Native American Heritage Month

The warp-faced weaves of the Andes are the most complex in the world, with up to eight warp levels. While existing studies of Andean textiles use a technical language derived from other textile traditions, this book takes as its starting point the technical terms in the Aymara and Quechua languages used by Andean weavers themselves. The result is a completely new way of understanding one of the great craft traditions of the world. The authors' work is truly groundbreaking. This is a highly technical book that sets out the authors' alternative classification system via tables, photographs and diagrams. But it is also a celebration of a brilliant and sophisticated weaving tradition. Each technique is described in detail, with technical details and historical development with accompanying photographs and some computer renderings. Denise Y. Arnold and Elvira Espejo have worked with weavers across the region to understand this language and have studied more than 700 textile samples in museums and collections, from the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London to the Instituto de Lengua y Cultura Aymara (ILCA) in La Paz. It will be of great interest to practical weavers, museum curators, anthropologists, art historians, archaeologists, and anyone with a love for Latin America and its rich textile traditions.

Art for a New Understanding, an exhibition from Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art opening this October, seeks to radically expand and reposition the narrative of American art since 1950 by charting a history of the development of contemporary Indigenous art from the United States and Canada, beginning when artists moved from more regionally-based conversations and practices to national and international contemporary art contexts.This accompanying book documents and expands on the histories and themes of this exciting exhibition. This fully illustrated volume includes essays by art historians and historians and reflections by the artists included in the collection. Also included are key contemporary writings-from the 1950s onward-by artists, scholars, and critics, investigating the themes of transculturalism and pan-Indian identity, traditional practices conducted in radically new ways, displacement, forced migration, shadow histories, the role of personal mythologies as a means to reimagine the future, and much more. As both a survey of the development of Indigenous art from the 1950s to the present and a consideration of Native artists within contemporary art more broadly, Art for a New Understanding expands the definition of American art and sets the tone for future considerations of the subject. It is an essential publication for any institution or individual with an interest in contemporary Native American art, and an invaluable resource in ongoing scholarly considerations of the American contemporary art landscape at large.

This volume accompanies a major international loan exhibition featuring more than three hundred works of art, many rarely or never before seen in the United States. It traces the development of gold working and other luxury arts in the Americas from antiquity until the arrival of Europeans in the early sixteenth century. Presenting spectacular works from recent excavations in Peru, Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Mexico, this exhibition focuses on specific places and times--crucibles of innovation--where artistic exchange, rivalry, and creativity led to the production of some of the greatest works of art known from the ancient Americas. The book and exhibition explore not only artistic practices but also the historical, cultural, social, and political conditions in which luxury arts were produced and circulated, alongside their religious meanings and ritual functions. Golden Kingdoms creates new understandings of ancient American art through a thematic exploration of indigenous ideas of value and luxury. Central to the book is the idea of the exchange of materials and ideas across regions and across time: works of great value would often be transported over long distances, or passed down over generations, in both cases attracting new audiences and inspiring new artists. The idea of exchange is at the intellectual heart of this volume, researched and written by twenty scholars based in the United States and Latin America. 

Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists explores the artistic achievements of Native women and establishes their rightful place in the art world. This landmark book includes works of art from antiquity to the present, made in a variety of media from textiles and beadwork to video and digital arts. It showcases artists from more than seventy-five Indigenous tribes to reveal the ingenuity and innovation that have always been foundational to the art of Native women. Women have long been the creative force behind Native art. Hearts of Our People accompanies the first major exhibition of artwork by Native women, presented in close cooperation with top Native women artists and scholars, honoring the achievements of over 115 artists from the United States and Canada spanning over 1,000 years. Their triumphs?from pottery, textiles, and painting, to photographic portraits, to a gleaming El Camino?show astonishing innovation and technical mastery. Beautifully illustrated and enriched by the personal reflections, historical research, and artistic insights of leading scholars and artists in the field, Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists pays tribute to the vital role and creative force of Native women artists, now and throughout time.

