This classic volume on the evocative and enigmatic pottery of the Mimbres people has become an irreplaceable design catalogue for contemporary Native American artists. Burt and Harriet (Hattie) Cosgrove were self-trained archaeologists who began excavating Mimbres materials in 1919. When their meticulous research came to the attention of Alfred V. Kidder of the Peabody Museum, he invited them to direct the Mimbres Valley Expedition at the Swarts Ranch in southern New Mexico on behalf of the Peabody.

Working in the summers of 1924 to 1927, the Cosgroves recovered nearly 10,000 artifacts at the Swarts site, including an extraordinary assemblage of Mimbres ceramics. Like their original 1932 report, this paperbound facsimile edition includes over 700 of Hattie Cosgrove's beautiful line drawings of individual Mimbres pots. It also presents a new introduction by archaeologist Steven A. LeBlanc, who reviews the eighty years of research on the Mimbres that have followed the Cosgroves' groundbreaking study. The Peabody's reissue of "The Swarts Ruin" once again makes available a rich resource for scholars, artists, and admirers of Native American art, and it places in historical context the Cosgroves' many contributions to North American archaeology.

Diversity and Dialogue honors distinguished artist James Luna (Luiseo) and five fellows: installation artist and sculptor Gerald Clarke (Cahuilla), photographer and videographer Dana Claxton (Lakota), painter and installation artist Sonya Kelliher-Combs (Inupiaq/Athabascan), artist Larry Tee Harbor Jackson McNeil (Tlingit/Nisga), and photographer and installation artist Will Wilson (Din). James H. Nottage is vice president and chief curatorial officer of the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art in Indianapolis. Other contributors include Margaret Archuleta (Tewa/Hispanic), Mique'l Icesis Askren (Tsimshian Nation Metlakatla, Alaska), Joanna Bigfeather (Western Cherokee/Mescalero Apache), Sandy Gillespie, Michelle La Flamme (African Canadian/Metis/Creek), Lee-Ann Martin (Mohawk), Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie (Seminole/Muscogee/Din), and Jennifer Vigil (Din/Latina).

A major new history of craft that spans three centuries of making and thinking in Aotearoa New Zealand and the wider Moana (Pacific). Paying attention to Pakeha (European New Zealanders), Maori, and island nations of the wider Moana, and old and new migrant makers and their works, this book is a history of craft understood as an idea that shifts and changes over time. At the heart of this book lie the relationships between Pakeha, Maori and wider Moana artistic practices that, at different times and for different reasons, have been described by the term craft. It tells the previously untold story of craft in Aotearoa New Zealand, so that the connections, as well as the differences and tensions, can be identified and explored. This book proposes a new idea of craft--one that acknowledges Pakeha, Maori and wider Moana histories of making, as well as diverse community perspectives towards objects and their uses and meanings.

In Art for an Undivided Earth Jessica L. Horton reveals how the spatial philosophies underlying the American Indian Movement (AIM) were refigured by a generation of artists searching for new places to stand. Upending the assumption that Jimmie Durham, James Luna, Kay WalkingStick, Robert Houle, and others were primarily concerned with identity politics, she joins them in remapping the coordinates of a widely shared yet deeply contested modernity that is defined in great part by the colonization of the Americas. She follows their installations, performances, and paintings across the ocean and back in time, as they retrace the paths of Native diplomats, scholars, performers, and objects in Europe after 1492. Along the way, Horton intervenes in a range of theories about global modernisms, Native American sovereignty, racial difference, archival logic, artistic itinerancy, and new materialisms. Writing in creative dialogue with contemporary artists, she builds a picture of a spatially, temporally, and materially interconnected world-an undivided earth.

This is the companion volume to the authors' groundbreaking Symmetries of Culture, the classic reference for symmetry analysis of pattern for anthropologists, archaeologists, art historians, mathematicians, and designers. Central to symmetry analysis is the use of symmetry in the more precise sense of its geometrical isometries in contrast to its everyday meaning of balance. For this volume, Donald Crowe and Dorothy Washburn invited colleagues from several disciplines to apply the method of symmetry analysis to actual case studies from cultures around the world. The essays compiled here explore how cultural information is embedded in the symmetrical structure of pattern. From descriptions of patterns on objects as diverse as Nasca embroideries, Ica Valley ceramics, Quechua textiles, Yombe mats, and Zulu beadwork, as well as from Amazonian shamanic therapy, ceramic design among the Shipibo, and Turkish Yoeruk weaving, the contributors reveal how the symmetrical structures in the patterns describe aspects of each culture's fundamental principles for living in the world. This approach offers a profoundly fresh way to read the meaning in pattern by arguing that pattern communicates through the structural metaphors embedded in the symmetrical relationship of the pattern parts. The two volumes together offer readers a revolutionary new window into the communicative importance of design.

