NATIVE AMERICAN ART

Native American arts and crafts are enjoying renewed appreciation and increasing recognition as a vital part of America's cultural heritage. This volume, a magnificent collection of full-color photographs and incisive commentary, presents the richness and celebrates the diversity of this centuries-old tradition and places it within a larger historical and social context. The artistic tradition explored in this book emerged as the snows of the last Ice Age melted, nearly 20,000 years ago. Native American Art displays the astonishing array of both utilitarian and ceremonial objects produced by America's earliest peoples. Native American Art features works from every part of the United States, executed in many different media. Lively descriptions identify elements that characterize the works of each historic period, geographic region, and culture, as well as reveal ideas about art, imagery, and spiritualism embodied in these works.

Organized by region, this handsomely illustrated celebration of Native American arts and crafts splices an absorbing text, 290 color plates, numerous photographs and extended captions. The study demonstrates how clothes, baskets, Navajo weavings, Hopi kachina dolls, jewelry, quillwork, pottery, carvings and ceremonial objects fit into the very fabric of Native American societies. At the same time, the authors provocatively argue that American Indian art, far from being conservative and firmly anchored in the past, has been on the cutting edge of the historical present, continually reinventing its means of expression to absorb and accommodate cultural change. The album concludes with an arresting survey of 20th-century Native painting, sculpture, photography, prints and performance art, in all of which ancient images, symbols and visual metaphors take on new meanings. Penney is a curator at the Detroit Institute of Arts; Longfish, a Seneca/Tuscarora, is an artist and professor at UC-Davis.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.