Posted on 02/24/2005 10:19:19 PM PST by Fizzie
Churchill Art Piece Called Into Question
by CBS4 News reporter Raj Chohan
Feb 24, 2005 8:03 pm US/Mountain BOULDER, Colo. (CBS4) Boulder County resident Duke Prentup has been a fan of native American art for as long as he can remember. That love of art took him to the home of Ward Churchill in the early 1980's, where Prentup bought several pieces of Churchill's art, including a serigraph titled "Winter Attack."
"I have enjoyed them ever since immensely, they're obviously up inside my house," Prentup said.
Last month came a stunning revelation, though, as as Prentup flipped through a 1972 book called The Mystic Warriors of the Plains written and illustrated by the late artist Thomas E. Mails. He found a sketch that was strikingly similar to the Churchill piece.
(Excerpt) See the rest of the article, and photo comparisons of the 2 pieces of art here: http://news4colorado.com/topstories/local_story_055200531.html
(Excerpt) Read more at news4colorado.com ...
Family lore has it that there was a Cherokee some generations back in our family, which supposedly accounted for my father and his brothers having jet black hair. I've never traced it so I don't know (if true) what fraction I am. LOL. Of course, having been born in this country does make me a native American. That's good enough for me, thank goodness and the good Lord.
Update: the only books relating to prints and photographs that we had were price guides. Sorry!
Someone should contact the FReeper that did the image overlay with animation that proved the Rathergate documents were generated with modern typesetting software ie MS Word. Maybe he could provide the same type of analysis here. LOL.
http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36~53~2731533,00.html
Churchill artwork mirrors artist's
New questions arose Thursday about the professional history of controversial University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill when his artwork was shown to be nearly identical to that of a well-known Western artist.
Churchill once sold prints under his name that bear an uncanny resemblance to a drawing done by the late artist Thomas E. Mails, CBS4 reporter Raj Chohan reported Thursday night.
The print made by Churchill in 1981, called "Winter Attack," appears to be a mirror image of a pen-and-ink sketch in a 1972 book called "The Mystic Warriors of the Plains" by Mails.
Churchill, after first angrily refusing to talk to Chohan on camera, admitted the work was based on Mails' rendering and said he had noted that fact during the initial release of "Winter Attack."
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Boulder County resident Duke Prentup, who had paid about $100 for the Churchill work, discovered the similarity while leafing through a book of Mails' work, according to the CBS4 report.
Meanwhile, how Churchill came to win accelerated tenure at CU continued to be questioned. Churchill was never formally offered a job at California State University at Northridge, although CU officials believed he had been when they shortcut the hiring process to give him a tenured position, a Cal State spokeswoman said Thursday.
Michael Pacanowsky, head of the CU communications department at the time, wrote on Jan. 10, 1991, that the process to find Churchill a job had to be accelerated because of the competing offer, but Cal State spokeswoman Carmen Chandler said the controversial professor was never officially offered a job.
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Pacanowsky wrote in the January 1991 letter that he was asked to appoint Churchill to the communications department after the Cal State offer.
"I was initially told we had some time to consider the matter. ... Unfortunately, Ward has been offered a full professorship at Cal State-Northridge, and we need to make our decision well before the end of January," wrote Pacanowsky, who was returning from Germany on Thursday and could not be reached for comment.
E-mails and memorandums from 1991 show that the supposed competing offer was the primary justification for swiftly promoting Churchill from a one-semester temporary teaching job he had barely started into a full-time tenured faculty slot. But the records don't say who created the belief that Cal State-Northridge was competing for Churchill's services.
A Feb. 8, 1991, memo from Evelyn Hu-DeHart, director of the Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America, wrote that Churchill's job was a "special opportunity" position, which is often a job to help hire a more diverse faculty.
Administrators did not have to submit a search plan or advertise the position, she wrote, but the department decided to advertise the position and came up with three finalists, including Churchill.
Hu-DeHart, now at Brown University, refused to discuss the matter over the phone but answered some questions by e-mail this week.
She said Churchill would have had to prove he had an offer from Cal State and that he was more "senior" than a University of Arizona candidate despite never being a professor.
"'Senior' can be defined in more than one way, for example, by scholarship and number of publications," Hu-DeHart wrote via e-mail.
Cal State's Chandler said there could have been some informal talks between Churchill and the school, but any record of that may have been destroyed in the 1994 Northridge earthquake. Records of formal offers were preserved.
George Wayne, a former CU employee who at the time was an administrator at another Cal State campus, said he knows Churchill was a candidate for a job at Northridge because he was contacted by a Cal State colleague about Churchill sometime around 1991. Wayne did not remember who contacted him.
Churchill could not be reached for comment Thursday.
Yes, my grandfather died at 85 with maybe half a dozen white hairs - a majestic looking man.
I with you on the Native American or just plain American....no hyphen here. God bless our ancestors, eh? So fortunate to live in this wonderful country no matter how we got here.
I saved the pics to my desktop file for now.Thanks.
I give up. The problem is that their costumes don't look like Cheyenne. Going through the entire Curtis collection is taking a long time, then there's the Bell collection...
Are those the actual pictures? Isn't one just a negative of the other?
Gosh, let me guess...
I was only kidding, but I see someone has done this. See post 389 on this thread.
Good job anyway...I think a curator and any Indian Art museum could do this in 1/2 an hour. The problem is, that ain't us.
Those are actual pictures.
Been thinking along those lines myself. Here we are putting $$ in education funds for our children and you can believe I am wondering.............
It's the CBS defense: it's forged, but accurate.
OMG! Wonder what other ones he copied like this! Anyone know?
You are way too kind. Where do you think I first heard of Peter Sellers? :-) I'm an old bat!
Wonder how much he CHARGED for the fraud?
Keep scrolling.
In addition to the new4 story, last night FReepers found two more examples of clear (suspected?) copyright violations...those "forgeries?" are noted in the earlier part of this long thread.
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