It's curious: How could a Seattle shop known for a mummy, mermaid
and man-eating clams - not to mention tiny fleas in dresses - be regarded
as a significant supplier of art?
That's what Kate C. Duncan wanted to know.
Duncan, an art historian, lived in Seattle from 1975 to 1991 and sometimes
took visitors to Ye Olde Curiosity Shop, an obligatory tourist
stop on the waterfront.
To Duncan, the entire floor-to-ceiling jumble of trinkets, curios,
novelties, baskets, masks and carvings was an amusing diversion.
"But to be honest," she admits, "I didn't take it very seriously."
Her attitude changed dramatically in 1993. On a research trip to the
Royal Ontario Museum, Duncan was asked by a curator if she was familiar
with Ye Olde Curiosity Shop.
When she said yes, the curator explained that much of the Ontario's
Northwest Coast collection of Indian-made art and artifacts had come
from that shop.
"My first reaction was: "Really?'" says Duncan.
Her next reaction: to return to the quirky Seattle shop and learn
more about its role as a conduit of Native American and Eskimo art,
its impact in boosting tourism here and its colorful founder, J.E. "Daddy"
Standley.
Her book, "1001 Curious Things: Ye Olde Curiosity Shop and
Native American Art," (University of Washington Press, $35) is a product
of that exploration.
Duncan, now an art professor at Arizona State University, will visit
Seattle Friday and Saturday to read from the 273-page oversize book,
and hopes to hear local residents tell their memories of the shop.
In her research, Duncan found that items that passed through the curiosity
shop are also on display in major museums in London, Washington, D.C.,
and other cities.
Objects that have interested museums range from the utilitarian to
the decorative, all shedding light on the lifestyle of Northwest tribes
and Alaskan Eskimos.
A 7-inch-long ivory school of fish, created by an Eskimo carver about
1900, was among some 1,200 pieces purchased from Standley in 1916 by
collector George Heye, founder of the museum of the American Indian
Heye Foundation. It is now in the National Museum of the American Indian,
part of the Smithsonian Institution.
Another example is a 79-inch prehistoric mammoth tusk, engraved with
depictions of Eskimo village life about 1899, acquired by the Royal
Ontario Museum - at Standley's urging - in 1917.
The curiosity shop, which marked its 100th birthday in 1999 at Pier
54, is still in operation. (It spent most of its life on or adjacent
to Colman Dock, Pier 52.) Passed through generations, it is now run
by Standley's great-grandson, Andy James, and his wife, Tammy.
But the bulk of Duncan's work concentrates on the store's first four
decades, when it was run by Standley, collector, Native-art enthusiast
and civic booster.
"He probably was very entertaining to some people, and a little odd
to others," Duncan said. "He was always very committed to what he was
doing, and he loved Seattle dearly ... I wish I could have met him."
Although such a meeting was impossible - Standley died in 1940 - he
posthumously tutored Duncan on the shop and his activities through the
countless notes he left behind - notes he intended to use to write his
own book but never quite got around to.
Standley's passion for the unusual traces back to a children's book
on the wonders of nature, which he won for having the neatest desk and
nicest monogram in his third-grade class in Ohio.
Years later, that interest influenced the inventory in his first shop,
a grocery store in Denver, where Standley likely gathered Indian-made
items in exchange for food and supplies.
"I started putting curios on the counter for decoration and people
began to buy them. So I got more and more curios," he told The Seattle
Daily Times in 1937.
In 1899, Standley moved to Seattle, advised by doctors that a lower
altitude might benefit his ailing wife, Isabelle. That same year, he
opened his first Seattle shop, Standley's Free Museum and Curio, on
Second Avenue and Pike Street.
For Standley, the timing was ideal. By the time of Seattle's first
world's fair, the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, word of his
shop and collection was already spreading, and his exhibit at the event
drew not just tourists, but scholars, anthropologists and collectors.
Over the years, the jumbled displays at Standley's shops combined
the simply curious with significant art objects - treasures and trinkets
sharing shelf space in a most democratic style of display.
Among the staples: Baskets, tools, ivory, masks and totem poles of
all sizes. Standley didn't just wait for items to come to him; many
were made by Native artists to his specifications, or to resemble ones
he had seen in books.
But Duncan notes that Standley also spiced up the array with the bizarre,
the strange and sometimes, the downright creepy, such as the shrunken
heads from the Amazon (some were real, some were counterfeits made from
animal skin). Standley even put together a gag do-it-yourself kit, with
packets of a mysterious powder and the advice, "Don't lose your head,
shrink it."
How about a sewing basket made from the shell of an armadillo? A popular
item in the 1920s, the shells were cleaned out, turned over, lined with
satin, and the tail was fastened to the neck area to form a handle.
Duncan found the names of six Texas suppliers among Standley's paperwork.
Standley's supply methods sometimes crossed cultural lines. He was
enthusiastic about totem poles make by Tlingit artists in Alaska. But
to ensure a steady and affordable supply, he had the design replicated
by carvers of the Vancouver Island-based Nuu-chah-nulth tribe living
in Seattle. He even stocked inexpensive totem-pole souvenirs made in
Japan.
In 1937, Standley, then 83, was hit by a car on Alaska Way and suffered
a broken leg. Though he would live for another three years, Duncan said
he never fully recovered.
Also significant, the 1940s saw an expansion of the public's knowledge
of the larger world, through war, travel and the news media.
"By the 1940s the shop could no longer disarm in quite the way it
had in earlier decades," Duncan notes.
A final chapter in the book gives a condensed look at the shop since
1940, noting the shop's different locations and the sale of some 2,000
piece of Native American art at three auctions from 1976 though 1980.
These days, the shop still holds some of the ancient treasurers, but
mostly it sells novelty items more likely to amuse than amaze.
It's doubtful the shop could have survived exactly the way J.E. Standley
operated before 1940, Duncan said, now that television, the Web and
other media can bring much of the world's curiosities into people's
own homes.
"But there is a mystique, something about the personal search, the
discovery, and tangibly experiencing the object itself, that a media
experience cannot provide," Duncan wrote. "Visitors still rush their
friends through cramped aisles to a display case somewhere in the rear
of the shop to share a discovery."
Jack Broom can be reached at 206-464-2222,
or at jbroom@seattletimes.com.
Copyright
© 2001 The Seattle Times Company