Past Exhibition
Art and Ethnography: The art and collection of Carl Sr. and Adolf Spohr
Cody Firearms Museum Breezeway
Adolf Spohr (1889 – 1966) was a collector of American Indian artifacts. He amassed one of the most important collections of Plains Indian objects in the mid-twentieth century. Adolf’s father, Carl W. Spohr Sr., was an artist. Between 1924 and 1926, Carl completed 51 ethnographic watercolors depicting objects from Adolf’s collection. This 2015 exhibition of selected watercolors and their corresponding objects highlighted the carefully crafted drawings of Carl and the beautiful array of objects collected by Adolf.
Ethnographic drawings have long been used by both artists and anthropologists to document important historic objects. However, the drawings are also artworks on their own. The focused act of drawing provides the artist with a deeper understanding of the subject and a new way of viewing it. In the finished drawing, notice what Carl chose to feature, the object’s age, reflections of light, details, and texture, as well as what to hide. With the advent of photography, the use of ethnographic drawings as an important documentary tool faded. Today, these detailed object studies offer a glimpse into the wide range of American Indian designs at the turn of the century.
An example from this exhibition:
An object’s provenance, or record of ownership, can tell its own interesting history. This Sioux bag, once owned by Adolf Spohr, was acquired by Paul Dyck (1924 – 2006), whose collection was acquired by the Plains Indian Museum in 2007. We can tell from the painting that sometime after 1926, the bag suffered water damage on its flap.
