Innholdsfortegnelse for October - November 2017 / No.11 i Native American Art Magazine

And then it ended...It’s hard to believe that the 2017 Santa Fe Indian Market has come to a close. We definitely enjoyed all the time we spent there as always, and the best part of it was walking around on each day, seeing all our artist friends, engaging with them, seeing all the quality work for sale and taking in everything that is part of the Santa Fe Indian Market experience. We also enjoyed being on the Plaza for the whole weekend and having friends, artists, collectors and dealers stop by to say hello. By all accounts, it was a wonderful weekend. Our goal this year was to elevate the level of reporting being done for Indian Market. When you open this issue of the magazine, turn to page 124…

INDIANAPOLIS, IN Every two years since 1997, the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art has supported the Native American art community through its Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship. The program provides five contemporary Native artists with grants so they can “continue to pursue their art professionally and receive greater exposure.” With the support of the Lilly Endowment Inc., the museum has purchased approximately 400 works of the contemporary art since 1999 for its permanent collections. In all, there have been 50 Fellowship artists. To celebrate the 20 years of the Fellowship, the museum has announced the traveling exhibition Native Art Now!, featuring some of the best contemporary Native artwork by these artists. The exhibition was developed by a team led by Jennifer Complo McNutt, the museum’s curator of contemporary…

ALBUQUERQUE, NM The matrilineal heritage of Pueblo potters is well known. A similar lineage exists among painters, most notable are Pablita Velarde (1918-2006) of Santa Clara, her daughter Helen Hardin (1943-1984) and Hardin’s daughter Margarete Bagshaw (1964-2015). Velarde was a trailblazing watercolor painter, painting traditional scenes of Pueblo life while bucking opposition to women being artists. She recalled being the only girl in the painting class at the Santa Fe Indian School, “They poked fun at me. Because I wanted to be an artist. ‘You’d do better washing dishes or washing clothes or scrubbing floors,’ they said.” In 1939 under the WPA, she was commissioned to paint murals at Bandelier National Monument. In 1988 she was designated a Santa Fe Living Treasure. Hardin went beyond her mother’s traditional painting to…

TAOS, NM Corn has been a staple among tribes in the Americas for thousands of years. It provides more than food, however, and is an intimate part of their lives. Dennis Wall and Virgil Masayesva (Hopi), in an article for the journal American Indian Quarterly, wrote, “For traditional Hopis, corn is the central bond. Its essence, physically, spiritually, and symbolically, pervades their existence. For the people of the mesas corn is sustenance, ceremonial object, prayer offering, symbol, and sentient being unto itself. Corn is the Mother in the truest sense that people take in the corn and the corn becomes their flesh, as mother milk becomes the flesh of the child.” Randy Brokeshoulder is of Hopi, Navajo and Shawnee heritage. He learned katsina carving from his father and his brother.…

RENO, NV Edges, the lines where land meets water, where mountain meets plain, are nature’s boundaries; the lines we draw on maps that correspond to lines we draw on Earth are walls we build, hangovers of historical conflicts, frontiers of darkly imagined difference. Of late, perhaps as a poli-sci response to chaos theory in mathematics, perhaps as a natural outgrowth of digital interconnectedness, it has been fruitful to redraw the lines on maps, or to erase them altogether, just to see how the world might look when seen anew. Alongside the concepts of China, India, the Middle East, the Mediterranean, scholars and artists are exploring the Silk Road. Instead of the European nations, their separate colonies in the Americas and the Caribbean, instead of Native American nations and African slave…

SANTA FE, NM From the beginning of the fur trade in the 17th century, beads were a highly sought-after material for Native peoples, but beyond a medium of exchange, they also quickly became a method of artistic and cultural expression, and they remain so to this day. In Beads: A Universe of Meaning the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian traces the history of this tiny commodity. Curator Cheri Falkenstien-Doyle explains the impetus for the exhibition, saying the museum wanted to explore, “the essential idea of something that is really a trade item, imported from Europe, and how it became some an important symbol of Native identity.” The exhibition opens with one of the oldest pieces, a man’s shirt and leggings dating to the early 1800s, which features just a…

DENVER, CO Hopi artist Charles Loloma (1921-1991) is widely recognized for his intricate inlaid jewelry that features colorful stones such as lapis, coral and turquoise. In the November 5 Arts of the American West sale, hosted by Leslie Hindman Auctioneers in Denver, not only will eight lots of his jewelry be offered, but a rare multicolored stained glass window by the artist will cross the block. The piece, with colors including blues, reds, yellows and oranges, was commissioned in 1980 for the office of a Phoenix collector. Loloma designed and executed the work, including hand selecting the glass. When the building sold in 1987, the window was uninstalled and it has not been publically displayed since. Rachel Enright, consignment manager of the Arts of the American West department at Leslie…

