Jules Tavernier and the Elem Pomo

Exhibition Website

Dec 18 2021 - Apr 17 2022


Jules Tavernier and the Elem Pomo explores the intercultural exchange between French-born and trained American artist Jules Tavernier (1844–1889) and the Indigenous Pomo community of Elem at Clear Lake in northern California.

Investigating Tavernier’s life and career, the exhibition is centered around his rediscovered masterwork Dance in a Subterranean Roundhouse at Clear Lake, California (1878), in which the artist depicts a ceremonial dance of the Elem Pomo known as mfom Xe, or “people dance,” in an underground roundhouse. Commissioned by San Francisco’s leading banker Tiburcio Parrott as a gift for his Parisian business partner Baron Edmond de Rothschild, the work celebrates the rich vitality of Elem Pomo culture, while also exposing the threat posed by White settlers, including Parrot, who was then operating a toxic mercury mine on the community’s ancestral homelands.

The exhibition brings together approximately 50 works—including paintings, prints, watercolors, and photographs—to tell the story of Tavernier’s travels through Nebraska, Wyoming, California, and the Hawaiian Islands, incorporating a multiplicity of voices and perspectives, including those of Pomo cultural leaders and curators, who will offer new interpretations of his work. 

Major paintings by Tavernier are shown alongside examples of nineteenth- to twenty-first-century Pomo baskets and regalia, including works by contemporary weaver Clint McKay (Dry Creek Pomo/Wappo/Wintun), in order to reveal the resiliency of the Indigenous Pomo peoples and highlight their continued cultural presence today. The exhibition is presented in collaboration with Elem Pomo cultural leader and regalia maker Robert Geary and Dry Creek Pomo scholar Sherrie Smith-Ferri, Ph.D.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website

Image credit: Jules Tavernier - 'Sunrise Over Diamond Head', oil on canvas, 1888, Honolulu Museum of Art



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