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1952-2021
Ira Jacknis passed away unexpectedly at his home in Oakland, California on September 29, 2021. Born and educated in New York City, he matriculated at Yale University in 1970, graduating in 1974 with a dual degree in art history and anthropology and a senior thesis on the Japanese tea ceremony. While at Yale he held research fellowships focused on Northwest Coast art and also worked at the Smithsonian on the Handbook of North American Indians. He continued on this trajectory, combining Native American studies, art history, and museum studies during his graduate training in anthropology at the University of Chicago, where he studied with, among others, George Stocking, Nancy Munn, and Raymond Fogelson. For his doctoral dissertation (1989) on Kwakwaka’wakw art in relation to both museums and anthropologists, Ira conducted archival and field research on the Northwest Coast in 1981-82.
While completing his Chicago degree, Ira held positions at the Brooklyn Museum as both a research associate and assistant curator. In 1991 he took a position as a research anthropologist at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he remained until his retirement in 2018. During his career, Ira worked on numerous exhibits, many of which were documented in important catalogues like Objects of Myth and Memory: American Indian Art at the Brooklyn Museum (1991), Carving Traditions of Northwest California (1995), and Food in California Indian Culture (2004).
In 2002, Ira published his scholarly masterpiece, The Storage Box of Tradition: Kwakiutl Art, Anthropologists, and Museums, 1881-1981, a revised version of his doctoral thesis. Two central points of his analysis deserve attention. First, for more than a century, Kwakwaka’wakw artists interacted in multiple ways with museums, curators, and anthropologists, all serving as resources that local artists could draw on but none of which was determinative for the continuity of a tradition that had its own sources of social vitality. Second, nonindigenous curators and anthropologists were prone to locate the end of the production of “authentic” indigenous arts in the generation of artists working immediately prior to their own arrival. It was not indigenous people, but white scholars who thought Indian art and culture was vanishing. And as Ira’s work showed, the “vanishing point” moved forward in time as one generation of outside scholars was succeeded by the next.
Ira’s published work spanned the arts (from carvings and basketry to music and film) and included dozens of scholarly essays, including many on Franz Boas, his students and collaborators. Those of us who knew him will remember his diffidence—expressed in his shy smile and twinkling eyes—and his quiet (but unrestrained!) enthusiasm for the scholarship and artworks he loved so well.
Richard Handler (University of Virginia)