenirs.
“There’s a big military history in this area and that was to protect the park,” she says. “While the military is now gone, there are two types of rangers in the park. One of them is interpretive and charged with interacting with people, helping them with information. The other is law enforcement. These folks are not there first and foremost for the people, despite what we think. They’re actually there to protect the park and the animals from the people.”
Just off the Grand Loop Road, west of the Tower-Roosevelt junction, stands a lone petrified tree surrounded and protected by a 6- to 8-foot-tall iron fence. It’s not just a metaphor for the park itself, but a reminder of the damage people can do.
Pritchard explains that when the park was established in 1872 there was no federal funding attached to the designation, and people started looting within its new boundaries, including the piece-by-piece dismantling of a second petrified tree that once stood adjacent to its twin. The iron fence was erected to protect what remains of the first tree, and the military moved in to ensure that type of looting doesn’t happen again.
Everyone Has a Yellowstone Story
During her work on “More than Scenery,” Pritchard spent time at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts, researching the park through maps, historic pictures, and artifacts, often seeing the same researchers day after day.
“I can’t tell you how many people, while I’ve been working on this project, have shared their Yellowstone stories with me,” she says, including one woman in that library who professed she had no story to offer only to return a few days later with one.
“She proceeded to tell me that she was at a conference in the Jackson, Wyoming, area and she and her husband had a rental car, so they decided to go to the park. As they started driving in, it got smokey, and they couldn’t figure out why until they got back and checked the news,” Pritchard says. “It was the start of the fires of ’88.”
Pritchard was visiting Boulder, Colorado, in the summer of 1988 and also saw the smoke from the Yellowstone fires. Twenty years later, when she was in the park in 2008, Pritchard says she noticed the trees around her were the same kind of pine and roughly the same size, 12 to 14 feet tall, new growth forest.
“I realized what I was seeing was a burn matrix from the fires of ’88,” Pritchard says, noting that one can still wipe the soot off some burned trees.
Firefighters sought to suppress wildfires in the park before 1988, when 800,000 acres of Yellowstone burned, and they realized that strategy allowed for too much fuel to accumulate in the woodlands. Pritchard says fires now are left to burn themselves out unless historic structures or people are threatened.
Nevertheless, in 2016, a series of fires burned in the park, far sooner than the 100 years expected to yield enough fuel.
“What that said to them was fire management would have to be a lot more aggressive than anyone had ever imagined. We’ve seen what’s happened and played out in California. It’s a huge concern. There are a lot of areas, including parts of Montana and Colorado, where they just expect and accept that August skies will be cloudy from fire smoke the whole month – and that’s thanks to climate change,” Pritchard says.
Despite spending years in the Yellowstone area and gaining the kind of familiarity and understanding of it that only an expert can have, Pritchard says she’s “in a funny place, where I’m not really a local and I’m not a regular visitor, either. I’m in between.”
She adds, “It’s not a place I would have fully appreciated when I was younger, because of the people and the commercialization of it in a lot of ways. But the park is special. It really is much more interesting and complex than one first realizes.”
Heart of Brevard announces photography contest
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Heart of Brevard (HOB) has announced a call for photo submissions for its upcoming Shopping and Dining Guide. Amateur and professional photographers are invited to capture the essence of the Heart of Brevard business district through their lens.
With over 10,000 copies printed each year, the HOB Shopping and Dining Guide serves as a valuable resource for visitors and locals alike providing information about the downtown business community. Guides are distributed in Heart of Brevard businesses, the Brevard/Transylvania Visitor’s Center, Brevard City Hall, the Pisgah Ranger Station/Visitor Center.
The winning photo will be featured on the front page of the upcoming guide, and the photographer will receive a $200 prize and recognition for their work. All submissions will be shared in an on-line gallery.
Heart of Brevard welcomes a diverse range of photos that depict the beauty and vitality of downtown Brevard. Images may include, but are not limited to, captivating images of downtown businesses, bustling events, individual shops, or any scene that encapsulates the spirit of the Heart of Brevard business district.
Submit your photos by June 25. Winner will be announced by June 30.
Photo and Contest Guidelines Requirements:
•Deadline for submissions – June 25 at 5 p.m.
•Photo Size: High-Res, Vertical Image, approximately 5.75″x4.”
•Photos must showcase the Heart of Brevard (HOB) and can include photos of HOB events, photos of downtown businesses, photos of visitors enjoying downtown, etc.
