Posted: 24 Oct 2010 10:07 AM PDT

Reporting from Urumqi, China —

Almost invariably when visitors approach the middle-aged woman enshrined in a climatized exhibit case in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region Museum, they pause and do a double take. What gets the most attention is her nose: high-bridged, slightly hooked, the sort of nose that reminds you of Meryl Streep.

Then a little gasp. "Weiguoren!" (A foreigner!), one young woman exclaimed to her friends. They were touring the museum earlier this month on a Chinese public holiday.

Nearly 4,000 years after her death, the so-called Beauty of Loulan still has the ability to amaze.

She is one of hundreds of Bronze Age mummies discovered in the shifting desert sands of northwestern China's Xinjiang region, where thousands more still lie buried. Unlike the embalmed mummies of ancient Egypt, they were preserved naturally by the elements, which in some ways makes them more interesting. They represent an extended span of history dating from 1800 BC to as recently as the Ching dynasty (1644-1912) and a range of human experience. Some were kings and warriors, others housewives and farmers.

"They were ordinary people who lived and died in Xinjiang over the ages,'' said Wang Binghua, a retired archaeologist who exhumed many of the mummies.

The most famous of them, the Beauty of Loulan, was unearthed in 1980 by Chinese archaeologists who were working with a television crew on a film about the Silk Road near Lop Nur, a dried salt lake 120 miles from Urumqi that has been used by the Chinese for nuclear testing.

Thanks to the extreme dryness and the preservative properties of salt, the corpse was remarkably intact — her eyelashes, the fine hair on her skin, even the lines on her skin were visible. She was buried face up about 3 feet under, wrapped in a simple woolen cloth and dressed in a goatskin, a felt hat and leather shoes.

But what was most remarkable about the corpse — believed to date to about 1,800 BC — was that she appeared to be Caucasian, with her telltale large nose, narrow jaw and reddish-brown hair.

The discovery turned on its head assumptions that Caucasians didn't frequent these parts until at least a thousand years later, when trading between Europe and Asia began along the Silk Road. And it added another bone of contention to the raging ethnic conflict in Xinjiang, where Uighurs, a Turkic speaking people, consider themselves to be the indigenous population and the Han Chinese foreign invaders from the east. Since Uighurs themselves often resemble Europeans rather than Chinese, many were quick to adopt the Beauty of Loulan as one of their own.

"If you went to see the mummy in the museum, a Uighur would come up to you and whisper proudly, 'She's our ancestor,'" said Victor H. Mair, a professor of Chinese studies at the University of Pennsylvania. "It became a political hot potato."

For years, the Chinese government tried to thwart foreign scholars from looking too deeply into the mummies' origins. In 1993, the government confiscated tissue samples from Xinjiang mummies that Mair and an Italian geneticist, Paolo Francalacci, had collected with permission. (A Chinese scientist, whom Mair declines to name, later slipped the samples into their hands as they were preparing to leave.) Although DNA testing was not as advanced as it is today, the scientists were able to trace a genetic link to Europe.

Their findings were confirmed by a more comprehensive study published in February based on genetic tests of remains from a nearby archeological site — Xiaohe ("Small River"), which lies about 100 miles west of Loulan. Geneticists from China's Jilin and Fudan universities concluded that the ancestors of these ancient people had indeed come from Europe, possibly by way of Siberia.

Not only were the mummies not Chinese, but they weren't Uighur either — although their descendents might have eventually been assimilated into the Uighur population, according to Mair, who consulted on that study. "We deflated that bubble,'' he said.

The result is that the mummies have shed some of their political sensitivity, allowing them to come out of the closet of China's ethnic troubles. For the first time this year, two mummies traveled to the United States as part of an exhibit titled "Secrets of the Silk Road: Mystery Mummies of China" at Santa Ana's Bowers Museum. The show is now at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, where it will remain until early next year, when it travels to the University of Pennsylvania.

