The early collections from Africa in Liverpool's World Museum reflect the city's longstanding shipping and commercial links with Africa's Atlantic coast. A principal component of these collections is an assemblage of several thousand artefacts from western Africa that were transported to institutions in northwest England between 1894 and 1916 by the Liverpool steam ship engineer Arnold Ridyard. While Ridyard's collecting efforts can be seen to have been shaped by the steamers' dynamic capacity to connect widely separated people and places, his Methodist credentials were fundamental in determining the profile of his African networks, because they meant that he was not part of official colonial authority in West Africa. Kingdon's study uncovers the identities of many of Ridyard's numerous West African collaborators and discusses their interests and predicaments under the colonial dispensation. Against this background account, their agendas are examined with reference to surviving narratives that accompanied their donations and within the context of broader processes of trans-imperial exchange, through which they forged new identities and statuses for themselves and attempted to counter expressions of British cultural imperialism in the region. The study concludes with a discussion of the competing meanings assigned to the Ridyard assemblage by the Liverpool Museum and examines the ways in which its re-contextualization in museum contexts helped to efface signs of the energies and narratives behind its creation.

Volume 27 in the Civilization of the American Indian Series Maria: The Potter of San Ildefonso is the story of Maria Martinez and her husband, Julian, who revived the ancient Pueblo craft of pottery-making and stimulated interest in Southwestern Pueblo pottery among both white people and Indians. Maria Montoya Martinez, or Marie, as she sometimes signs her pottery, is a woman who has become in her own lifetime a legend. She lives in the pueblo of San Ildefonso, near Santa Fe, New Mexico, and although her life has been, as closely as she could make it, the normal life of a woman of her culture, her unusual qualities have set her apart and gained her fame throughout the world. Through her mastery of pottery-making, Maria brought economic gain to her family and her village. However, distressing problems accompanied success and fame. Liquor ultimately wrecked Julian. There was dissension within the pueblo. And there was the succession of admiring white people who invaded her home and interrupted her work. Not least, in Maria view, was the departure of her own children from many Pueblo customs. Inextricably woven into the story of Maria is the story of the pottery of the Southwestern Pueblos, a native craft that has become a national art interest, including the development of the unique black-on-black ware by Julian, the first of which is reproduced among the illustrations. Margaret Lefranc's many accurate drawings of actual pieces of pottery provide an almost complete documentary history of the craft and show some of the finest examples of Maria's art. Her skilled pen has also interpreted faithfully the spirit of Maria, the Pueblo Indians, and the pottery. "Miss Marriott's literary style is superb. She has caught the beautiful, measured pace of Indian talk and, without seeming to make any conscious effort, has written Maria's story with simplicity and understanding as if Marie herself were living her life before you."-Will Davidson in the Chicago Sunday Tribune. ." . . a unique American biography and a unique story of the birth of an art."-Lewis Gannett in the New York Herald Tribune.

The artist-makers represented here come from every region of the United States, making this book a compilation of many native traditions as well as modern styles. Exciting background ideas are expressed in the details of these works, so their study and appreciation is quite fascinating. Over 50 living jewelry masters of Native American heritage are featured in this lavish new book. Their dynamic work includes many pieces that were awarded at recent juried shows. Tufa casting, stone cutting, engraving, metalsmithing, and other technical skills that are highly refined and personalized are evident, demonstrating the work of true Masters in this evolving field. See and be inspired by new designs in bead necklaces, silver bracelets, pendants, pins, earrings, belts, and rings, as well as sculpture that ranks as wearable art. Marvel at the new pieces by top masters living today.

Moon Hunter is an injured wolf and outcast in his pack like his friends. Lost in the Valley of Drury, Moon Hunter cannot find food or his friends and the dark mist of Drury is caving in on him until a guiding light appears out of the woods around him. Here he meets a friend named Grasshopper and from there Moon Hunter learns of his purpose in life and finds all the food from earth, water, air, and sun he needs to start a new life with a family of friends like him. With imagination, absolution is not unknown anymore to Moon Hunter and the pack of wolves in this colorful tale of serendipity proportions.

