Innholdsfortegnelse for June - July 2018 / No.15 i Native American Art Magazine

DANICA FARNAND Director of American Indian Art, Cowan’s Auctions FOR WELL OVER A YEAR, we’ve seen a steady increase in first-time bidders with Cowan’s, culminating in a record number of first-time buyers in this most recent auction. I am continuously astonished at the number of bidders who register for our auctions. As a result our sales, for both high-end and middle-market art, has grown pretty significantly. The active bidding and resulting prices are proof that the market is alive and well. “I am continuously astonished at the number of bidders who register for our auctions.” Our April 6 auction had a heavy focus of material from the Great Lakes and Great Plains. In our last three major auctions, we have also integrated a collection of Ancient Art of the Midwest,…

Dallas Museum of Art features Hopi mural DALLAS, TX At Dallas Museum of Art, the exhibition Hopi Visions showcases a mural painting by Hopi artists Michael Kabotie and Delbridge Honanie. Displayed outside of Arizona for the first time, Journey of the Human Spirit spans 48 feet with six panels, narrating the history of the Hopi people. It covers subject matter from the people’s mythic emergence, the arrival of Europeans and the rebirth of Hopi traditions in the information age. The mural will be complemented by other Hopi works in the museum’s collection and will be on view through December 2. Southwestern weavings on view at Colonial Williamsburg WILLIAMSBURG, VA Open July 14 at the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum, one of the Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg, Tradition and…

FORT SUMNER, NM In the summer of 1868 in a field east of Fort Sumner, New Mexico, near what was known as the Indian Issue House, representatives of the Navajo and United States governments signed the Treaty of Bosque Redondo which acknowledged the sovereignty of the Navajo Nation. Thus, after four years imprisonment at the fort, more than 3,000 deaths and nearly 53 individual long walks, approximately 7,300 Navajos mounted horse and wagons at dawn to return to their original homelands in the Four Corners region. The column of people was said to stretch over 10 miles. Navajo leader Barboncito at the time told his people that “After we get back to our country it will brighten up again and the Navajo will be as happy as the land. Black…

PHOENIX, AZ Arizona weather can be finicky: it’s either entirely too hot or just perfect, with little leeway in between. So when cool breezes and clear skies settled upon the 60th Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair & Market on March 3 and 4, collectors and artists knew the weekend would be a memorable one for the long-running Phoenix market. Hundreds of artists and thousands of guests were on hand to browse and buy artwork of all kinds, enjoy live music and dancing performances, and to enjoy the tremendous collection inside the Heard Museum. The wildly popular event, second to only the Santa Fe Indian Market, routinely draws the best jewelers, basketmakers, bead and quill artists, potters, painters and sculptors, glass artists, carvers, jewelers and weavers to the Heard’s sprawling downtown campus.…

BRUNSWICK, ME In 2017, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art acquired a major late-19th century Lakota painting depicting a Sun Dance ceremony. “It’s the first of its kind to enter the museum’s collection, and to celebrate it, we decided to put on an exhibition to highlight and contextualize the painting, both with historic and contemporary work,” explains Frank Goodyear, co-director of the museum and curator of Art from the Northern Plains. The muslin painting at the center of the exhibition is an elaborate representation of the Sun Dance ceremony, which was outlawed by the United States in 1883. Dancers painted in blue and yellow and decked out in ceremonial regalia encircle a cottonwood pole. On the left, a drum circle performs, and on the right, a prayer circle is taking place.…

CRYSTAL BRIDGES MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, recently purchased two pieces of artwork by Shan Goshorn. The works, titled Venomous and From Where We Spring will be included in the upcoming exhibition Native North America, which charts the developments of contemporary Indigenous art from the United States and Canada from the mid-20th century to the present. “This new acquisition aligns with recent efforts of Crystal Bridges to be more inclusive broadly—in what we collect as well as in exhibitions and programs,” says curator Mindy N. Besaw. From Where We Spring, a single-weave Cherokee-style basket, was inspired by the quote, “It is the mothers, not the warriors, who create a people and guide their destiny,” from Oglala Lakota chief Luther Standing Bear.…

Fringed leather gauntlets with beaded cuffs are fashion accessories with romantic and nostalgic links to the American West. Made for use within Indian communities and for sale to outsiders, they served a practical purpose and a decorative function. Their bright designs alluded to sundry thoughts made visible by their creators and engaged viewers in conversations that were variously passive, cryptic, whimsical and provocative. The visual value of these narratives has allowed gauntlets to become intrinsically linked with Western people, their changing histories and varied landscapes. Although they have deep roots in European and Asian history, leather gauntlets did not arrive in the American West until after the Civil War. The gaze of martial decision-makers had then focused on the interior of the republic and its Native American population. An 1872…