The mummies are also star attractions within China, the centerpiece of the recently refurbished museum in Urumqi, and another in the oasis town of Turpan, 140 miles from Urumqi, where ethnic Chinese mummies discovered in the region are on display.

Although the terrain nowadays is so dry and wind-swept as to be almost uninhabitable, this area known as the Tarim Basin was once laced with rivers and dotted with oases hospitable enough for settlement. As a crossroads between Europe and Asia, it was home at different times to an astonishing mix of peoples — Europeans, Siberians, Mongolians, Han Chinese.

There was a man who lived in the 3rd or 4th century AD who was 6 feet 6 and dressed in magnificent red and gold embroidered clothing; a 3-month-old baby (8th century) with a felt bonnet and small blue stones covering the eyes, which were possibly the same color. Some of the men have red beards; the women have long blond braids.

All the mummies tell a story. In an ancient graveyard in Astana, near Turpan, a man and a woman are buried together in an underground crypt that dates from the Tang dynasty (AD 618-906) and is one of the few places that the public can see mummies in their original graves.

The woman looks younger than the man. Her mouth is in a grimace; forensic specialists say her arm and neck were broken shortly before her death. "We think she might have been beaten and buried alive to be with her husband. He died naturally,'' said Bai Yingcai, a tour guide and mummy expert who was taking visitors through the crypts.

Often, the mummies' accessories are more interesting than the bodies themselves. Some have high pointed hats; another, possibly a healer, was buried with a bag of marijuana.

In one cemetery in Hami, in northeastern Xinjiang, archaeologists found plaid fabric similar to what you'd see on a Scottish kilt. Elizabeth Barber, a professor emeritus at Occidental College and a leading expert on ancient textiles, used the cloth to surmise that the mummies shared Celtic ancestry with the Scots. In fact, the cloth was almost the same as samples found in ancient salt mines in Hallstatt, Austria, an area once inhabited by early Celtic tribes.

Wang, the Chinese archaeologist, says people have been too distracted by ethnic issues to focus on what the mummies can teach about ancient lives: "You can study the mummies to learn what these people ate, how they dressed, their social life, their standards of beauty, how they interacted with others. This information is very precious.''

The Loulan beauty, despite her fine features, lived a hardscrabble life. Her shoes and clothing had repeatedly been mended. Her hair was infested with lice. She had ingested a considerable amount of sand, dust and charcoal, and lung failure most likely caused her to die in her early 40s.

"You can see that even back then, pollution was a problem," said Wang.

Demick is The Times' Beijing bureau chief.

Nicole Liu of the Beijing bureau contributed to this report.

barbara.demick@latimes.com

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Cultural Assets: Banks Stock Up on Art - Time

Posted: 24 Oct 2010 08:20 AM PDT

Mural, by Julie Mehretu, in the lobby of Goldman Sachs' New York City headquarters.

Diane Bondareff / AP

In the lobby of Deutsche Bank's polished, corporate-chic London headquarters stands a sculpture by British artist Tony Cragg. Called Secretions, the piece looks like a jumble of giant human organs, but closer inspection reveals it is a mosaic of thousands of dice glued together. At a time when banks are disparaged as casinos, visitors may be surprised to read the small placard hung by Deutsche Bank on an adjacent wall. The sculpture's dice, the placard says, "may provoke comparisons with the nature of the bank's business."

Its author, Deutsche Bank art adviser Alistair Hicks, who looks somewhat out of place in his crumpled blazer and mismatched trousers amid the sharp suits crossing the lobby, flashes a toothy grin. "I call us the subversive department," he says of the bank's art program, which is administered by him and six other advisers. "We are happy to not be just the smooth extension of Deutsche Bank branding." (See pictures of Picasso at the Met.)