An engaging explanation of Oceanic art and an important gateway to wider appreciation of Oceanic heritage and visual culture Art from Oceania, the region encompassing the islands of the central and south Pacific, spans hundreds of distinct artistic processes, formats, and mediums. Many people's exposure to Oceanic art comes through its influence on the work of European artists, and therefore Oceanic works themselves often remain difficult for Western viewers to interpret and comprehend. How to Read Oceanic Art, the third book in a series of guides to understanding different artistic genres, helps elucidate this subject through explanation of specific objects. The book analyzes the most illustrative Oceanic pieces from the Metropolitan Museum's collection-including lively painted masks, powerful figurines, and intricately carved wooden poles-which together represent the extraordinary diversity of artistic traditions in the region. Attractive photography and clear, engaging texts explain how and why various works were made as well as how they were used. This publication is an invaluable resource for art historical study, and also an important gateway to wider appreciation of Oceanic heritage and visual culture. Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press

Following India's independence in 1947, Indian artists creating modern works of art sought to maintain a local idiom, an "Indianness" representative of their newly independent nation, while connecting to modernism, an aesthetic then understood as both universal and presumptively Western. These artists depicted India's precolonial past while embracing aspects of modernism's pursuit of the new, and they challenged the West's dismissal of non-Western places and cultures as sources of primitivist imagery but not of modernist artworks. In "Art for a Modern India," Rebecca M. Brown explores the emergence of a self-conscious Indian modernism--in painting, drawing, sculpture, architecture, film, and photography--in the years between independence and 1980, by which time the Indian art scene had changed significantly and postcolonial discourse had begun to complicate mid-century ideas of nationalism.

Through close analyses of specific objects of art and design, Brown describes how Indian artists engaged with questions of authenticity, iconicity, narrative, urbanization, and science and technology. She explains how the filmmaker Satyajit Ray presented the rural Indian village as a socially complex space rather than as the idealized site of "authentic India" in his acclaimed "Apu Trilogy," how the painter Bhupen Khakhar reworked Indian folk idioms and borrowed iconic images from calendar prints in his paintings of urban dwellers, and how Indian architects developed a revivalist style of bold architectural gestures anchored in India's past as they planned the Ashok Hotel and the Vigyan Bhavan Conference Center, both in New Delhi. Discussing these and other works of art and design, Brown chronicles the mid-twentieth-century trajectory of India's modern visual culture.

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.

The early collections from Africa in Liverpool's World Museum reflect the city's longstanding shipping and commercial links with Africa's Atlantic coast. A principal component of these collections is an assemblage of several thousand artefacts from western Africa that were transported to institutions in northwest England between 1894 and 1916 by the Liverpool steam ship engineer Arnold Ridyard. While Ridyard's collecting efforts can be seen to have been shaped by the steamers' dynamic capacity to connect widely separated people and places, his Methodist credentials were fundamental in determining the profile of his African networks, because they meant that he was not part of official colonial authority in West Africa. Kingdon's study uncovers the identities of many of Ridyard's numerous West African collaborators and discusses their interests and predicaments under the colonial dispensation. Against this background account, their agendas are examined with reference to surviving narratives that accompanied their donations and within the context of broader processes of trans-imperial exchange, through which they forged new identities and statuses for themselves and attempted to counter expressions of British cultural imperialism in the region. The study concludes with a discussion of the competing meanings assigned to the Ridyard assemblage by the Liverpool Museum and examines the ways in which its re-contextualization in museum contexts helped to efface signs of the energies and narratives behind its creation.

