Recognizing tribal artifacts as works of art by individuals.

When the Denver Art Museum’s signature American Indian art galleries reopened after a seven-month overhaul recently, the biggest change wasn’t the new display cases or the dramatic lighting. Rather, it was in a less obvious place: the wall labels.

For the first time many of the works on display are attributed to individual artists instead of just their tribes. It is a revolution in museum practice that many scholars hope will spread, raising the stature of American Indian artists and elevating their work from the category of artifacts to the more exalted realm of art.

So the museum’s “Wild Man of the Woods” mask, made in 1900 and previously identified only as “Kwakiutl,” will be attributed to Willie Seaweed, a Canadian carver who died in 1967. In another gallery an exhibition of more than 30 pieces of pottery will celebrate the extraordinary skill of Nampeyo, a Hopi woman born around 1860.

Art museums have collected American Indian objects for decades, but they have tended to treat them as ethnographic pieces . Nancy Blomberg, the curator of native arts at the Denver Art Museum, was determined to do things differently . “I want to signal that there are artists on this floor,” she said.

Although some museums have made a few efforts to identify the artists behind pre-20th-century Indian pieces, the Denver museum is doing it more completely and comprehensively.

Ms. Blomberg has drawn on her own work and the research of other scholars. In June, as she was paging through an auction catalog, two inkand- watercolor paintings caught her eye. The Denver museum has owned a work that was clearly by the same artist since the 1930s, but had no information about its origin, although Ms. Blomberg had shown it to Indian tribes in Colorado .

“No one had any idea where they came from,” she said. But the auction catalog did. It said both paintings were “signed upper right” with “Fenno.” And it included a reference to a 1911 newspaper article that said that Louis Fenno - “the greatest of Ute artists” - was shot dead in 1903 .

“Recognizing that Native American art was made by individuals, not tribes, and labeling it accordingly, is a practice that is long overdue,” said Dan L. Monroe, executive director of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts . Continuing to follow past practices, he added, “perpetuates a set of ideas, values and historical practices laden with racism, ethnocentrism, and tragic and destructive government policies.”

But most museums are short on money and people . The task of rediscovering long-lost artists is enormous, but “the field of people doing this is small,” said Kate C. Duncan, an Arizona State University professor who heads the Native American Art Studies Association.

Even in Denver, Ms. Blomberg can attach names to fewer than 100 of the more than 600 works on view, about 50 of which are by living artists. But, she said, identifying the artists is “a growing trend, and everyone is building on everyone else’s work.”

The roots of the attribution movement go back to the 1960s and to Bill Holm, now 85 and curator emeritus of Northwest Coast Indian Art at the Burke Museum in Seattle. An artist himself, he created a vocabulary for speaking about form in Northwestern Indian art, and began to identify individual hands through their signature stylistic characteristics.

Attribution research is painstakingly slow , and often subject to revision. Valerie Verzuh, a curator at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe, New Mexico, has spent hours assessing Southwest Indian pottery, considering the designs, kinds of paint used, brush strokes . Looking at Plains Indian beadwork, Ms. Blomberg focuses on details like the number of beads between stitches.

But the advances can be exhilarating. Kathryn Bunn-Marcuse, who teaches at the University of Washington, has looked at “thousands and thousands” of 19th-century silver works . In 2007, while speaking at a clan conference of the Tlingit, she showed a list of about 70 names of artists that she and a colleague had discovered in 19th-century documents.

“People came up to me afterward and said, ‘That was my great-grandfather,’ or ‘That was my great-uncle,’ ” she said.


By JUDITH H. DOBRZYNSKI