JAMES BALESTRIERI James Balestrieri is director of J. N. Bartfield Galleries in New York City. Jim has written plays, verse, prose and screenplays. He has degrees from Columbia and Marquette universities, attended the American Film Institute and has an MFA in playwriting from Carnegie Mellon. He has an excellent wife and three enthusiastic children. IRIS MCLISTER Iris McLister is a freelance writer and art consultant based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is a regular contributor to national and regional publications. She writes exhibition and artist catalog essays and has worked in the commercial art world for almost ten years. JOHN O'HERN John O’Hern retired to Santa Fe after 30 years in the museum business, specifically as the Executive Director and Curator of the Arnot Art Museum, Elmira, New York.…

THE BRINTON MUSEUM New acquisitions of a Blackfeet War Chief’s shirt and leggings and a two-piece Apache woman’s dress with moccasins are now on display at the Brinton Museum in Big Horn, Wyoming. The items were purchased at a Skinner auction last year and introduced to museum’s collector members at a special event in October 2016. “The predominant focus of the Brinton Museum’s American Indian collections lies in collecting and exhibiting the art and artifacts of the Plains Nations,” says museum director and chief curator Ken Schuster. “These rare and important new acquisitions are exemplary additions to the Bradford Brinton Memorial and the Gallatin Collections featured in the exhibition To Honor The Plains Nation as they enhance the museum’s holdings from both the Northern and Southern Plains.” The Apache woman’s…

From the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles, from prehistory to the present day, museums are investigating and celebrating Native American culture in their exhibitions. An exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, honors the 150th anniversary of the Canadian Federation. Follow the North Star: Inuit Art from the Collection of Estrellita and Yousuf Karsh continues through December 31. The collection is primarily hand-printed stonecuts from the collection of the renowned portrait photographer and his wife. The prints are primarily from the drawing, printmaking and carving center of Cape Dorset on Baffin Island. Survey exhibitions include Native North America (working title) at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, October 6, 2018, through January 7, 2019.…

PHOENIX, AZ In his artist statement for the Heard Museum’s Invitational ’74, T.C. Cannon (1946-1978) wrote, “I choose the places where I live in a very scrupulous manner. There must be room for development and germination of the expectant forces that inevitably come to seek me out in my occupied rooms. There must be opportunity for all of the elements to show themselves to me and suitable occasions to view humanity and its reflexes from these powers. I must dwell in places where I am always in awe of God and mortal men. There must always be people present with answers to questions that I am continually baffled by. My abode shall have access to small creatures and many-colored leaves and a better than average view of the ever-changing colors…

HOWES CAVE, NY Hardy Boys 59: Night of the Werewolf. I had to look up the title but I remembered the set up, plain as the day I read it through twice from start to finish, when I was about 10, in 1972. In the mystery, someone is sabotaging buildings and it seems as though a werewolf in northern New York—Mohawk country— has something to do with the crimes. The boys and their father team up with Hank Eagle, “one of those ‘high steel Mohawks’” who can walk the high girders of a skyscraper because of their “superb natural sense of balance.” Looking back at the book, and remembering how that sense of fearlessness had fascinated me and sent me to the library to learn more, I was gratified to…

SANTA FE, NM Stepping Out: 10,000 Years of Walking the West, on view at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe, offers a cohesive, informative look at Native American moccasins and their makers. The show is an academically and visually thoughtful exploration of a range of tribes and time periods, and though it could be sprawling, instead it feels consummately intimate, transforming something as seemingly humble as everyday footwear into artistry of the highest caliber. Comprising artwork from four major Native American tribal regions: Southwest, Southern Plains, North Central Plains and the Great Basin, the show occupies the Blommer Gallery, just off the museum’s main floor: softly lit, with an elegant, dark blue interior, it’s a private feeling space that affords private and prolonged contemplation. Much of…

RICHMOND, VA Museums tend to be quiet, serene places. With outside noise unable to penetrate these massive buildings of stone and steel, visitors often whisper to each other, they silent their cellphones, and they ponder the works in a deep, almost meditative state. As silence permeates through the galleries, the artwork—on the walls, on pedestals, in display cases or sitting out in the open—tends to speak to guests. And it speaks loudly, clearly and with great force. The idea that artwork has a voice, equal to or greater than the artist who created it, is the theme of Hear My Voice: Native American Art of the Past and Present now open at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, Virginia. The exhibition will bring together historic Native American artifacts,…

In his book of essays The Autocrat of the Breakfast- Table, 1858, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., wrote “[The] Boston State-House is the hub of the solar system.” The phrase transmogrified into “Boston is the hub of the universe,” which was shortened eventually to “The Hub.” Most of us who grew up the Boston area believed that. Some even believed, “There’s no culture west of the Berkshires”—the rolling hills that run along the border with New York state. Joel Hurwitz, who lives on the North Shore of Boston, admits, “I grew up in the east and until my early- to mid-30s I had never been west of the Mississippi.” Then he visited the state called the Land of Enchantment and its capital, The City Different, Santa Fe, New Mexico. “It was…

