RESEARCH General Arts

AMERICAN INDIANS
Photographic exhibition an interpretation of Anasazi tribal life

Melissa Mitchell, Arts Editor
(217) 333-5491; melissa@uiuc.edu

2/1/2002

Photo by Robert Mooney White House. Canyon de Chelly National Monument, Arizona

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — To the casual observer, Robert Mooney's photographic exhibition at the University of Illinois' I space gallery in Chicago may appear to be a technically well-crafted set of images reflecting the pristine landscape of national-park lands in the American Southwest.

But those who look deeper will find far more. They'll catch an increasingly rare glimpse of ancient history, and a landscape that Mooney believes will be out-of-reach to the average American in the near future. The exhibition, "Anasazi Architecture and Sacred Images," on view through Feb. 16, features 35 color and black-and-white images that provide important clues about how the Anasazi communed and co-existed with their natural environment. The Anasazi, Mooney said, are considered to be among the nation’s most advanced prehistoric cultures, and thrived in the Southwest from about A.D. 600 to 1350.

Photo by Robert Mooney Square Tower House. Mesa Verde National Park.

The exhibition represents the latest body of interpretive photographs of American Indian culture by Mooney, a professor emeritus of architecture at the UI. In the past, he has turned his lens, as well as his academic interest, toward other native cultures and themes, among them the tribes of the Great Plains.
The Anasazi project, completed during a 1999-00 sabbatical leave, took Mooney to Canyonlands National Park in Utah, Chaco Culture National Historical Park and Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico, and Wupatki National Monument in Arizona.

"The epicenter of the Anasazi culture is in the Four Corners area, and it is there that the Anasazi demonstrated their mastery of architectural design and technology, building construction, urban planning and extended road systems, agriculture and understanding of the cosmos and its relation to their architecture," Mooney wrote in his project proposal. "This is the country where the architecture of the vanished civilization of the first Americans yet remains, not always intact but certainly much more than fragments; this is the country where the ancients created a timeless record, incising and painting interpretations of their physical and spiritual lives, on their great stone cliff canvases."

While Mooney says his primary objective in documenting Anasazi art and architecture is to educate others – particularly Midwesterners, for whom these images may not be so familiar – the UI professor also is keen on incorporating the work into his teaching. Last semester, he based the curricula of an honors seminar on Native American architecture, in part, on the Anasazi
.
"The context of my research as expressed in the art of my photography, has consistently addressed relationships between both built and natural environments, whether designed by an architect or simply created as an expression of the vernacular of a people," Mooney said. "Through those experiences, I have been able to introduce my students to examples of unique visual and narrative material regarding cultural phenomena, which they would not otherwise encounter in their architectural education."