American Indian Art

Discussing and illustrating the art forms of the Native Americans of North America, a comprehensive tour covers such areas as the Plains, the Southwest, California, the Great Basin and the Pacific Plateau, the Pacific Northwest Coast, the Arctic Coast, and the Woodlands.

As the Great Depression touched every corner of America, the New Deal promoted indigenous arts and crafts as a means of bootstrapping Native American peoples. But New Deal administrators' romanticization of indigenous artists predisposed them to favor pre-industrial forms rather than art that responded to contemporary markets. In A New Deal for Native Art, Jennifer McLerran reveals how positioning the native artist as a pre-modern Other served the goals of New Deal programs—and how this sometimes worked at cross-purposes with promoting native self-sufficiency. She describes federal policies of the 1930s and early 1940s that sought to generate an upscale market for Native American arts and crafts. And by unraveling the complex ways in which commodification was negotiated and the roles that producers, consumers, and New Deal administrators played in that process, she sheds new light on native art’s commodity status and the artist’s position as colonial subject. In this first book to address the ways in which New Deal Indian policy specifically advanced commodification and colonization, McLerran reviews its multi-pronged effort to improve the market for Indian art through the Indian Arts and Crafts Board, arts and crafts cooperatives, murals, museum exhibits, and Civilian Conservation Corps projects. Presenting nationwide case studies that demonstrate transcultural dynamics of production and reception, she argues for viewing Indian art as a commodity, as part of the national economy, and as part of national political trends and reform efforts. McLerran marks the contributions of key individuals, from John Collier and Rene d’Harnoncourt to Navajo artist Gerald Nailor, whose mural in the Navajo Nation Council House conveyed distinctly different messages to outsiders and tribal members. Featuring dozens of illustrations, A New Deal for Native Art offers a new look at the complexities of folk art “revivals” as it opens a new window on the Indian New Deal.

Artistic traditions of indigenous North America are explored in a study that draws on the testimonies of oral tradition, Native American history, and North American archaeology, focusing on the artists themselves and their cultural identities. Original.

This catalogue includes 139 Native North American works of art that represent many peoples and a variety of materials and functions, presented here for their aesthetic value.-- Metropolitan Museum of Art website.

Fourteen authorities explore sociology, anthropology, art history of Native American creativity.

Museums--along with books, newspapers, and Wild West shows in the 19th century, movies and television in the 20th--have shaped our perceptions of American Indians. This book brings together six prominent museum professionals--Native and non-Native--to examine the ways in which Indians and their cultures have been represented by museums in North America and to present new directions museums are already taking. Traditional museum exhibitions of Native American art and culture often represented only the past, ignoring the living Native voice. Today, museums have begun to incorporate Native perspectives in their displays. Even more dramatic is the growth in the number of Indian-run museums. These essays explore the relationships being forged between museums and Native communities to create new techniques for presenting Native American culture. This publication will serve to stimulate the discussions and analyses that can lead to new partnerships and collaborations.

The 50th anniversary edition of this classic work on the art of Northwest Coast Indians now offers color illustrations for a new generation of readers along with reflections from contemporary Northwest Coast artists about the impact of this book. The masterworks of Northwest Coast Native artists are admired today as among the great achievements of the world�s artists. The painted and carved wooden screens, chests and boxes, rattles, crest hats, and other artworks display the complex and sophisticated northern Northwest Coast style of art that is the visual language used to illustrate inherited crests and tell family stories. In the 1950s Bill Holm, a graduate student of Dr. Erna Gunther, former Director of the Burke Museum, began a systematic study of northern Northwest Coast art. In 1965, after studying hundreds of bentwood boxes and chests, he published Northwest Coast Indian Art: An Analysis of Form. This book is a foundational reference on northern Northwest Coast Native art. Through his careful studies, Bill Holm described this visual language using new terminology that has become part of the established vocabulary that allows us to talk about works like these and understand changes in style both through time and between individual artists� styles. Holm examines how these pieces, although varied in origin, material, size, and purpose, are related to a surprising degree in the organization and form of their two-dimensional surface decoration. The author presents an incisive analysis of the use of color, line, and texture; the organization of space; and such typical forms as ovoids, eyelids, U forms, and hands and feet. The evidence upon which he bases his conclusions constitutes a repository of valuable information for all succeeding researchers in the field. Replaces ISBN 9780295951027

Catalogue of an exhibition at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts.