Made to be aesthetic as well as functional, mountain sheep horn bowls are highly prized objects. They were used at feasts by Chiefs or nobility. Pieces carved in high relief with formline and figures are especially prestigious and valued. The material requires a lengthy chemical bath and boiling to soften the horn. The horn is cut lengthwise in order to be opened, hollowed and shaped.

This design with two beaked faces is also found on Tlingit sheep horn bowls. Of note is that it is very similar to the design found on the belly of raven rattles. Because they are extremely difficult to shape and carve, and also are made of a material not found on Haida Gwaii, Haida sheep horn bowls are special objects that are highly sought after.

Charles and Valerie Diker, previous collectors of this work, assembled one of the greatest collections of Native American art in private hands. The Metropolitan Museum in New York has mounted multiple exhibitions of their collection, while also continuing a long-term exhibition of their donated and loaned works in the Met’s American Wing, where the Dikers wished that Native American art “would be presented as American art rather than tribal art,” hoping to “re-contextualize what we define as American culture.” The Dikers also served as co-chairs of the board of directors of the George Gustav Heye Center in New York City, a branch of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, where a ground-floor exhibition space is dedicated as the Diker Pavilion. Charles Diker led a distinguished career in business and has been trustee and vice-president of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.

We thank Alexander Baile for his assistance in researching this lot and for contributing the above essay.

For the biography on Gary Bell in PDF format, please click here.

To view the full catalogue for The Gary Bell Collection: Masterworks of Northwest Coast Art, please click here.