When Buffalo Bill's Wild West show traveled to Paris in 1889, the New York Times reported that the exhibition would be ""managed to suit French ideas."" But where had those ""French ideas"" of the American West come from? And how had they, in turn, shaped the notions of ""cowboys and Indians"" that captivated the French imagination during the Gilded Age? In Transnational Frontiers, Emily C. Burns maps the complex fin-de-siecle cultural exchanges that revealed, defined, and altered images of the American West. This lavishly illustrated visual history shows how American artists, writers, and tourists traveling to France exported the dominant frontier narrative that presupposed manifest destiny - and how Native American performers with Buffalo Bill's Wild West and other traveling groups challenged that view. Many French artists and illustrators plied this imagery as well. At the 1900 World's Fair in Paris, sculptures of American cowboys conjured a dynamic and adventurous West, while portraits of American Indians on vases evoked an indigenous people frozen in primitivity. At the same time, representations of Lakota performers, as well as the performers themselves, deftly negotiated the politics of American Indian assimilation and sought alternative spaces abroad. For French artists and enthusiasts, the West served as a fulcrum for the construction of an American cultural identity, offering a chance to debate ideas of primitivism and masculinity that bolstered their own colonialist discourses. By examining this process, Burns reveals the interconnections between American western art and Franco-American artistic exchange between 1865 and 1915.

World is Africa brings together more than 30 important texts by Eddie Chambers, who for several decades has been an original and a critical voice within the field of African diaspora art history. The texts range from book chapters and catalogue essays, to shorter texts. Chambers focuses on contemporary artists and their practices, from a range of international locations, who for the most part are identified with the African diaspora. None of the texts are available online and none have been available outside of the original publication in which they first appeared. The volume contains several new pieces of writing, including a consideration of the art world 'fetishization' of the 1980s, as the manifestation of a reluctance to accept the majority of Black British artists as valid individual practitioners, choosing instead to shackle them to exhibitions that took place three decades ago. Another new text re-examines the 'map paintings' of Frank Bowling, the Guyana-born artist who was the subject of a major retrospective at Tate Britain in 2019. The third introduces the little-known record sleeve illustrations of Charles White, the American artist who was the subject of a major retrospective in 2018 at major galleries across the US. Among the other new texts is a critical reflection on the patronage the Greater London Council extended to Black artists in 1980s London. World is Africa makes a valuable contribution to the emerging discipline of black British art history, the field of African diaspora studies and African diaspora art history.

Artist-explorer John Mix Stanley (1814-1872), one of the most celebrated chroniclers of the American West in his time, was in a sense a victim of his own success. So highly regarded was his work that more than two hundred of his paintings were held at the Smithsonian Institution - where in 1865 a fire destroyed all but seven of them. This volume, featuring a comprehensive collection of Stanley's extant art, reproduced in full color, offers an opportunity - and ample reason - to rediscover the remarkable accomplishments of this outsize figure of nineteenth-century American culture. Originally from New York State, Stanley journeyed west in 1842 to paint Indian life. During the U.S.-Mexican War, he joined a frontier military expedition and traveled from Santa Fe to California, producing sketches and paintings of the campaign along the way - work that helped secure his fame in the following decades. He was also appointed chief artist for Isaac Stevens's survey of the 48th parallel for a proposed transcontinental railroad. The essays in this volume, by noted scholars of American art, document and reflect on Stanley's life and work from every angle. The authors consider the artist's experience on government expeditions; his solo tours among the Oregon settlers and western and Plains Indians; and his career in Washington and search for government patronage, as well as his individual works. With contributions by Emily C. Burns, Scott Manning Stevens, Lisa Strong, Melissa Speidel, Jacquelyn Sparks, and Emily C. Wilson, the essays in this volume convey the full scope of John Mix Stanley's artistic accomplishment and document the unfolding of that uniquely American vision throughout the artist's colorful life. Together they restore Stanley to his rightful place in the panorama of nineteenth-century American life and art.

Sometimes referred to as a Navajo folk art, these representations of recognizable objects occasionally have been designed into Navajo weavings at least since the middle of the nineteenth century. Unlike the geometric designs of more traditional Navajo rugs, these delightful pictorial images include scenes from everyday life, animals, landscapes, spelled-out words and designs of ceremonial significance. The pictorial weaving are shown through hundreds of color photographs with new as well as older examples. Here are familiar and imaginary animals, birds, people, religious designs and multiple weavings of fantastic detail. They convey, through dynamic color schemes and bold designs, images important to the Navajo weavers: the light and happy reflections of their scenic lands. The pictorial rugs are arranged chronologically within design groups to demonstrate the evolution of styles. Whenever known, the weavers are identified by name and region. It is their creativity that breathes life into these pictorial images and conveys the lively spirit of their lives.

