Indigenous Art and Artists

A fresh exploration of Native American art that positions the work within the broader context of North American art history. This landmark publication presents Native American art within the broader context of American art history, through an examination of notable works from a major private collection. The insightful texts provide a new evaluation of the art, culture, and daily life of numerous North American tribes, including Acoma, Apache, Cheyenne, Creek, Crow, Hopi-Twea, Kiowa, Lakota, Pomo, Seneca, Seminole, Tlingit, and Zuni, among others.

Originally published in 2006, Art of the Northwest Coast offers an expansive history of this great tradition, from the earliest known works to those made at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Although non-Natives often claimed that First Nations cultures were disappearing, Northwest Coast Native people continued to make art during the painful era of colonization, often subtly expressing resistance to their oppressors and demonstrating the resilience of their heritage. Integrating the art's development with historical events following contact with Euro-Americans sheds light on the creativity of artists as they appropriated and transformed foreign elements into uniquely Indigenous statements.

By examining the stunning stone buildings and dynamic spaces of the royal estate of Chinchero, Nair brings to light the rich complexity of Inca architecture. This investigation ranges from the paradigms of Inca scholarship and a summary of Inca cultural practices to the key events of Topa Inca's reign and the many individual elements of Chinchero's extraordinary built environment.

Becoming Our Future: Global Indigenous Curatorial Practice explores how Indigenous visual art and culture operate within and from a structural framework that is unique within the cultural milieu. Through a selection of contributions by Indigenous curators, artists, and scholars brings together perspectives that define curatorial practices, and at the same time postulates Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination within the three countries.

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.

Indigenous and settler scholars and media artists discuss and analyze crucial questions of narrative sovereignty, cultural identity, cultural resistance, and decolonizing creative practices. This collection explores those issues with a focus on settler-Indigenous cultural politics in the country known as Canada, looking in particular at Indigenous representation in media arts.

Revision & Resistance reveals the story of Kent Monkman's monumental 2019 diptych commission mistikôsiwak (Wooden Boat People) for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. This book celebrates Monkman's historic achievement with essays and contributions by today's most prominent voices on Indigenous art and Canadian painting.

In this volume, 16 Indigenous voices convene to consider some of the most burning questions surrounding this field. A first-of-its-kind reader appearing at a critical moment, Sovereign Words includes perspectives across art, film, ethics, history, theory and museology.

Delegation is the first comprehensive monograph by Apsáalooke/Crow artist Wendy Red Star, whose photography recasts historical narratives with wit, candor, and a feminist, Indigenous perspective. Red Star centers Native American life and material culture through imaginative self-portraiture, vivid collages, archival interventions, and site-specific installations.

Artisans of the Pacific Islands and Australia have produced objects ranging from stained and beaten fabric, rock engravings, and woven containers to tattooed and painted bodies, drawings on sand and paper, and contemporary installation art. This survey looks at the full range of objects created over several millennia, spanning the settlement of Oceania in the prehistoric period to the present day.

Art from Oceania, the region encompassing the islands of the central and south Pacific, spans hundreds of distinct artistic processes, formats and mediums. This book analyzes the most illustrative Oceanic pieces from the Metropolitan Museum's collection - including lively painted masks, powerful figurines, and intricately carved wooden poles.

Offering a fresh look at Oceania that incorporates new scholarship and perspectives from Indigenous voices, this book uses art to explore histories of expression and aesthetic innovation that epitomize this vast and expansive region. The visual arts of Oceania tell a wealth of dynamic stories about origins, ancestral power, performance, and initiation. This publication explores the deeply rooted connections between Austronesian-speaking peoples, whose ancestral homelands span Island Southeast Asia, Australia, Papua New Guinea, and the island archipelagoes of the northern and eastern Pacific.

The dazzling colours and patterns of the art of the Pacific Islands have long entranced Western audiences, not least artists such as Gauguin and Picasso. The tendency has been to regard Oceanic art as 'primitive', mysterious and shrouded in taboo, but Nicholas Thomas, in looking at and beyond the familiar, stunning surfaces of masks and shields, carved canoe prows and feathered gods, discovers the significance of such objects, past and present, for the peoples of the Pacific.

Including both traditional and contemporary arts, this book introduces the rich artistic traditions of these two regions, traditions that have had a considerable impact on western art in the twentieth century through the influence of artists such as Gauguin. Instead of looking at Polynesia and Micronesia separately, the book focuses on the artistic types, styles, and concepts that they share, placing each in its wider cultural context.

The collection of Mark and Carolyn Blackburn features both ceremonial and functional traditional forms in diverse media, from delicate ivory ornaments and decorated barkcloth to formidable weaponry and imposing sculpture in coral, wood, and stone. The geographic spread of the collection is vast, covering the Pacific Ocean from Hawai'i to Rapa Nui (Easter Island) to 'Aotearoa (New Zealand), and the many islands in between.

The book discusses the representation of Amazonian indigenous cultures in temporary exhibitions taking place between the 1980s and 2010 through the analysis of selected case studies of these exhibitions held in major institutions in Europe, South America and the United States.