•Photographers may submit up to 3 images for consideration
•Submit applications at www.form.jotform.com/heartofbrevard/shopping–dining-guide-photo-contes.
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User Generated Content to Connect an International Audience
Image: Emilia Ramos / Supplied by International Center of Photography
MuseumNext delves into the world of user generated content with Anna Selle and Kim Cabrera from the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York. They explain how making art a participatory event can drive engagement, grow audiences and create rich content.
Starting in the summer of 2022, the International Center of Photography’s digital marketing team successfully launched and implemented three user-generated content campaigns to great effect. Through #ICPShareTheStreet, #HauntedICP, #ICPFaceToFace and most recently, #LoveAtICP, Instagram was utilised to showcase a range of contributions from photographers around the world.
Anna Selle, Senior Manager of Marketing and Communications at ICP, says, “We have a very broad and diverse audience of people on our social media channels – many of whom will likely never visit us in the Lower East Side. As part of our drive to engage those people we wanted to run campaigns that emphasised our role as a ‘center’ of photography and a place where photographers of all ages and levels of expertise are catered to.
“Social media is an obvious place to connect people from across different cultures and geographies, so the idea for our user generated campaign was to create something that tapped into our network.”
ICP already had some experience with this type of initiative. Having launched a campaign called “ICP From Anywhere” during the height of the pandemic to connect with audiences trapped at home, Anna and Digital Marketing Coordinator, Kim Cabrera, were confident that the project could have genuine impact.
Kim says, “I think we wanted to provide a dedicated space that could showcase work that might not be traditional exhibition material. There’s only a small percentage of photography that we can feature on-site at ICP. But we have a much greater ability to shine a light on other works online.”
Taking an iterative approach to user generated campaigns
As the owner of digital strategy, Anna first brought the idea for a user generated content campaign to the ICP team during its summer blockbuster exhibition: William Klein: YES. Anna says,
“I think this served as a solid pilot for the strategy. We leveraged an on-site exhibition that gained a lot of attention – in this case Willian Klein’s street photography – to get our social audience to share their own images.”
Kim adds, “It’s important to use a physical exhibition as a hook because it helps to spark interest and gather ideas. But it also serves to help us promote the exhibition and drive footfall among more local audiences. That’s where #ICPShareTheStreet came from.”
Image: Amy Touchette / Supplied by International Center of Photography
From this first experiment, the team have grown and developed the user generated content initiative, making it a recurring fixture in the institution’s social media calendar. Over time, additions such as competitions have been built into the strategy in order to maximise engagement, while the timings for campaigns have been refined to optimise promotional support for the on-site exhibition.
However, Anna notes, “To be honest we found that incentives such as winning tickets to the museum or being sent ICP swag weren’t the main drivers of engagement. They helped, of course, but it seems to us that the idea of users’ work being shared and amplified is more important.
“At this point in time, the core of the campaigns is really resharing content from ICP’s Instagram account, which has nearly 400,000 followers right now.”
Analysing the results
Speaking of social statistics, it’s been clear that these user generated content campaigns have a marked effect on the ICP’s social metrics. The team have seen the Instagram rate of audience growth increase 300% year-over-year since the start of the user-generated campaigns.
Campaigns also served to convert a healthy percentage of the online, social audience into exhibition visitors. Kim says, “The street photography campaign in particular was hugely impactful and saw our audience and engagement metrics shoot up.
“But just as important as the individual metrics is the insight it gives us. It helps us to establish what we should be focusing on in the future. Social media is so flexible and the data we get from campaigns is so immediate that we have the freedom to try new ideas. Not everything will work out but we can have the confidence to experiment a little bit because it’s easy to test and pivot all the time – even with a small marketing team.”
Anna adds, “It’s important to note that the user generated content isn’t a one-time thing. If we’ve shared content and built a campaign, we essentially have an archive of really impactful and interesting material that can be revisited in the future. Even though photos may not be part of our own collection, the nature of Instagram and other social media platforms enables us to share and support content from image makers more than once.”
Image: Bego Amaré / Supplied by International Center of Photography
In order to maximise reach and engagement, Anna says, that strategic boosting of posts was also important – particularly early in each campaign when the marketing team was trying to build interest.
“Using social media advertising is certainly a quick and cost-effective way to get the word out. We didn’t have a large budget for advertising, so this has been a great tool for us.”