In the decade before the financial meltdown, curators like Hicks used some of the banks' huge profits to make those institutions the world's largest holders of contemporary art. Deutsche Bank's collection consists of more than 50,000 pieces. UBS owns 35,000. Dutch bank ING houses 22,500, and JPMorgan Chase stores more than 30,000. By comparison, Paris' Louvre, the most famous museum in the world, has 35,000 works. Goldman Sachs reportedly paid $5 million for the Ethiopian-born artist Julie Mehretu to create a mural for the lobby of its New York City headquarters

Few banks collect art to make money. A liquidation auction of art from collapsed investment bank Lehman Brothers in London on Sept. 29, for example, raised $2.6 million. Not bad, but it won't make a dent in the $613 billion in liabilities the bank had run up when it folded.

Art confers respectability and respect, according to Joan Jeffri, director of the arts-administration program at Columbia University's Teachers College, and banks need those more than ever. From the mighty Medici banking dynasty in Renaissance Florence to the giants of the 19th century, like John Pierpont Morgan, art has been used to project status and power.

You could argue that the banks have done a better job of acquiring art than they have of acquiring financial assets. What's more valuable: a Richard Diebenkorn painting or a toxic collateralized debt obligation? "The people responsible for managing these corporate collections have professionalized," Jeffri says. "Whereas it was once the wife of the CEO or some personal friend managing the CEO's interest in art, now banks have art departments and on-staff curators."

At Deutsche Bank, Hicks and his team manage collections in more than 900 buildings in 45 countries. Their department is a cottage industry in itself; they produce a bimonthly magazine, offer tours to employees and clients and, most crucially, patrol the globe for fresh and provocative new works. They periodically present their purchasing ideas to a committee of bankers, which has the final say on acquisitions.

That bankers, despite their fall from grace, still hold such a powerful place in the art world concerns some purists. The reason? When art becomes institutionalized, the line between prestige and corporate whitewash can become smudged. Jeffri points out that 30 years ago, when Big Tobacco was first coming under intense scrutiny over its lethal products, Philip Morris bulked up its art collection and began sponsoring exhibits under the slogan "It takes art to make a company great."

In 2006 several prominent British artists and critics knocked UBS and the Tate Modern after the bank exhibited corporate art at the publicly funded museum. Art that is displayed in museums becomes immediately more valuable, which prompted accusations of a conflict of interest. Conversely, Royal Bank of Scotland came under fire last year for not sharing its collection despite receiving a multibillion-dollar taxpayer bailout. Critics contended that the art was now publicly owned and therefore should be available for viewing.

Clearly, the inchoate criticism of banks' involvement in the arts is tied to a populist backlash in the wake the crisis. But there are legitimate concerns about just how deeply banks have become enmeshed in the art world, say experts. Cash-strapped museums in the U.S. have been accused of ceding creative control to corporations by accepting ready-made exhibits curated by banks' internal art staff rather than the museum's own curators. Bank of America, for example, regularly sponsors precurated shows in smaller American museums such as the Millennium Gate Museum in Atlanta and the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey. Bank of America media-relations manager Diane Wagner says the company offers its art to public spaces as a way to reach out to the community. "It's part of our DNA to want to share our collection with people," she says.

Jeffri says it's not that simple: "There are some dangers. A museum would not want to be known for giving over its space to private corporations. We need to think carefully about how banks and museums collaborate."

On the whole, Jeffri and others say, banks are still a positive force in the contemporary-art world. Sotheby's Saul Ingram, who last year opened a European office for the auction house's corporate arts services, says that as austerity measures pressure state-supported arts around the globe, enthusiasts should be grateful for the banks' involvement. "We are in a recession, but banks continue to sponsor and support the arts," he says. "That's crucial if we don't want a 10-year gap in our culture."

Colin Tweedy, CEO of Arts & Business in London, which works to establish links between commerce and culture, points out that patronage has been essential to art for centuries. "Artists have always had rich investors behind them, whether it's Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, da Vinci or Michelangelo," he says.