SANTA FE, NM From ancient times, Pueblo potters have fashioned figures in clay. In her book, The Pueblo Storyteller: Development of a Figurative Ceramic Tradition, Barbara Babcock wrote, “Figurative designs may be described as embodiments of and prayers to ancestors, gods, or spirits for rain, for crops, for success in hunting, and for human and animal procreation…” There are clay female figures from the Ancestral Puebloans of the 400s CE and, in 1964, Helen Cordero of Cochiti Pueblo began making storyteller figures based on her grandfather, a Cochiti storyteller, surrounded by children. Cochiti artists made satirical figures in the 1880s, poking fun at the visitors who began to invade the Pueblos with the coming of the railroad, from circus performers to the clergy. Lyn Fox has assembled a group of…

INDIANAPOLIS, IN Returning to the Eiteljorg Museum campus for its third year and to the city of Indianapolis for its 26th year, the 2018 Eiteljorg Indian Market and Festival takes place June 23 and 24. The festival will welcome around 120 artists from more than 50 Native cultures across the United States and Canada to show their jewelry, pottery, paintings, sculpture, basketry and other fine artworks. Participating artists this year include Mark Taho, Adrian Wall, Tyra Shackleford, Fortune Huntinghorse, Monty Little, Matagi Sorensen, Mavasta Honyouti, Samuel LaFountain, Nanibaa Beck, Penny Little, Glenda McKay and Jody Naranjo. McKay will bring a neck sheath knife titled Ancestors, with hand-carved ivory charms decorating the fringe and strap. Shackleford’s textile titled Chaloklowa’ Toklo (Twin Turkeys) is created with soy silk, and was inspired by…

BOSTON, MA Denman Waldo Ross (1853-1935) was a professor at Harvard, an artist and a consummate collector who was a trustee of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, from 1895 until his death. Speaking at a trustee’s meeting shortly after Ross’s death, John Templeman Coolidge said, “Adequately to describe the vast number of gifts would call for a special publication in many volumes and can only be lightly touched upon here, for they counted up to eleven thousand….” In a 1913 issue of the MFA Bulletin Ross wrote, “It has not been intended in gathering this collection to illustrate the history of art or the ways of craftsmanship, though that is done incidentally. The history of art is indiscriminate. It chronicles both decadence and development. Our real interest lies in…

SANTA FE, NM To aficionados of Southwestern jewelry, the name Norbert Peshlakai (Navajo) is synonymous with silver, which is pretty fitting, since the name “Peshlakai” or more accurately “Beeshligaii” translates to “white metal” or “silver.” The surname is peculiarly fitting for this artist, who comes from a long line of silversmiths; moreover, his mother, Lydia, is renowned in the art of Crystal rug weaving, an art form with roots in Crystal, New Mexico. Six of Peshlakai’s eight siblings, in fact, continue textile traditions today. Despite his family’s enviable artistic pedigree, Peshlakai, intriguingly enough, didn’t originally set out to work with silver. In college, he studied painting before an administrative mix-up led him to a jewelry-making class. Today, his stunningly detailed work, from meticulously stamped and inlaid bangles to tiny, gleaming…

DALLAS, TX Pottery, beadwork, jewelry, baskets and more will be among the Native American artwork available during Heritage Auctions’ June 26 Ethnographic Art sale in Dallas. One of the top lots of the auction is a book of Kiowa ledger drawings by Etahdleuh Doanmoe (Hunting Boy) that features 33 drawings with some running across two pages, which span 22 inches across. The imagery recalls the artist’s life as a free man as well as his life incarcerated for three years at Fort Marion. Having been held privately for the past 142 years, the book is fresh to the market and expected to fetch between $60,000 and $80,000. According to Heritage Auctions’ ethnographic art department head Delia Sullivan, “It’s the most exciting lot in the sale. It’s a wonderful book.” Another…

JUNE 2-4 MORRISON, CO Tesoro Indian Market and Powwow The Fort Restaurant (303) 839-1671 www.tesoroculturalcenter.org JUNE 9 FLAGSTAFF, AZ Navajo Rug Auction Museum of Northern Arizona (928) 774-5211 www.musnaz.org THROUGH JUNE 30 TUCSON, AZ Navajo Transitional Blankets Mark Sublette Medicine Man Gallery (520) 722-7798 www.medicinemangallery.com THROUGH JULY 8 ORLANDO, FL Enduring Beauty: Seminole Art and Culture Orlando Museum of Art (407) 896-4231 www.omart.org OPENING AUGUST 1 SANTA FE, NM Pueblo Pottery Eccentrics & Curios Lyn A. Fox Fine Pueblo Pottery (505) 577-0835 www.foxpueblopottery.com JUNE 2-SEPT. 15 SANTA FE, NM Les Namingha King Galleries (480) 440-3912 www.kinggalleries.com THROUGH JUNE 16 KALISPELL, MT The Surging, Thundering Herd: Vintage Bison Engravings Hockaday Museum of Art (406) 755-5268 www.hockadaymuseum.org THROUGH JULY 1 PHOENIX, AZ Awa Tsireh: Pueblo Painter and Metalsmith Heard Museum (602) 252-8840…