CARTERSVILLE, GA Photography is a unique artistic medium in the sense that time is measured not in days and weeks, but milliseconds. When photographer Zoë Marieh Urness found herself in a sub-zero blizzard in North Dakota and standing in front of a long line of angry and passionate people, she instinctively raised her camera and clicked off a shot. As her finger depressed the shutter release, a wave of small events took place within the camera: an aperture in the lens flicked closed slightly, a small rectangular mirror pivoted flat from a 45-degree angle, unobstructed light flooded into a chamber deep within the camera housing and exposed a light-sensitive sensor. And then everything snapped back into place. The whole process—as best Urness can remember from the settings on her camera—…

SANTA FE, NM The rich tradition of fiber art is on display in Connective Tissue: New Approaches to Fiber in Contemporary Native Art at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts. In the past year, many museum exhibitions have paid notice to Native fashion, but the museum’s chief curator Manuela Well-Off-Man notes, “Many of these artists have history working on fiber related materials, and I thought, ‘It’s time to do a show like that, not just focusing on fashion, but fiber material.’ Because we have all these of really talented artists who have innovative approach to fiber art.” The exhibition includes work from artists such as Melissa Cody, Wally Dion, Brian Jungen, Nicholas Galanin, Sonya Kelliher-Combs and more, and broaches topics from resource exploitation to cultural appropriation. But the common…

NEW YORK, NY You will feel a tectonic shift in the way that museums view Native American art when the Charles and Valerie Diker Collection is placed on view in 2018, not in a separate ethnographic cabinet of curiosities, but into the recently expanded and re-conceived American Art Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. This summer, in anticipation of that event, 38 superb artworks created by Native Americans, from the Thaw Collection at the Fenimore Art Museum, will be exhibited at the Met. The Thaw Collection not only challenges but destroys the old notions that Native American basketry, beadwork, carving and painting fell into the realm of the primitive, of the somehow less-civilized. Here, the gorgets and masks, the works in clay, the textiles, works spanning…

OKLAHOMA CITY, OK Painter Jerome Tiger spent much of his life in Oklahoma. He was born in Tahlequah, lived in Eufaula and Muskogee, and exhibited his work in Tulsa. And now, 50 years after his passing, Tiger’s work will be featured in a major exhibition celebrating his life and career in Oklahoma City. He’s returning home, but he also never left: the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, which is exhibiting Life and Legacy: the Art of Jerome Tiger, has in its collection 148 major works from the Muscogee (Creek) artist. The exhibition, which is now open and runs through May 13, 2018, will feature 54 works, including two of only three known oil paintings and some rare sculptural work. For Eric Singleton, curator of ethnology at the museum, the…

SCOTTSDALE, AZ Hopi pottery continues to fascinate collectors, art lovers and aficionados of Southwestern Native cultures. Humble clay is kneaded, pounded and shaped into ollas, vases, bowls and even picture frames, creating canvases upon which artists painstakingly paint portraits reflecting the ancient Hopi and Tewa cultures. Lovers of the millennia-spanning art form can now experience the history of Hopi pottery in a whole new way at Western Spirit: Scottsdale’s Museum of the West’s new exhibit Canvas of Clay: Hopi Pottery Masterworks from the Allan and Judith Cooke Collection. The exhibit spans more than six centuries of pottery styles and history, from pre-contact Sityatki and Polacca pieces to contemporary works by 23 master artists, including the legendary Nampeyo and many of her descendants. The more than 65 pieces in the exhibit,…

TUCSON, AZ by Mark Sublette To fully perceive the nuances of Navajo weavings has required thousands of antique Navajo textiles to pass through my hands over the last 25 years. Understanding the uniqueness of certain pieces came after careful examination and reflection allowed a perception of artistic individuality to solidify in my mind. I have heard it takes years to understand modern art; the same adage applies to Navajo weavings. I recognized a small subsection of textiles existed alongside the usual traditional patterns. The Navajo weavings I’m referring to each have a simple but sophisticated set of parameters, bold design sensibilities and unusual color combinations which give them the ability to stand apart in a sea of Navajo wool. This set, unique in its artistic voice, could not be pigeonholed…

LOS ANGELES, CA From the producers of Objects of Art Santa Fe and the American Indian Art Show comes a new event, the Objects of Art Los Angeles. Like other iterations of Objects of Art, the Los Angeles version aims to bring together historic and contemporary works and present them along a continuum. With American Indian art, works on paper and canvas, sculpture, jewelry, furniture and books available at a range of price points, the show has a little bit of something to offer for everyone. “In the past, there was a grand canyon between contemporary material and historic material,” says co-producer Kim Martindale of the event. “Now there’s a valley with a bridge between it connecting them together. Rather than being a strictly antique show, or a strictly contemporary…