This remarkable study explores the use of the visual and performing arts to promote nonviolence and social harmony in sub-Saharan Africa. It focuses on Gelede, a popular community festival of masquerade, dance, and song, held several times a year by the Yoruba of Southwestern Nigeria and the Republic of Benin. Babatunde Lawal, an art historian and African scholar who has taught in Nigeria, Brazil, and the United States, is himself a Yoruba and has taken an active part in Gelede. He writes from the perspective of an informed participant/observer of his own culture. Lawal bases his book on extensive field research-observations and interviews-conducted over more than two decades as well as on numerous published and unpublished scholarly sources. He casts significant new light on many previously obscure aspects of Gelede, and he demonstrates a useful methodological approach to the study of non-Western art. The book systematically covers the major aspects of the Gelede spectacle, presenting its cultural background and historical origins as preface to a vivid and detailed description of an actual performance. This is followed by a discussion of the iconography and aesthetics of costume, and an examination of the sculpted images on the masks. The book concludes with a discussion of the moral and aesthetic philosophy of Gelede and its responsiveness to technological and social change. The Gelede Spectacle is illustrated in color and black-and-white with over 100 field and museum photographs, including a rare sequence on the dressing of a masquerader. It offers, in addition, more than 60 Gelede song texts, proverbs, and divination verses, each in the original Yoruba as well as in translation. Lawal's interpretations of these pieces indicate the rich complexities of metaphor and analogy inherent in the Yoruba language and art.

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. The works featured in this lavish volume span centuries, from the period prior to contact with European settlers through the early 20th century, and represent the extensive artistic achievements of culturally distinct indigenous peoples. Both known and unrecorded makers' innovative visions are manifest in a wide variety of aesthetic forms and media-from painting, sculpture, and drawing to costume, ceramics, and baskets. Challenging traditional presentations of American Indian art, this publication situates and analyzes them alongside other North American artistic practices. Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press Exhibition Schedule: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (10/01/18-10/06/19)

New Mexico Colcha Club looks at the history, beauty, and various styles of New Mexico colcha embroidery, and tells the uplifting story of how a small group of determined women revived a cultural tradition destined for extinction. In the 1700s Spanish colonial women in the isolated province of New Mexico wanted to add beauty and warmth to their bedding. They worked their homespun yarn in a long couching stitch to create the flowing needlework that came to be called "colcha embroidery." Highly sought after and valued, a detailed embroidered piece could cost upwards of 46 pesos. (During the same time period, sheep and cows cost 2 and 15 pesos respectively). However, a century later colcha was on its way to oblivion. Like many traditional crafts, this beautiful and skilled artform was becoming obsolete as inexpensive and abundant commercial cloth, modern styles, and machine-made products became more desirable and available. Fast-forward to the 1920s and the Arte Antiguo, a colcha club founded by twelve Hispanic women in the Espanola Valley of New Mexico. Spearheaded by Teofila Ortiz Lujan and then later her daughter, Esther Lujan Vigil, these women heroically sought to rescue colcha and bring it back to its rightful place as a cherished custom. The women traveled to churches to examine vintage altar cloth, hunted through attics and archives in search of examples of the antique embroidery, and sketched old patterns--all in the hopes of keeping colcha from extinction and activating a revival of the embroidery. Esther Lujan Vigil, through her artwork and teaching, keeps the tradition alive and has elevated colcha from a folk art to a fine art. Divided into three sections, the first part of thebook traces the roots of the embroidery tradition and domestic life in colonial New Mexico. The second part looks at the Arte Antiguo's push in the early twentieth century to revive this lost art. The third part focuses on Esther Lujan Vigil's artistic skills and the renaissance of colcha embroidery today. New Mexico Colcha Club features historical and recent photographs of colcha work that demonstrate the beauty, intricacy, and diversity of this Old World custom. This inspirational and informative biography of colcha is folk art enlivened by social history. It is a must read for those interested in Spanish textile traditions and folk art, needlework, and New Mexico history.

African-American art has made an increasingly vital contribution to the art of the United States from the time of its origins in early-eighteenth-century slave communities. This major reassessment of the subject discusses folk and decorative arts such as ceramics, furniture, and quilts alongside fine art -- sculptures, paintings, and photography -- produced by African Americans, both enslaved and free, throughout the nineteenth century. It explores art and politics, the influence of galleries and museums, and examines the New Negro Movement of the 1920s, the Era of Civil Rights and Black Nationalism through the 1960s and 1970s, and the emergence of new black artists and theorists in the 1980s and 1990s. African-American Art shows that in its cultural diversity and synthesis of cultures it mirrors those in American society as a whole.