Asked finally, for their advice to other museums looking to launch their own user-generated campaigns, Anna says, “The in-built tools of social media platforms like Instagram really make it easy to both drive interest in our exhibitions and also monitor that success. So, as part of our user generated campaigns, we’ve included links through to the exhibition pages on our website, which enables us to see how many link clicks and ticket sales are generated.
“These metrics are obviously just as relevant as audience size and engagement figures. In fact, they were imperative for our senior managers and our executive director to see.”
Kim adds, “I would add that it’s important to understand how you want to use social media when starting out with this kind of campaign. It’s crucial to consider how you want to promote awareness, be inclusive and work towards the institution’s broader goals. Social media is fun, it’s a little bit more casual, it’s a way to be nimbler but it’s also an institutional platform. We still always want to be aware of who or what we are amplifying when we engage with user-generated content.”
Find out more about how museums are utilising the latest strategies, technologies and tools to enhance the work they are doing for their audiences and communities with MuseumNext’s virtual conference series. More information here.
What’s the story behind the sculpture that inspired Michelle Dee’s gown?
Michelle Dee is a total stunner in the gold gown she wore for the Mega Ball.
Colorado-based company accused of cultural appropriation over Native-inspired designs, products
Connor Ryan, a pro skier from Denver and member of the Hunkpapa Lakota, was strolling the Outdoor Retailer trade show in Denver’s Colorado Convention Center in 2019 when he came across some mittens that sparked his ire.
“I was with friends, all of us from different Indigenous groups, and we saw these different patterns and symbology from our cultures in the bead work of these gloves. If it was a Native brand, I feel like we would have known them,” said Ryan, an athlete with Natives Outdoors, a Native American-owned collective of outdoor athletes and designers that advises outdoors businesses working at the intersection of tribal lands and recreation. “We tried to interact with them and they immediately were really defensive and asked us to leave.”
In the four years since, Ryan and other Native Americans have criticized Colorado-based Astis Mittens for cultural appropriation and not employing Native artists to create the intricately beaded designs on the company’s leather-fringed, fur-cuffed mittens. The company’s founders often talked about their idea for their mittens coming from a pair of mittens made by a Cree artist. The word for mittens in the Cree language is “astisak.”
Outdoor sports media brand Teton Gravity Research last month announced it was ending a collaboration with Astis after hearing from athletes and activists like Ryan “that one of our vendors was practicing cultural appropriation,” a statement from the Wyoming-based TGR reads. The company recently trumpeted its collaboration with Astis but has removed the designs from its online store.
TGR worked with Ryan to develop programs that will support the Shoshone and Arapaho Fish and Game Office, which manages wildlife on the 2.3 million-acre Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming. TGR also is contributing to the Sealaska Heritage Institute in Alaska to support the group’s interns studying snow science and avalanche forecasting.
“We are taking steps to improve our vetting process for retail vendors and endeavor to continually raise the bar for future business practices,” reads a statement from TGR’s founders.
The Cree origin story no longer appears on the Astis website. The company, which is headquartered in Minturn, directs a portion of revenue from mitten sales to the American Indian College Fund. A statement from the fund on the Astis website says the mitten-maker has made a “large commitment” and is providing full-time scholarships for Native American students at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
“With their investment in Native students and communities, Astis is empowering the next generation of Native leaders to create social and economic transformation in Indian Country,” reads the statement on the Astis website.
The Astis scholarship program started last year and supported three students. The company will be supporting three students again for another year.
Marco Tonazzi joined Astis co-founder Bradford Peterson in 2022 as a partner, replacing a previous owner and helping the company recover from the pandemic slowdown. The Vail Valley entrepreneur with two hotels and retail operations in Minturn and Vail Village is helping Astis “do more to recognize the relationship and inspiration” the mitten company draws from Indigenous cultures, he said in an interview with The Colorado Sun.
“This is something that is so important to Brad. He has wanted to do this for so long but it was not something he was able to do before. The values were not there in the previous ownership structure,” Tonazzi said. “Our inspiration comes from many areas and the beadwork does not only come from Native communities but it comes from Inuit, Norway, Mexico and other sources. The Native community is an important source of inspiration and we are working to better understand how we can give back and support that community.”
Peterson and Tonazzi said they want to sit down with Native American leaders like Ryan and “talk and learn and understand each other and maybe find out that our differences are not that big,” Tonazzi said.
“It’s hurtful to be attacked without having an option to have a conversation,” he said.
