Native North American Art

The richness of Native American art is explored from the early pre-Columbian period to the present day, stressing the conceptual and iconographic continuities over five centuries and across an immensely diverse range of regions. 53 color photos. 104 halftones. 8 maps.

Tourist art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is generally of high quality and great aesthetic interest. Yet scholars have largely ignored these objects because their incorporation of Euro-North American influences, in both forms and motifs, has led to their dismissal as commercial, acculturated, and inauthentic. This exclusive location of authenticity and value in an idealized past silences the creative responses of Aboriginal people to repressive official policies of directed acculturation and denies their full participation in historical modernity. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the production, sale, and consumption of tourist art constituted a system for the circulation of objects within which images of Indianness were negotiated. To produce marketable commodities, Aboriginal people constructed images of themselves that mediated European notions of the savage, the natural, and the primitive. By accepting this imagery, colonizers and settlers naturalized their own identities as the rightful successors to the -Indians. While stereotypes of Indianness were being transported into parlours and bed chambers, the objects made for sale were also influencing the things Aboriginal people made for their own use. The beaded purses, pincushions, and shopping baskets brought Euro-American styles and concepts into Aboriginal communities, together with associated ideas of gender roles and domestic organization. An innovative combination of fieldwork, art historical analysis, and historical contextualization, this study is the first rigorous comparison of Native souvenir production with a wide range of Euro-American decorative arts and home crafts to identify the sources of object types and styles and revealing the innovative difference displayed by Aboriginal trade wares. Images newly uncovered in archives and travel literature - including depictions of Native vendors and makers - illustrate the book, along with never before displayed or published objects from museum collections in Europe and North America.

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 landmark publication reevaluates historical Native American art as a crucial but under-examined component of American art history. The Charles and Valerie Diker Collection, a transformative promised gift to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, includes masterworks from more than fifty cultures across North America. The works highlighted in this volume span centuries, from before contact with European settlers to the early twentieth century. In this beautifully illustrated volume, featuring all new photography, the innovative visions of known and unknown makers are presented in a wide variety of forms, from painting, sculpture, and drawing to regalia, ceramics, and baskets. The book provides key insights into the art, culture, and daily life of culturally distinct Indigenous peoples along with critical and popular perceptions over time, revealing that to engage Native art is to reconsider the very meaning of America. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Verdana}

This illuminating and provocative book is the first anthology devoted to Twentieth Century Native American and First Nation art. Native American Art brings together anthropologists, art historians, curators, critics and distinguished Native artists to discuss pottery, painitng, sculpture, printmaking, photography and performance art by some of the most celebrated Native American and Canadian First Nation artists of our time The contributors use new theoretical and critical approaches to address key issues for Native American art, including symbolism and spirituality, the role of patronage and musuem practices, the politics of art criticism and the aesthetic power of indigenous knowledge. The artist contributors, who represent several Native nations - including Cherokee, Lakota, Plains Cree, and those of the PLateau country - emphasise the importance of traditional stories, myhtologies and ceremonies in the production of comtemporary art. Within great poignancy, thye write about recent art in terms of home, homeland and aboriginal sovereignty Tracing the continued resistance of Native artists to dominant orthodoxies of the art market and art history, Native American Art in the Twentieth Century argues forcefully for Native art's place in modern art history.

North American Indian Art: Masterpieces and Museum Collections from the Netherlands showcases 114 oustanding examples of Native art and heritage from the Canadian subarctic forests to the American Southwest preserved in Dutch museums. Many of these rare material documents collected between the seventeenth and the twenty-first century have never been published before. They are here stunningly presented as individual works of art and placed into their cultural and historical contexts by forty-two leading American, Canadian, and European experts who weave together the historical narrative of each object's acquisition with current Native and scholarly interpretations of their use and meaning. In his introductory essay Pieter Hovens provides a detailed account of the history of Dutch interests in North American Indian cultures, from the seventeenth-century colonial experience in New Netherland through the collecting activities of public institutions and private connoisseurs to academic scholarship and social engagement. All of these interests have contributed to the wealth and range of objects featured here as well as to the public perception of Native Americans in the Netherlands. This book offers for the first time an overview of all institutional collections of Native North American arts and cultures in a single European country. It is the privilege of the Dutch museums to share these heritage collections with the widest audience possible.

A splendidly illustrated introduction to the rich history of Native American art, distinguished by its broad coverage and nuanced discussion. This timely new book surveys the artistic traditions of indigenous North America, from those of ancient cultures such as Adena, Hopewell, Mississippian, and Anasazi to the work of modern artists like Earnest Spybuck, Fred Kabotie, Dick West, T. C. Cannon, and Gerald McMaster. The text is organized geographically and draws upon the testimonies of oral tradition, Native American history, and the latest research in North American archaeology. Recent art historical scholarship has helped restore, to a large degree, some understanding of the identities and cultural roles of Native American artists and the social contexts of the objects they created. Native American art is often discussed simply as a cultural production rather than the work of individual artists who made objects to fufill social and cultural purposes; this book focuses as much as possible on the artists themselves, their cultural identities, and the objects they made even when the names of the individual artists remain unrecoverable. But this is not a book of artists' biographies. It seeks to inform a general readership about the history of Native American art with a lively narrative full of historical incident and illustrated with provocative and superlative works of art. It explores the tension between artistic continuities spanning thousands of years and the startlingly fresh innovations that resulted from specific historical circumstances. The narrative weaves together so-called "traditional" arts, "tourist" arts, and Native American art of today by taking the point of view of their particular and local histories—the artists, their communities, and audiences. Among the many cultures included are: Arapaho, Athapascan, Cherokee, Cheyenne, Chumash, Hopi, Hupa/Karok, Inuit, Iroquois, Kwakiutl, Lakota, Miwok, Navajo, Ojibwa, Pomo, Tlingit, Tsimshian, Uypik, and Zuni.