`a much needed text. . . breaks down the barrier between folk and formal art, and articulates an interrelationship of both concepts to African-American people and their culture' Keith Morrison, Artist and Dean of the College of Arts, San Francisco State University.

`a fine survey of contemporary African-American art and ideas... a volume, which, like no other, can be used both as an unusual reference book and a good read' Emma Amos, Artist and Professor of Art at Rutgers University

This exciting new investigation explores the rich variety of indigenous arts in the US and Canada from the early pre-contact period to the present day. It shows the importance of the visual arts in maintaining the integrity of spiritual, social, political, and economic systems within Native North American societies and examines such issues as gender, representation, the colonial encounter, and contemporary arts. Basketry, wood and rock carvings, dance masks, and beadwork, are discussed alongside the paintings and installations of modern artists such as Robert Davidson, Emmi Whitehorse, and Alex Janvier.

In Art to Come Terry Smith—who is widely recognized as one of the world's leading historians and theorists of contemporary art—traces the emergence of contemporary art and further develops his concept of contemporaneity. Smith shows that embracing contemporaneity as both a historical concept and a condition of the globalized world allows us to grasp how contemporary art exists in a fluid space of increasing interdependencies, multiple contemporaneous modernities, and persistent inequalities. Throughout these essays, Smith offers systematic proposals for writing contemporary art's histories while assessing how curators, critics, philosophers, artists, and art historians are currently doing so. Among other topics, Smith examines the intersection of architecture with other visual arts, Chinese art since the Cultural Revolution, how philosophers are theorizing concepts associated with the contemporary, Australian Indigenous art, and the current state of art history. Art to Come will be essential reading for artists, art students, curators, gallery workers, historians, critics, and theorists.

Covering a wide geographical and cultural area, and containing many illustrations, this is the first collection of essays on anthropological approaches to art and aesthetics to be published for some time.

Focusing on stunning paintings and engravings from around the world, Powerful Pictures interrogates the driving forces behind global rock art research. Many of the rock art motifs featured in the 16 chapters of this book were created by indigenous hunter-gatherer groups, and it sheds new light on non-Western rituals and worldviews, many of which are threatened or on the point of extinction. Stemming from a conference in Val Camonica in northern Italy, the book is arranged by continent, although it tackles how early research in some countries (e.g., Sweden, France, Spain, the USA, Canada, South Africa) influenced the trajectory of archaeological investigations in others (e.g., Australia, India, Mexico, Germany, Mongolia, Russia). All of the contributing authors have vast experience working with rock art and Indigenous communities, many of them holding posts in prestigious university departments around the world. The book will be of particular interest to professional historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists, and indeed anyone who is interested in art, symbolism, and the past.

The Safaitic rock art of the North Arabian basalt desert is a unique and understudied material, one of the few surviving traces of the elusive herding societies that inhabited this region in antiquity. Yet little is known about this rock art and its role in the desert societies. Why did these peoples make carvings in the desert and what was the significance of this cultural practice? What can the rock art tell us about the relationship between the nomads and their desert landscape? This book investigates these questions through a comprehensive study of over 4500 petroglyphs from the Jebel Qurma region of the Black Desert in north-eastern Jordan. It explores the content of the rock art, how it was produced and consumed by its makers and audience, and its relationship with the landscape. This is the first-ever systematic study of the Safaitic petroglyphs from the Black Desert and it is unique for the study of Arabian rock art. It demonstrates the value of a material approach to rock art and the unique insights that rock art can provide into the relationship between nomadic herders and the wild and domestic landscape.

As the international art market globalizes the indigenous image, it changes its identity, status, value, and purpose in local and larger contexts. Focusing on a school of Australian Aboriginal painting that has become popular in the contemporary art world, Robyn Ferrell traces the influence of cultural exchanges on art, the self, and attitudes toward the other.

Aboriginal acrylic painting, produced by indigenous women artists of the Australian Desert, bears a superficial resemblance to abstract expressionism and is often read as such by viewers. Yet to see this art only through a Western lens is to miss its unique ontology, logics of sensation, and rich politics and religion. Ferrell explores the culture that produces these paintings and connects its aesthetic to the brutal environmental and economic realities of its people. From here, she travels to urban locales, observing museums and department stores as they traffic interchangeably in art and commodities.

Ferrell ties the history of these desert works to global acts of genocide and dispossession. Rethinking the value of the artistic image in the global market and different interpretations of the sacred, she considers photojournalism, ecotourism, and other sacred sites of the western subject, investigating the intersection of modern art and postmodern culture. She ultimately challenges the primacy of the "European gaze" and its fascination with sacred cultures, constructing a more balanced intercultural dialogue that deemphasizes the aesthetic of the real championed by western philosophy.