In late prehistory, the ancestors of the present-day Hopi in Arizona created a unique and spectacular painted pottery tradition referred to as Hopi Yellow Ware. This ceramic tradition, which includes Sikyatki Polychrome pottery, inspired Hopi potter Nampeyo s revival pottery at the turn of the twentieth century.

How did such a unique and unprecedented painting style develop? The authors compiled a corpus of almost 2,000 images of Hopi Yellow Ware bowls from the Peabody Museum s collection and other museums. Focusing their work on the exterior, glyphlike painted designs of these bowls, they found that the glyphs could be placed into sets and apparently acted as a kind of signature.

The authors argue that part-time specialists were engaged in making this pottery and that relatively few households manufactured Hopi Yellow Ware during the more than 300 years of its production. Extending the Peabody s influential Awatovi project of the 1930s, "Symbols in Clay" calls into question deep-seated assumptions about pottery production and specialization in the precontact American Southwest. "

& Western approaches to Africa's visual culture have until recently separated 'traditional' from 'modern' as if the two categories had no common ground, and as if only the former was authentically African. Yet 'tradition' is also an active process of handing on, one subject to evolution, development and history. This book explores a burgeoning body of West African artistic production that draws upon photography, advertising, graphic design, European art history and Ghanaian history and culture. As such it constitutes an envisioning of a local modernity centred upon Kumasi, a vibrant trading city at the centre of local, national and international networks, whether historical, economic, political, educational, religious or aesthetic. The art described here, whatever its immediate purpose, reflects and interprets this intense and unique local context. Among the Ghanaian painters discussed are E.V. Asihene, Grace Kwami, E.K.J. Tetteh, Ablade Glover, Ato Delaquis, B. Offei Nyako, Atta Kwami, kari'kacha seid'ou, Bob Acheampong and many others whose practice was college based. Kwami also discusses the art and lives of Kumasi's leading sign painters - King Samino (King Samino Sign Art Services), Alex Amofa (Supreme Art Works), Kwame Akoto (Almighty God Art Works), Isaac Azey Otchere (Azey Alberto Art Sign Service), and Isumaila Moro (Iss Hi-Tech Prints) - thereby exploring the interrelationship of two entwined traditions, two art worlds of modern painting centred at either the university and/or the signpainter's workshop.

Published through the Recovering Languages and Literacies of the Americas initiative, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Victoria Howard was born around 1865, a little more than ten years after the founding of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde in western Oregon. Howard's maternal grandmother, Wagayuhlen Quiaquaty, was a successful and valued Clackamas shaman at Grand Ronde, and her maternal grandfather, Quiaquaty, was an elite Molalla chief. In the summer of 1929 linguist Melville Jacobs, student of Franz Boas, requested to record Clackamas Chinook oral traditions with Howard, which she enthusiastically agreed to do. The result is an intricate and lively corpus of linguistic and ethnographic material, as well as rich performances of Clackamas literary heritage, as dictated by Howard and meticulously transcribed by Jacobs in his field notebooks. Ethnographical descriptions attest to the traditional lifestyle and environment in which Howard grew up, while fine details of cultural and historical events reveal the great consideration and devotion with which she recalled her past and that of her people. Catharine Mason has edited twenty-five of Howard's spoken-word performances into verse form entextualizations, along with the annotations provided by Jacobs in his publications of Howard's corpus in the late 1950s. Mason pairs performances with biographical, family, and historical content that reflects Howard's ancestry, personal and social life, education, and worldview. Mason's study reveals strong evidence of how the artist contemplated and internalized the complex meanings and everyday lessons of her literary heritage.