Emory Sekaquaptewa dedicated most of his life to promoting Hopi literacy and creating written materials to strengthen the language and lifeway of his people. He understood how intimately cultural ideas are embedded in language, and by transcribing and translating early recordings of katsina songs he helped strengthen the continuity of Hopi religious thought and cultural practices. Sekaquaptewa believed that the advice contained in the katsina songs, some of which were recorded over a century ago, could be used by future generations as guideposts for navigating contemporary life.   Hopi Katsina Songs contains Hopi transcriptions, English translations, and detailed commentaries of 150 katsina songs, recorded throughout the twentieth century from all three Hopi mesas, as well as twenty-five recorded by Sekaquaptewa himself. To further continue the creative process of the Hopi legacy, Sekaquaptewa included song fragments with the hope that readers would remember the songs and complete them. These features make his collection an invaluable resource for preserving and teaching Hopi language and culture.

This beautiful catalog presents the first systematic study of feather mosaics from New Spain in the context of a broader creative exchange between Mesoamerican and European aesthetics and materials. Thirty-three scholars look at these unprecedented artworks that circulated in the sixteenth and seventeeth centuries from a range of vantage points, including art history, anthropology, collecting, natural history, archeology, and conservation. Published to complement a major international exhibition held at the National Museum of Art (MUNAL) in Mexico City in 2011, the book is organized thematically and includes over three hundred color photographs of feather mosaics with astonishing detail, as well as relevant paintings, sculptures, drawings, engravings, books, European illuminated manuscripts, Mesoamerican codices, and studies of natural history. No book has ever brought together so many images of artworks from this tradition, let alone assembled a team of scholars to offer such trenchant analysis. It will be essential for art historians, scholars of colonialism, and historians of the Spanish Empire alike.

Making History: IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts is a unique contribution to the fields of visual culture, arts education, and American Indian studies. Written by scholars actively producing Native art resources, this book guides readers--students, educators, collectors, and the public--in how to learn about Indigenous cultures as visualized in our creative endeavors. By highlighting the rich resources and history of the Institute of American Indian Arts, the only tribal college in the nation devoted to the arts whose collections reflect the full tribal diversity of Turtle Island, these essays present a best-practices approach to understanding Indigenous art from a Native-centric point of view. Topics include biography, pedagogy, philosophy, poetry, coding, arts critique, curation, and writing about Indigenous art. Featuring two original poems, ten essays authored by senior scholars in the field of Indigenous art, nearly two hundred works of art, and twenty-four archival photographs from the IAIA's nearly sixty-year history, Making History offers an opportunity to engage the contemporary Native Arts movement.

Against the backdrop of Guatemala, this book presents portraits of artisans working in the ancient traditions of the Maya paired with insights into the creation of the textiles and the events that have affected their work. Weaving, spinning, and basket making have sustained the Maya economically and culturally against the pressures of change and a 36-year civil war that decimated their population. Their persistence in continuing traditional art has created some of the loveliest, most colorful textiles the world has ever known. Artisans share their personal histories, hopes, and dreams along with the products of their hands and looms. Their stories show determination in the face of unimaginable loss and hardship which instill an appreciation for the textiles themselves and for the strong people who create them.

A timely re-examination of European engagements with indigenous art and the presence of indigenous art in the contemporary art world. The arts of Africa, Oceania and native America famously inspired twentieth-century modernist artists such as Picasso, Matisse and Ernst. The politics of such stimulus, however, have long been highly contentious: was this a cross-cultural discovery to be celebrated, or just one more example of Western colonial appropriation? This revelatory book explores cross-cultural art through the lens of settler societies such as Australia and New Zealand, where Europeans made new nations, displacing and outnumbering but never eclipsing native peoples. In this dynamic of dispossession and resistance, visual art has loomed large. Settler artists and designers drew upon Indigenous motifs and styles in their search for distinctive identities. Yet powerful Indigenous art traditions have asserted the presence of First Nations peoples and their claims to place, history and sovereignty. Cultural exchange has been a two-way process, and an unpredictable one: contemporary Indigenous art draws on global contemporary practice, but moves beyond a bland affirmation of hybrid identities to insist on the enduring values and attachment to place of Indigenous peoples.