For his part, Hicks, who has been busy preparing for the Deutsche Bank—sponsored Frieze Art Fair in London Oct. 14-17, insists that the company's collection "proves that the bank is about more than just making money." He delights in the fact that the company hangs a Sigmar Polke painting described on the accompanying text panel as portraying "the West's heedless consumerism" near the very boardrooms bankers use to maximize profit from that consumerism. "Our art creates friction and intellectual stimulation," Hicks says. "Isn't that what art is all about?"

This article originally appeared in the October 18, 2010 issue of TIME.

See TIME's Pictures of the Week.

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Tucson garden a native cultural lesson for youth - YourWestValley.com

Posted: 24 Oct 2010 08:30 PM PDT

Posted: Sunday, October 24, 2010 8:15 pm | Updated: 1:42 pm, Fri Oct 22, 2010.

TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) — Carmella Kahn-Thornbrugh grew up in a rural area of the Navajo Reservation, with no paved roads and huge expanses of open land.

"We helped our family garden," she said. "We grew corn and squash every year. We had sheep. We had horses. We were never inside unless it was raining or time for bed. We were really healthy."

When she moved to Tucson to pursue her undergraduate degree, she realized how disconnected she felt from her native culture.

"In the beginning I felt so isolated, so alone," Kahn-Thornbrugh said. "I didn't know where to go for help. It's so hard to find native people in Tucson."

As she began to establish herself, Kahn-Thornbrugh observed that there really wasn't a way for Native Americans in Tucson to connect with each other.

She also noticed that poor nutrition among Native Americans was a growing concern.

As a graduate student at the UA College of Public Health, Kahn-Thornbrugh decided to start a youth gardening project. It was designed to teach Native American children how to grow their own food and participate in cultural activities.

The project, named G.R.O.W. N.A.T.I.V.E., which stands for Gardening Resources & Opportunities With Native American Teachings, Indigenous Values & Evaluation, was a success.

Kahn-Thornbrugh said the 21 youths who took part agreed gardening was important to their culture and they wanted to continue.

Sheila-Ann Patricio, 15, participated in the first youth project. She learned about eating healthy food and also had fun with the other youths.

"We got along. We talked and had fun, laughed, and just enjoyed being in that program," she said. "We had stuff to do after school. I don't want to be overweight and just be sitting at home."

Kahn-Thornbrugh, now as a doctoral student, wants to expand the gardening project to include families and also become a nonprofit organization.

"It builds kinship in the community," she said. "That feeling that you have your own clan in the community. And that's how it is back on the reservation — you feel so connected."

Miriam Zmiewski-Angelova helped start the project with Kahn-Thornbrugh and now is a board member for the program. She said she wants to promote healthy eating habits.

"We hope that people will become a lot more aware of where their food comes from and why it's important to understand why all these messages are out there about eating healthy," she said.

Kathryn Foster, who also serves on the board, said she likes how the project allows them to be in touch with the earth.

"I'm an outside person. I look at the sun, I watch the moon, I look up," she said. "People are inside, they're watching TV, they don't even know what's going on outside."

The program uses two beds at the Iron Horse Community Garden for demonstration projects. A company called Native Seeds/SEARCH provides the seeds.

The board also wants to establish more community gardens around Tucson, where people can meet and plant together.

"What we try to promote is just that connection," Foster said. "It doesn't matter if you're from a different tribe. We really just want to connect with people and build that partnership."

Kahn-Thornbrugh said it could take two or three years for the family project to be completed. She hopes they can recruit 60 families to participate.

"A lot of people say healthy food is expensive, so why not grow your own," she said. "It's a lot of work, but it's definitely worth it because there's just so many good things about gardening."

Cultural

Sunday, October 24, 2010

“Cultural Exchange: China's surprising Bronze Age mummies - Los Angeles Times” plus 2 more

“Cultural Exchange: China's surprising Bronze Age mummies - Los Angeles Times” plus 2 more

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