Identities of power and place, as expressed in paintings from the periods before and after the Spanish conquest of Mesoamerica, are the subject of this book of case studies from Central Mexico, Oaxaca, and the Maya area. These sophisticated, skillfully rendered images occur with architecture, in manuscripts, on large pieces of cloth, and on ceramics.

Explores the scope that there is for Indigenous curatorial agency in the relationship of Indigenous contemporary art with the 'art world.' This monograph focuses on the current boom in Indigenous contemporary art in Brazil, exploring in particular the way that this work interfaces with the art world through exhibitions, and the scope that there is for Indigenous curatorial agency in this relationship. After a brief introduction to Indigenous art, it gives an overview of the evolving relationship between Indigenous art and the art world, exploring in particular the nature of decolonial and/or Indigenous curatorial practice both in Brazil and elsewhere in the world.

In this edited volume, experts from multiple disciplines analyze the manuscript's bilingual texts and more than 2,000 painted images and offer fascinating, new insights on its twelve books. The contributors examine the "three texts" of the codex--the original Nahuatl, its translation into Spanish, and its painted images. Together, these constitute complementary, as well as conflicting, voices of an extended dialogue that occurred in and around Mexico City. The volume chapters address a range of subjects, from Nahua sacred beliefs, moral discourse, and natural history to the Florentine artists' models and the manuscript's reception in Europe. The Florentine Codex ultimately yields new perspectives on the Nahua world several decades after the fall of the Aztec empire.

This engaging exploration of the Maya pantheon introduces readers to the complex stories of Mesoamerican divinity through the stunning carvings, ceramics, and metalwork of the Classic period Lives of the Gods explores how ancient Maya peoples gave bodily form to the divine and explains the cosmological underpinnings of some of the greatest creative achievements of Maya civilization. Focusing on the Classic period (250-900 CE), the publication reveals how artists and scribes used diverse media--from the monumental to the miniature--to construct an aesthetic and a rhetoric of a powerful universe, as rich and complex as the more familiar Greco-Roman, Hindu-Buddhist, and Egyptian pantheons.

The first study devoted to a single sculptor in ancient America, as understood through four unprovenanced masterworks traced to a small sector of Guatemala.

A landmark book reframing ancient Colombian art--including goldwork, ceramics, textiles and more--as vehicles of cultural knowledge across space and time Spanning all major pre-Columbian cultures of Colombia, and featuring some of the most remarkable artworks ever made in this region--from intricately cast gold pendants and ceramic effigies to modern Indigenous stools, barkcloths and featherworks--The Portable Universe/El Universo en tus Manos: Thought and Splendor of Indigenous Colombia radically recasts how we approach ancient Colombian art.

The final installment in the definitive series of catalogues of the Robert Woods Bliss Collection, Pre-Columbian Art from Central America and Colombia at Dumbarton Oaks examines a comprehensive and expertly curated collection of jade and gold objects from Costa Rica, Panama, and Colombia. This lavish catalogue provides over two hundred detailed and illustrated descriptions of objects that span approximately two millennia.

Published in conjunction with the major exhibition, 'The Road to Aztlan: Art from a Mythic Homeland' explores the art derived from and created about the legendary area that encompasses the American Southwest and portions of Mexico long before they were separated by an international border. The book and accompanying exhibition view Aztlan as a metaphoric centre and allegorical place of origin for the various peoples of the Southwest and Mexico.

Aztec painted manuscripts and sculptural works, as well as indigenous and Spanish sixteenth-century texts, were filled with images of foodstuffs and food processing and consumption. Both gods and humans were depicted feasting, and food and eating clearly played a pervasive, integral role in Aztec rituals. Basic foods were transformed into sacred elements within particular rituals, while food in turn gave meaning to the ritual performance. This pioneering book offers the first integrated study of food and ritual in Aztec art. Elizabeth Morán asserts that while feasting and consumption are often seen as a secondary aspect of ritual performance, a close examination of images of food rites in Aztec ceremonies demonstrates that the presence--or, in some cases, the absence--of food in the rituals gave them significance.

Teotihuacan: City of Water, City of Fire examines new discoveries from the three main pyramids at the site--the Sun Pyramid, the Moon Pyramid, and, at the center of the Ciudadela complex, the Feathered Serpent Pyramid--which have fundamentally changed our understanding of the city's history. With illustrations of the major objects from Mexico City's Museo Nacional de Antropología and from the museums and storage facilities of the Zona de Monumentos Arqueológicos de Teotihuacan, along with selected works from US and European collections, the catalogue examines these cultural artifacts to understand the roles that offerings of objects and programs of monumental sculpture and murals throughout the city played in the lives of Teotihuacan's citizens.

In Unseen Art, Claudia Brittenham unravels one of the most puzzling phenomena in Mesoamerican art history: why many of the objects that we view in museums today were once so difficult to see. She examines the importance that ancient Mesoamerican people assigned to the process of making and enlivening the things we now call art, as well as Mesoamerican understandings of sight as an especially godlike and elite power, in order to trace a gradual evolution in the uses of secrecy and concealment, from a communal practice that fostered social memory to a tool of imperial power.

This volume explores how visual arts functioned in the indigenous pre- and post-conquest New World as vehicles of social, religious, and political identity. Twelve scholars in the field of visual arts examine indigenous artistic expressions in the American continent from the pre-Hispanic age to the present.