Two hundred masterpieces of Indigenous art from North America, accompanied by essays on the collection and the current issues affecting Indigenous communities.   Here, Now: Indigenous Arts of North America at the Denver Art Museum features two hundred of the Denver Art Museum's most notable Indigenous artworks. Aimed at both longtime fans of Indigenous arts and those coming to them for the first time, this expansive book reinterprets the collection and offers new insights into the historic and contemporary work of Indigenous artists. The artworks--covering a range of media, artistic traditions, and time periods--are organized geographically and invite readers to make connections between the artworks and the places they were produced. The book also includes contributions by Indigenous authors reflecting on the collection and the current issues that affect contemporary Indigenous communities. Contributors include John P. Lukavic, Dakota Hoska (Oglála Lakȟóta), and Christopher Patrello; with Kathleen Ash-Milby (Navajo), Susan Billy (Hopland Band of Pomo Indians), Jeffrey Chapman (White Earth Ojibwe), Jordan Poorman Cocker (Kiowa/Tongan), Jasha Lyons Echo-Hawk (Seminole/Pawnee), Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit/ Unangax̂), Joe Horse Capture (A'aniiih), Terrance Jade (Oglála Lakȟóta), Zachary R. Jones, Sascha Scott, Rose Simpson (Santa Clara), Daniel C. Swan, and Norman Vorano. The book opens with a contribution from United States Poet Laureate Joy Harjo.

Essays on Native Modernism: Complexity and Contradiction in American Indian Art, which grew out of a symposium held by NMAI in May 2005, explores the legacies of George Morrison (Grand Portage Band of Chippewa, 1919–2000) and Allan Houser (Warm Springs Chiricahua Apache, 1914–1994)—two giants of 20th-century art—as well as investigates the basis of a Native modernism by eliciting a broad discussion about the critical perspectives and practices of Native artists across North America. Also examined is the place of Native modernism in the canon of American art and the currents of influence between them.

The Barnes Foundation's historic Pueblo and Navajo collections are explored alongside works by contemporary Native American artists This richly illustrated book makes the Barnes Foundation's exceptional collection of Native American art from the Southwest available to the public for the first time. Collector and educator Albert C. Barnes traveled to the U.S. Southwest in 1930 and 1931 and, deeply impressed by the generative art practices he saw there, formed a collection of Pueblo and Navajo pottery, textiles, and jewelry. Water, Wind, Breath illuminates the materials, forms, and designs of the objects as they relate to Pueblo and Navajo histories and ideas. The book blends postcolonial and Indigenous perspectives, introducing readers to living artistic traditions filled with purpose, intention, and a deeply embedded spirituality that connects places, practices, and Native identities. Works by contemporary Native American artists are juxtaposed with historic pieces, illuminating the connections between heritage traditions and modern practices. Distributed for the Barnes Foundation Exhibition Schedule: The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia (February 20-May 15, 2022)

A photographic and narrative celebration of contemporary Native American life and cultures, alongside an in-depth examination of issues that Native people face, by celebrated photographer and storyteller Matika Wilbur of the Swinomish and Tulalip Tribes. "This book is too important to miss. It is a vast, sprawling look at who we are as Indigenous people in these United States."-Tommy Orange (Cheyenne and Arapaho), author of There There In 2012, Matika Wilbur sold everything in her Seattle apartment and set out on a Kickstarter-funded pursuit to visit, engage, and photograph people from what were then the 562 federally recognized Native American Tribal Nations. Over the next decade, she traveled six hundred thousand miles across fifty states-from Seminole country (now known as the Everglades) to Inuit territory (now known as the Bering Sea)-to meet, interview, and photograph hundreds of Indigenous people. The body of work Wilbur created serves to counteract the one-dimensional and archaic stereotypes of Native people in mainstream media and offers justice to the richness, diversity, and lived experiences of Indian Country. The culmination of this decade-long art and storytelling endeavor, Project 562 is a peerless, sweeping, and moving love letter to Indigenous Americans, containing hundreds of stunning portraits and compelling personal narratives of contemporary Native people-all photographed in clothing, poses, and locations of their choosing. Their narratives touch on personal and cultural identity as well as issues of media representation, sovereignty, faith, family, the protection of sacred sites, subsistence living, traditional knowledge-keeping, land stewardship, language preservation, advocacy, education, the arts, and more. A vital contribution from an incomparable artist, Project 562 inspires, educates, and truly changes the way we see Native America.