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Matthew Schulte
I'm Matthew Schulte and this is the Owsley moment brought to you by the David Owsley Museum of Art, the Ball State School of Art and IPR.

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Matthew Schulte
Hungry? The bentwood serving dish on display in the David Owsley Museum of Art's Gallery of Native American Art, can serve up more than enough food to satisfy anyone's appetite. The oblong dishes, curved sides, are decorated with low relief carvings of animals and human faces. The fluid lines of the dish are characteristic of the form line style, which emphasizes continuous contour lines around figures and shapes.

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Matthew Schulte
Form line is a complex abstract esthetic language created over 2000 years ago by the indigenous people of the northwest Coast of North America. The dish was made by an artist from the Haida culture and Native American culture from the southernmost islands of Alaska. Containers like this one were symbols of a height, a person's wealth and prestige, as they were usually passed down from one family member to another.

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Matthew Schulte
To make a serving dish like this, an artisan begins with one long slab of wood. The wood is cut to make corners, steamed and bent into its final shape. This sort of dish would have been used to serve food and during meals, and potlatch’s or occasions of grand feast and gift exchange. Today, contemporary native artists still make bentwood objects and carve in the form, line, style.

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Matthew Schulte
We'd like to thank Ball State student Breyanne Urbin for her research.

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Credit
Find more information and listen to Past Moments online at Indiana Public Radio's Owsley Moment. And to learn more about the David Owsley Museum of Art, visit bsu.edu/doma.