Astis’ owners say they are working to hire Native artists who will help the company create designs. That plan is unfolding and the company expects to name specific artists soon, Peterson said. Other brands have done exactly that. Pendleton, the storied blanket-maker in eastern Oregon got its start selling woven wool to Native Americans and now employs Native artists. Pendleton has donated almost $1 million to the American Indian College Fund.
“We will be changing and we are evolving,” Peterson said. “There are ways to go about things and one way is to shout and make accusations and another is to work together to make change. Everyone has different ideas and different opinions and everyone should have a voice. We are revamping this company and getting in line to be a better company and more well rounded.”
The scholarships are not enough, said Ryan, who has pushed the outdoor industry to better recognize the Native American influence in all aspects of outdoor recreation.
“Nothing is enough,” he said, describing his uncle, a bead-working artist “who can barely feed himself” and his family. “They sell stolen goods and art from people who have experienced genocide. They perpetuate the genocide of my people and make money off of it. There is no right way to do that.”
Astis has several collaborations with other brands, including Icelantic Skis.
Icelantic co-founder and CEO Annelise Loevlie said the collaboration is more than 10 years old but they have not ordered anything from Astis in the last few years. She had not heard of the Native American concerns with the mitten-maker, but she said she’s listening now.
“Honestly this has not been on my radar because it’s not something I have brought into my radar,” Loevlie said. “This is something I’m going to look into though. All of this cases reconsideration of our partnership with Astis and another other brand we are working with. Not in a shameful way, but in a way that encourages growth and understanding. On all sides. I’m learning through this too.”
Raising awareness of Native culture, influence
That’s part of the process, Ryan said. These concerns are raised to get more awareness of how Native American culture shapes outdoor experiences and a deeper respect for that culture and influence.
“There are a lot of great examples coming out but I think it can be hard for folks if they want to do it right. I certainly don’t want the Astis situation to scare brands away from working with Native communities,” Ryan said. “But it’s clear that Astis only works with stolen designs and stolen cultural items.”
There is an upswell of awareness and recognition of the Native roots that anchor American public lands. Offensive slurs have been stripped from landscapes and businesses. Native names are replacing the names of white settlers on peaks, valleys and landmarks across the country as part of a cultural shift and embrace of history that precedes the arrival of settlers.
Len Necefer founded Natives Outdoors in 2017 to amplify Native stories and artists in the outdoor recreation industry. Today the Native-owned and staffed business works to connect outdoor companies with Native artists and build campaigns around designs that accurately reflect the Indigenous connection with the art.
“I can understand the Native frustration with Astis,” said Necefer, who is Diné. “It’s something that is going to continue to come up with that company.”
Necefer has spent several years tracking the use of Native American imagery and symbols as part of a larger amplification of cultural appropriation. There are countless brands that have applied Native imagery on products and very few use Native artists in that design, marketing and production process. Necefer’s work helps to elevate Native artists.
His work with outdoor companies like Smartwool, Eddie Bauer and Bogs includes deals that return 4% to 8% of sales of products with Indigenous art to artists and Native communities.
“We want to make sure that the story and meaning of the design is not lost,” Necefer said. “Culturally appropriated designs can erase the history and people behind the product.”
Many Native artists struggle to pay bills and most are unable to launch a major business, Necefer said. Native Americans continually rank among the most impoverished demographics on the continent, with low wages and high rates of unemployment.
Necefer helps brands acknowledge how incorporating Native images without recognizing the artists who created them ignores the history of colonialism and settlers stealing lands from Indigenous people.
That recognition is increasing as more businesses work directly with Native artists. The challenge with Astis is that the entire product is a Cree design. It’s not just about the beadwork, Necefer said.
“I see them trying. I’m not going to discount the financial impact scholarships have on Native people’s lives, but they are facing a PR challenge moving forward if they continue to use these mittens and designs that come from the Cree people,” Necefer said.
Necefer and his peers are not against using Native designs in products. That art can help sustain Native culture, artists and communities. And consumers are demanding that kind of art.
“If we can help companies build a product that meets that demand and creates a higher price point that makes sure there is a meaningful benefit going back to Native communities, that’s the goal,” Necefer said. “It’s hard with Astis. I think their business model has a fundamental flaw that will always conflict with Native artists.”
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Remembering Joe Senungetuk, a practitioner in the art of resistance
Joe Senungetuk said he really didn’t care if his art sold, but if it stirred a reaction, it was worth it. He hoped his pieces would become time capsules for future generations of Alaska Natives — to help them understand their history and appreciate their culture.
