Kategoria BISAC: Art >> Indigenous Art of the Americas

The Northwest Coast totem pole captivates the imagination. From the first descriptions of these tall carved monuments, totem poles have become central icons of the Northwest Coast region and symbols of its Native inhabitants. Although many of those who gaze at these carvings assume that they are ancient artifacts, the so-called totem pole is a relatively recent artistic development, one that has become immensely important to Northwest Coast people and has simultaneously gained a common place in popular culture from fashion to the funny pages.

The Totem Pole reconstructs the...

Museums--along with books, newspapers, and Wild West shows in the 19th century, movies and television in the 20th--have shaped our perceptions of American Indians. This book brings together six prominent museum professionals--Native and non-Native--to examine the ways in which Indians and their cultures have been represented by museums in North America and to present new directions museums are already taking.

Traditional museum exhibitions of Native American art and culture often represented only the past, ignoring the living Native voice. Today, museums have begun to incorporate...

In the late 1950s, Chauncey C. Nash started collecting Inuit carvings just as the art of printmaking was being introduced in Kinngait (Cape Dorset), an Inuit community on Baffin Island in the Canadian territory of Nunavut. Nash donated some 300 prints and sculptures to Harvard s Peabody Museum one of the oldest collections of early modern Inuit art. The Peabody collection includes not only early Inuit sculpture but also many of the earliest prints on paper made by the women and men who helped propel Inuit art onto the world stage.

Author Maija M. Lutz draws from ethnology, archaeology,...

We Are Here boldly exemplifies Native American contemporary art as important, relevant, and deserving of a place in the contemporary art cannon. The five Eiteljorg Fellowship artists honored in this volume are among the Native artists creating some of the richest and most alarming art in the world. Powerful stories infused with Native history and experiences are expressed in glass, photography, performance art, and other media.

Alan Michelson's (Mohawk) glass depictions of buried history are elegant and haunting. Bonnie Devine's (Ojibwa) intricate and powerful works unfold...

Rising from a forest mist or soaring overhead in parks and museums, magnificent cedar totem poles have captured the attention and imagination of visitors to Washington State, British Columbia, and Alaska.

Discovering Totem Poles is the first guidebook to focus on the complex and fascinating histories of the specific poles visitors encounter in Seattle, Victoria, Vancouver, Alert Bay, Prince Rupert, Haida Gwaii (Queen Charlotte Islands), Ketchikan, Sitka, and Juneau. It debunks common misconceptions about totem poles and explores the stories behind the making and displaying of...

Visual artist Joan Henrik has been profoundly inspired by the legends and stories that had their origins in native folklore. Native people come from an oral narrative tradition which has always been a sacred process, because it provided the people with social, cultural, and historical contexts. The oral narrative has acted as a social cohesive for the entire tribe and constitutes the cultural grounding of indigenous people for thousands of years.

Motivated by these stories, Henrik created fourteen animal icons for a terrazzo floor design now inlaid in the new Amsoil sports arena in...

"How have we come to this place, this cold, hard, killing ground? How have we come to this fourth world, a world of violence, darkness, greed, lack of compassion for human life, punctuated with brief flashes of light and hope?" Painter Mateo Romero uses a bold, muscular style and thick, expressive paint to expose the fault lines and tragedies afflicting Native people today. At the same time, he offers a meditation on the difficult yet artistically stimulating process of cultural diaspora and return in which he and many other Native artists are engaged. The fifty paintings reproduced here...

Joseph Hillaire (Lummi, 1894 1967) is recognized as one of the great Coast Salish artists, carvers, and tradition-bearers of the twentieth century. In A Totem Pole History, his daughter Pauline Hillaire, Scalla Of the Killer Whale, who is herself a well-known cultural historian and conservator, tells the story of her father s life and the traditional and contemporary Lummi narratives that influenced his work.

A Totem Pole History contains seventy-six photographs, including Joe s most significant totem poles, many of which Pauline watched him carve. She conveys with...