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At least since Marcel Duchamp turned a urinal upside-down and called it art, museumgoers have been learning to expect to confront the most surprising objects in the gallery. So after seventy-five years of everything from mounds of earth to rotting food to ground-up transistor radios and human bones, a few surfboards and a woody should come as no surprise.

Craig Stecyk’s innovation is not in the materials he uses, or in some new style or hip vocabulary he might have developed. There are retail stores in the mall surrounding Papa Moana which quite nearly match Stecyk’s installation for atmosphere and authenticity.

What sets Stecyk’s work apart from theme restaurants and urban bwana clothing stores is content, that misunderstood and too-frequently-ignored aspect of art that makes the difference between mere decoration and communication, between an idea to be sold and an ideal of the soul. And it is in the arena of content that Stecyk emerges as unique.

As curator (and noted surfer) Bolton Colburn shows in his essay here, the meanings of Papa Moana are rich and multi-layered, but they have all grown out of quintessentially Pacific concerns: Polynesian culture, surfing as a spiritual and historically-based life choice, the Pacific Rim as focus of a shifting world perspective. An art about such concerns could not have been born in the traditional Euro-American art centers. This is, unabashedly and with no apologies, an indigenous art.

For the Laguna Art Museum, a museum of American art with a special emphasis on the art of California, there could be no more appropriate presentation.