Horses are very rare in Africa. The few to be found west of Sudan, from the lands of the Sahara and Sahel down to the fringes of the tropical forests, belong to the king, the chief warrior and to notable persons. Due to the dense humidity of the tropical rainforest and the deadly tsetse fly, only restricted numbers of horses survive. And yet rider and mount sculptures are common among the Dogon, Djenne, Bamana, Senufo and the Yoruba people. The Akan-Asante people of Ghana and the Kotoko of Chad produced a good deal of small casting brass and bronze sculptures. Some of the artists could barely even have caught a glimpse of a horse. This visually stunning book presents a wealth of African art depicting the horse and its rider in a variety of guises, from Epa masks and Yoruba divination cups to Dogon sculptures and Senufo carvings. In Mali, the Bamana, Boso and Somono ethnic groups still celebrate the festivals of the puppet masquerade. The final chapter of this book is dedicated to the art and cult of these festivals, which are still alive and well. It is not the habit of the African artist to provide intellectual statements for his work, yet his unique creative dynamic and far-searching vision does not conflict with that of his Western counterpart. It is fair to state that the African, who though not educated in Western art history, contributed his fair share to the shaping of modern art. Features works from museums in both Africa and Europe, including the Musee Royal de L'Afrique Central, Tervuren in Belgium; Afrika Museum, Berg en Dal, Netherlands; Musee du quai Branly, Paris; Museum Rietberg, Zurich; The British Museum, London; Museu National de Antologia, Lisbon and National Museum, Lagos, Nigeria.

Patronized by royalty between the sixth and eighth centuries, the monuments of Guatemala's ancient Maya city of Piedras Negras were carved by sculptors with remarkable skills and virtuosity. Together patrons and sculptors created monumental imagery in a manner unique within the larger history of ancient Maya art by engaging public viewers through illustrations of ceremonies focusing on family and the feminine in royal agendas.
Flora Clancy's introduction contextualizes her work with other studies and lays out her methodological framework. She then discusses the known monuments of the city sequentially by reigns. Individual rulers are characterized by a biography drawn from the hieroglyphic texts and the icons or imagery of their monuments are analyzed and discussed.
Although the monuments of Piedras Negras are acknowledged as social, political, and cultural productions, Clancy also treats them as works of art that at their best operate on transcendent levels dissolving and overruling the contingencies of history and cultural differences.

Ancient petroglyphs and paintings on rocky cliffs and cave walls preserve the symbols and ideas of American Indian cultures. From scenes of human-to-animal transformations found in petroglyphs dating back thousands of years to contact-era depictions of eagle trapping, rock art provides a look at the history of the Black Hills country over the last ten thousand years. Storied Stone links rock art of the Black Hills and Cave Hills of South Dakota and Wyoming to the rich oral traditions, religious beliefs, and sacred places of the Lakota, Cheyenne, Kiowa, Mandan, and Hidatsa Indians who once lived there.Drawing on more than twenty years of fieldwork, Linea Sundstrom identifies the chronological depth, stylistic variations, and multiple interpretations of petroglyphs and cliff paintings in this richly illustrated volume. Sundstrom describes the age, cultural affiliation, and meaning of a wide variety of petroglyphs and rock paintings--from warriors' combat scenes and images related to girls' puberty rites to depictions of creation myths and sacred visions.

The University of New Mexico's Tamarind Institute is a world-renowned center for fine art lithography dedicated to training master printers and providing a professional studio for artists. In "Migrations," Tamarind director Marjorie Devon has compiled the work of six Native American artists, each of whom collaborated with professional printers at Tamarind and at Crow's Shadow Institute of the Arts in Pendleton, Oregon, to create prints. These artists were selected because they engage in contemporary art rather than what is traditionally considered "Native American art." Artists Steven Deo (Creek/Euchee), Tom Jones (Ho Chunk), Larry McNeil (Tlingit/Nisgaa), Ryan Lee Smith (Cherokee), Star Wallowing Bull (Chippewa/Arapaho), and Marie Watt (Seneca) represent a wide spectrum of Native American cultures and experiences.

In addition to the art, essays by Jo Ortel, Lucy Lippard, Kathleen Howe, and Gerald McMaster contribute expert analyses of Native American art. Ortel, an associate professor of art history at Beloit College, defines "Migrations" as it applies to this project. Lippard is an art critic and author whose essay discusses the cultural baggage forced upon the American Indian. As director of the Pomona College Museum of Art and professor of art history, Howe offers an overview of Tamarind Institutes projects with indigenous peoples. A Plains Cree artist, McMasters essay details the history of Crow's Shadow Institute on Oregon's Umatilla Reservation. A traveling exhibition of the art contained here, also entitled "Migrations," will begin in 2007, venues to be announced.

Artist, teacher, and Red Progressive, Angel De Cora (1869-1919) painted Fire Light to capture warm memories of her Nebraska Winnebago childhood. In this biography, Linda M. Waggoner draws on that glowing image to illuminate De Cora's life and artistry, which until now have been largely overlooked by scholars.One of the first American Indian artists to be accepted within the mainstream art world, De Cora left her childhood home on the Winnebago reservation to find success in the urban Northeast at the turn of the twentieth century. Despite scant documentary sources that elucidate De Cora's private life, Waggoner has rendered a complete picture of the woman known in her time as the first "real Indian artist." She depicts De Cora as a multifaceted individual who as a young girl took pride in her traditions, forged a bond with the land that would sustain her over great distances, and learned the role of cultural broker from her mother's MEtis family. After studying with famed illustrator Howard Pyle at his first Brandywine summer school, De Cora eventually succeeded in establishing the first "Native Indian" art department at Carlisle Indian School. A founding member of the Society of American Indians, she made a significant impact on the American Arts and Crafts movement by promoting indigenous arts throughout her career. Waggoner brings her broad knowledge of Winnebago culture and history to this gracefully written book, which features more than forty illustrations. Fire Light shows us both a consummate artist and a fully realized woman, who learned how to traverse the borders of Red identity in a white man's world.