Layla Bermeo Kristin and Roger Servison Assistant Curator of Paintings, Art of the Americas Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Boston, MA (617) 267-9300 www.mfa.org What are you currently working on? I’m pleased to have co-curated the exhibition Collecting Stories: Native American Art, which is on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), through March 10, 2019. Right now I’m continuing to create programming related to the exhibition with my colleague (and co-curator) Dennis Carr, the MFA’s Carolyn and Peter Lynch Curator of American Decorative Arts and Sculpture. This exhibition examines the many perspectives, voices and motivations involved in building the MFA’s early holdings of Native American art. Summer and fall programs may include artist demonstrations, public forums on representations of Native Americans at the museum and collaborations with…

The Museum of Indian Arts and Culture is showing Stepping Out: 10,000 Years of Walking the West through the end of 2018. It was my great pleasure to curate this exhibition of sandals and moccasins from across the western United States. In the process, I spent a lot of time looking at and learning about beaded moccasins. These shoes are easy to love. They are made to be both comfortable and beautiful, and they speak eloquently of the maker’s skill. Often they also include messages for the wearer. These messages can be as simple as “I love you,” and as complex as reminding the wearer who they are and how they are expected to behave. Take a look down at your feet. What do you see? You’re probably wearing shoes…

In 1917 a dapper young businessman by the name of William Wildschut relocated with his wife of eight years to the burgeoning railroad town of Billings, Montana. Wildschut worked for a small company that specialized in managing farm mortgages in many of the agricultural communities near Billings. On one particular trip to Hardin, a small town about 40 miles east of Billings, he ran into to several Crow men who were friendly and interested in doing business with him. Mr. Wildschut purchased a war shield from one of his new Crow friends and with this he began his personal adventure in collecting Crow material. In the beginning Wildschut used a great deal of his own money to collect Crow material hoping to preserve part of an endangered culture. Another German…

SANTA FE, NM Brian Lebel’s Old West Events, which has hosted a number of shows in Texas in recent years, is making a big move to Santa Fe, New Mexico, for its annual summer show. Lebel says Texas was a success, but big cities tend to abide by the law of diminishing returns—a larger foundation of people and resources does not always equal larger audiences or sales. What he set his sights on was a smaller city, a city with a culture and community of art, a city that was walkable and easily accessible. The city he was looking for was Santa Fe, New Mexico, and on June 23 and 24 Lebel will bring his annual summer show, the Cody Old West Show & Sale, to the Santa Fe Community…

RAPID CITY, SD A celebration of Great Plains Native art and culture, Native POP showcases original artwork from established and upcoming Native visual artists, including Marlena Myles, Keith BraveHeart, Terran Last Gun, Angela Babby, Wade Patton and others. A one-day, juried fine art show, this year’s event will be held on Saturday, July 21, from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. at Main Street Square, where visitors can purchase works of art directly from the artists themselves. It’s not just an art market, however—Native POP is a full-blown cultural event in its sixth year running, with Native performing artists and culture bearers, who, in recent years, have included such traditions as regalia making, quillwork, beadwork and bow and arrow making. “It’s a celebration of the arts and culture, which go hand…

ORLANDO, FL Forty years ago, I.S.K. “Keith” Reeves and Sara W. Reeves, who reside in Winter Park, Florida, began on a collecting journey of Native American art across the cultural areas of the United States. They gathered pieces of Inuit art, Plains, Northwest Coast and more, but their collection of Seminole items is perhaps the most distinguished. With works spanning from the 1820s to today, including a grouping of historic photography, the collection is considered the world’s largest of Florida Seminole material in private hands. Through July 8, Orlando Museum of Art in Florida will present Enduring Beauty: Seminole Art & Culture, which celebrates the life, history and art of the Seminoles solely through the context of the Reeves collection. On view will be regalia, baskets, carvings, dolls, paintings and…

CHAMBERLAIN, SD On December 29, 1890, a detachment of cavalry soldiers surrounded a large group of Lakota people near Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota. The soldiers, who were tasked with escorting the group, began to disarm the men and a melee broke out. A shot was fired, sparking one of the deadliest massacres in American history that would leave nearly 300 Lakota, including women and children, dead in the snow. The violence was so intense and merciless that it was reported infants were found nursing from dead mothers. More than a century later, the Lakota people still ask one question: Why? That one-word question—Takuwe in Lakota—is the title of an exhibition opening in June at the Akta Lakota Museum & Cultural Center in Chamberlain, South Dakota. The exhibition, which…