At the recent reopening of the UC Davis Gorman Museum of Native American Art, student Jada McCovey sat at a table in the redwoods next to the museum. On the table before her were finely carved bones and antlers with dark incised lines, all meticulously handcrafted by her grandfather George Blake.
When McCovey, a third-year Native American studies and environmental studies student, came to UC Davis, it felt like she was coming home. That’s largely because her grandfather earned his degree from UC Davis. McCovey is also a student of her grandfather, learning how to turn bones and antlers into art connected to her Hupa-Yurok heritage.
“As a kid I was always interested in what he was doing,” said McCovey, who recently was a Climate Science Alliance intern in San Diego and a tribal climate stewardship intern with the Yurok. “I’d draw designs on notepads while watching him. I left them with him, and the next time he told me I could put them on a pattern to carve. He let me put my own creative spin on it. I was surprised he had that faith in me when I was that young.”
Blake (B.A., Native American studies, ’77) took classes with Native American studies professor and artist George Longfish and art professors Manuel Neri and Robert Arneson. Along with the bone carvings, which include “purses” made of elk bones, Blake makes dugout redwood canoes, sinew backed bows, leatherwork, and gold and silver jewelry. In many cases, he has kept traditional skills alive and revived and recovered others. In 1991 he was named a National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellow.
Both grandfather and granddaughter are from the Hoopa Valley Reservation in Humboldt County where Blake still lives along with a large extended family.
Saving art forms and inventing new ones
Reached by phone during a busy holiday season, Blake gave a freewheeling and wide-ranging discussion of his work and the pitfalls of making a living as an artist. He talked about how to remove the sinews from a deer’s legs for the bows; spearing sturgeons to make fish glue; and how his designs have been appropriated by others.
Although Blake is best known for his traditional arts, he is also very much a contemporary artist. At times he adapts one form to another, such as using Native basketry designs in ceramics and carvings.
The influence of his time at UC Davis, especially with Arneson, is readily apparent in Blake’s artworks that are heavy on social and political commentary wrapped in humor. Arneson made a series of ceramic toilets; Blake’s first clay piece was a brassiere. The two mostly got along, Blake said.
“Arneson had me working in the same area as master students,” Blake recalled. “He always respected me.”
Blake has made plenty of work that could easily be classified as Funk art.
His 1993 wood sculpture Hang Around the Fort Injun, owned by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, parodies the cigar store Indian and Native American politicians. When a friend gave him a cap from the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant, the only such plant in California, he covered it with beadwork and placed it atop a ceramic skull.
Blake’s traditional work can be found in collections from the Gorman Museum to the Brooklyn Museum in New York to the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles.
Strengthening their connection
McCovey transferred to UC Davis after two years at the University of Oregon. She wanted to be closer to her family and study at her grandfather’s alma mater.
“I felt like life opened up when I got here,” McCovey said.
For the last couple of years, McCovey has landed very good internships that, along with her studies, will help fulfill her goals of working at the intersection of Native American issues and the environment.
“It’s an opportunity to encapsulate what my identify is driven by,” she said. “It all ties back to preservation and conservation.”
But this summer, she plans to be back in Hoopa.
“I really want to spend more time with my grandpa,” she said. “We have always been close and there’s a bond between us.”
