Folk Art Of The Andes

Color and black-and-white photographs show the architectural changes over the years and highlight the collection housed inside Casa San Ysidro from the Spanish Colonial, Mexican, and Territorial periods including tinwork, ironwork, carpentry, weavings, Pu

"This book presents artifacts - or artefactos - from everyday life, objects that have accompanied Colombian people through the centuries, both in their earthly and spiritual activities. In both English and Spanish, the word artifact means, literally, "made with skill or art." Although all worthy of museums and galleries, these are not just exhibition pieces, nor are their makers all members of a separate artisan class. There is no Colombian home, however humble, that does not have a handmade broom, stool, basket, textile, or rustic furniture; nor is there a single Amazon Indian who cannot quickly piece together a basket from leaves found in the jungle."--BOOK JACKET.

Folk art is as varied as it is indicative of person and place, informed by innovation and grounded in cultural context. The variety and versatility of 300 American folk artists is captured in this collection of informative and thoroughly engaging essays. American Folk Art: A Regional Reference offers a collection of fascinating essays on the life and work of 300 individual artists. Some of the men and women profiled in these two volumes are well known, while others are important practitioners who have yet to receive the notice they merit. Because many of the artists in both categories have a clear identity with their land and culture, the work is organized by geographical region and includes an essay on each region to help make connections visible. There is also an introductory essay on U.S. folk art as a whole. Those writing about folk art to date tend to view each artist as either traditional or innovative. One of the major contributions of this work is that it demonstrates that folk artists more often exhibit both traits; they are grounded in their cultural context and creative in the way they make work their own. Such insights expand the study of folk art even as they readjust readers' understanding of who folk artists are.

From prehistory to the present, the Indigenous peoples of the Andes have used a visual symbol system—that is, art—to express their sense of the sacred and its immanence in the natural world. Many visual motifs that originated prior to the Incas still appear in Andean art today, despite the onslaught of cultural disruption that native Andeans have endured over several centuries. Indeed, art has always been a unifying power through which Andeans maintain their spirituality, pride, and culture while resisting the oppression of the dominant society. In this book, Mary Strong takes a significantly new approach to Andean art that links prehistoric to contemporary forms through an ethnographic understanding of Indigenous Andean culture. In the first part of the book, she provides a broad historical survey of Andean art that explores how Andean religious concepts have been expressed in art and how artists have responded to cultural encounters and impositions, ranging from invasion and conquest to international labor migration and the internet. In the second part, Strong looks at eight contemporary art types—the scissors dance (danza de tijeras), home altars (retablos), carved gourds (mates), ceramics (ceramica), painted boards (tablas), weavings (textiles), tinware (hojalateria), and Huamanga stone carvings (piedra de Huamanga). She includes prehistoric and historic information about each art form, its religious meaning, the natural environment and sociopolitical processes that help to shape its expression, and how it is constructed or performed by today’s artists, many of whom are quoted in the book.

DIVAnalyzes Latin American and Caribbean folk art from a feminist perspective, considering the issue of gender in the production and circulation of popular art produced by women./div

A former professor and museum director offers a fascinating, in-depth look at the culture and history of beaded objects around the world. From a beaded dress found in an ancient Egyptian tomb to the beaded fringe on a 1920s Parisian flapper’s hem, humans throughout history have used beading as a way to express, adorn, and tell a story. Bol explores beadwork across the world and through the ages, showing how beading has taken on many different styles, forms, and purposes for different cultures. She looks at children’s clothing, puberty ceremonies, burials, emblems of social status and leadership, festivals, and many other cultural occasions that involve the use of beadwork. Images of artifacts and heirlooms as well as photography of people and their beadwork enhance the scholarship of this book for a beautiful, enlightening addition to art, history, multicultural collections everywhere.