Images of crosses, the Virgin Mary, and Christ, among other devotional objects, pervaded nearly every aspect of public and private life in early modern Spain, but they were also a point of contention between Christian and Muslim cultures. Writers of narrative fiction, theatre, and poetry were attuned to these debates, and religious imagery played an important role in how early modern writers chose to portray relations between Christians and Muslims. Drawing on a wide variety of literary genres as well as other textual and visual sources - including historical chronicles, travel memoirs, captives' testimonies, and paintings - Catherine Infante traces the references to religious visual culture and the responses they incited in cross-confessional negotiations. She reveals some of the anxieties about what it meant to belong to different ethnic or religious communities and how these communities interacted with each other within the fluid boundaries of the Mediterranean world. Focusing on the religious image as a point of contact between individuals of diverse beliefs and practices, The Arts of Encounter presents an original and necessary perspective on how Christian-Muslim relations were perceived and conveyed in print.

For millennia, Native artists on Olympic Peninsula, in what is now northwestern Washington, have created coiled and woven baskets using tree roots, bark, plant stems--and meticulous skill. "From the Hands of a Weaver" presents the traditional art of basket making among the peninsula's Native peoples--particularly women--and describes the ancient, historic, and modern practices of the craft. Abundantly illustrated, this book also showcases the basketry collection of Olympic National Park.
Baskets designed primarily for carrying and storing food have been central to the daily life of the Klallam, Twana, Quinault, Quileute, Hoh, and Makah cultures of Olympic Peninsula for thousands of years. The authors of the essays collected here, who include Native people as well as academics, explore the commonalities among these cultures and discuss their distinct weaving styles and techniques. Because basketry was interwoven with indigenous knowledge and culture throughout history, alterations in the art over time reflect important social changes.
Using primary-source material as well as interviews, volume editor Jacilee Wray shows how Olympic Peninsula craftspeople participated in the development of the commercial basket industry, transforming useful but beautiful objects into creations appreciated as art. Other contributors address poaching of cedar and native grasses, and conservation efforts--contemporary challenges faced by basket makers. Appendices identify weavers and describe weaves attributed to each culture, making this an important reference for both scholars and collectors.
Featuring more than 120 photographs and line drawings of historical and twentieth-century weavers and their baskets, this engaging book highlights the culture of distinct Native Northwest peoples while giving voice to individual artists, masters of a living art form.

First Nation's artist Robert E Stanley Sr shares his knowledge and technique in rendering classic Northwest Native drawings. Now you too, can learn to draw some of the legendary animals of the First Nation's tribes, by learning Robert's technique's passed down to him from generation to generation.

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 this volume, contributors show how stylistic and iconographic analyses of Mississippian imagery provide new perspectives on the beliefs, narratives, public ceremonies, ritual regimes, and expressions of power in the communities that created the artwork. Exploring various methodological and theoretical approaches to pre-Columbian visual culture, these essays reconstruct dynamic accounts of Native American history across the U.S. Southeast. These case studies offer innovative examples of how to use style to identify and compare artifacts, how symbols can be interpreted in the absence of writing, and how to situate and historicize Mississippian imagery. They examine designs carved into shell, copper, stone, and wood or incised into ceramic vessels, from spider iconography to owl effigies and depictions of the cosmos. They discuss how these symbols intersect with memory, myths, social hierarchies, religious traditions, and other spheres of Native American life in the past and present. The tools modeled in this volume will open new horizons for learning about the culture and worldviews of past peoples.

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, art history, and cultural studies to tell the story of a little-known collection that represents one of the most vibrant and experimental periods in the development of contemporary Inuit art. Lavishly illustrated, "Hunters, Carvers, and Collectors" presents numerous never-before-published gems, including carvings by the artists John Kavik, Johnniebo Ashevak, and Peter Qumalu POV Assappa. This latest contribution to the award-winning Peabody Museum Collections Series fills an important gap in the literature of Native American art."

A Painted Ridge is a book about the San (Bushmen) practice of rock painting. In it, David Witelson explores a suite of spatially close San rock painting sites in the Maclear District of South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province. As a suite, the sites are remarkable because, despite their proximity to each other, they share patterns of similarity and simultaneous difference. They are a microcosm that reflects, in a broad sense, a trend found at other painted sites in South Africa. Rather than attempting to explain these patterns chiefly in terms of chronological breaks or cultural discontinuities, this book seeks to understand patterns of similarity and difference primarily in terms of the performative nature of San image-making. In doing so, the bygone and almost unrecorded practice of San rock art is considered relative to ethnographically well-documented and observed forms of San expressive culture. The approach in the book draws on concepts and terminology from the discipline of performance studies to characterise the San practice of image-making as well as to coordinate otherwise disparate ideas about that practice. It is a study that aims to explicate the nuances of what David Lewis-Williams called the ‘production and consumption’ of San rock art.