But the Inupiaq artist, who died on May 31, leaves behind many contemporary art fans who loved his carvings, sculptures, and paintings.
Senungetuk lived to be 83, through years of sweeping change for Alaska Natives. He born in a time when people of the Northwest Arctic lived mostly on what the land and water provided. As a child in Wales, he chafed at teachers who punished him for speaking his language and annoyed them by drawing in the margins of his school papers, instead of sticking to the lines.
But he grew up to study art at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the San Francisco Art Institute.
As a young man, he resisted pressure to produce commercial art for tourists, which at the time was the only market available for Native artists. Instead, he used his art to tell stories about his culture and its struggles to survive in a modern world.
His wife, Martha, says his pieces weren’t always pretty.
“There are hoards of people that just want to make pretty pieces,” Martha Senungetuk said. “I know that he was one of a kind, that could not just create something that people admired, but something that will last for hundreds of years.”
Photo by Rhonda McBride
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Joe Senungetuk had a panoramic view of time, a common thread in his work. One of his pieces still hangs in his living room window — two masks combined to tell a story about colonialism. One face is white and small, suspended over another that is brown and large, which represents Alaska Native people. It’s titled “The White Man Came… and He Hung around… and He Hung Around.”
Senungetuk says the size of each mask reflects the amount of time each group of people has spent in Alaska and the disproportionate power wielded by newcomers to the state.
In an interview with Alaska Public Media’s Lori Townsend Senungetuk put it this way,
“The United States, as a country, started somewhere around 200 some years ago,” Senungetuk said. “And to me that ends up being like the first 16 inches of a football field.”
Senungetuk was an artist immersed in history, a serious student of Indigenous art, the world over. He says those works from early human artists were like a Bible to him. He admired their sophistication, especially that of his Inupiat forefathers, who could, with a few concentric circles, suggest the ripples created when seals poke their noses out of the water.
It was this kind of art, Senungetuk said, that was used to tell stories.
“The original purpose of them were to give birth to an idea, to a dance, to a ceremony that would celebrate new life,” Senungetuk said.
Joaqlin Estus
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Senungetuk believed modern Native artists could also use art to give birth to ideas. As an artist he used them to make social commentary, like the time he tore a bar stool apart to tell the story of his own battle – and that of fellow Alaska Natives – with alcoholism.
He pulled out the upholstery from a bar stool to fashion a frame for a wooden mask, then used springs from the seat to cover the mask, to make it look like a face behind bars. He called his work: “Imprisoned by State and Self.”
His friend and fellow artist, Jeff Clark, says Senungetuk made a conscious effort to produce art to stand the test of time.
“It’s about trying to figure out how this nonsensical world can make sense to you,” Clark said. “Maybe 200 years later, someone will go, ‘Wow! They really did understand what was going on.’”
Photos by Francisco Martinezcuello, KYUK
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Senungetuk was quoted in a magazine as saying, “My art and creating is spiritual to me. And it’s also a bit of resistance.”
“I can just see him smiling ever gently, when he says that with a little bit of resistance,” said Bob Onders, a former president at Alaska Pacific University, who helped to recruit Senungetuk and his wife as Elders in Residence at the university.
Onders says Senungetuk’s art told some harsh truths, but he was always gentle with people.
“I think he was just a peaceful presence, a comforting smile.”
Onders remembers how students seemed to enjoy basking in Senungetuk’s wisdom. He was often seen carving and talking with them about Native culture.
Onders says most people don’t realize that Senungetuk was also a writer. Onders says his book, “Give or Take a Century: An Eskimo Chronicle” is much like his art in how it offers “enduring wisdom.”
Senungutuk finished the book in 1971. It tells the story of his childhood in Wales and the cultural upheaval his family experienced when they moved to the larger community of Nome.
Onders says the book looks ahead to the impact modernization would have on life in Alaska and Native peoples.
“When you think about the time when he wrote that, and what he had been doing prior to that, what he put on paper was incredible,” Onders said. “Even the title speaks to how he thought far beyond his current time frame.”
Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian collection.
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Senungetuk hoped his book, which includes some of his art, would be a cultural compass for future generations.
“There is a fundamental lesson in knowing about your past, your culture’s past,” Senungetuk said.
Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian collection.
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Senungetuk said his culture was the inspiration for almost all of his work. And although life was far from smooth, he once said cutting into soft wood with a sharp blade felt like a knife sliding through butter – a feeling he enjoyed all his life.