Known for their beautiful textile art, the Kuna of Panama have been scrutinized by anthropologists for decades. Perhaps surprisingly, this scrutiny has overlooked the magnificent Kuna craft of nuchukana-wooden anthropomorphic carvings-which play vital roles in curing and other Kuna rituals. Drawing on long-term fieldwork, Paolo Fortis at last brings to light this crucial cultural facet, illuminating not only Kuna aesthetics and art production but also their relation to wider social and cosmological concerns. Exploring an art form that informs birth and death, personhood, the dream world, the natural world, religion, gender roles, and ecology, Kuna Art and Shamanism provides a rich understanding of this society's visual system, and the ways in which these groundbreaking ethnographic findings can enhance Amerindian scholarship overall. Fortis also explores the fact that to ask what it means for the Kuna people to carve the figure of a person is to pose a riddle about the culture's complete concept of knowing. Also incorporating notions of landscape (islands, gardens, and ancient trees) as well as cycles of life, including the influence of illness, Fortis places the statues at the center of a network of social relationships that entangle people with nonhuman entities. As an activity carried out by skilled elderly men, who possess embodied knowledge of lifelong transformations, the carving process is one that mediates mortal worlds with those of immortal primordial spirits. Kuna Art and Shamanism immerses readers in this sense of unity and opposition between soul and body, internal forms and external appearances, and image and design.

Tired of reading negative and disparaging remarks directed at Indigenous people of Winnipeg in the press and social media, artist KC Adams created a photo series that presented another perspective. Called "Perception Photo Series," it confronted common stereotypes of First Nation, Inuit and Metis people to illustrate a more contemporary truthful story. First appearing on billboards, in storefronts, in bus shelters, and projected onto Winnipeg's downtown buildings, Adams's stunning photographs now appear in the book, Perception: A Photo Series. Meant to challenge the culture of apathy and willful ignorance about Indigenous issues, Adams hopes to unite readers in the fight against prejudice of all kinds. Perception is one title in The Debwe Series.

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.

The largest known collection of ledger art ever acquired by one individual is Mark Lansburgh's diverse assemblage of more than 140 drawings, now held by the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College and catalogued in this important book. The Cheyennes, Crows, Kiowas, Lakotas, and other Plains peoples created the genre known as ledger art in the mid-nineteenth century. Before that time, these Indians had chronicled the heroic achievements of their warriors and chiefs on rock, buffalo robes, and tipi covers. As they came into increasing contact with American traders, the artists recorded their experiences in pencil and crayon drawings on paper bound in ledger or account books. The drawings became known as ledger art.
This volume presents in full color the Lansburgh collection in its entirety. The drawings are narratives depicting Plains lifeways through Plains eyes. They include landscapes and scenes of battle, hunting, courting, ceremony, incarceration, and travel by foot, horse, train, and boat. Ledger art also served to prompt memories of horse raids and heroic exploits in battle.
In addition to showcasing the Lansburgh collection, "Ledger Narratives" augments the growing literature on this art form by providing seven new essays that suggest some of the many stories the drawings contain and that look at them from innovative perspectives. The authors--scholars of art history, anthropology, history, and Native American studies--touch on such themes as gender, social status, sovereignty, tribal and intertribal politics, economic exchange, and confinement and space in a changing world.
The Lansburgh collection includes some of the most arresting examples of Plains Indian art, and the essays in this volume help us see and hear the multiple narratives these drawings relate.

The fin de siecle not only designated the end of the Victorian epoch but also marked a significant turn toward modernism. Extraordinary Aesthetes critically examines literary and visual artists from England, Ireland, and Scotland whose careers in poetry, fiction, and illustration flourished during the concluding years of the nineteenth century. This collection draws special attention to the exceptional contributions that artists, poets, and novelists made to the cultural world of the late 1880s and 1890s. The essays illuminate a range of established, increasingly acknowledged, and lesser-known figures whose contributions to this brief but remarkably intense cultural period warrant close attention. Such figures include the critically neglected Mabel Dearmer, whose stunning illustrations appear in Evelyn Sharp's radical fairy tales for children. Equally noteworthy is the uncompromising short fiction of Ella D'Arcy, who played a pivotal role in editing the most famous journal of the 1890s, the Yellow Book. The discussion extends to a range of legendary writers, including Max Beerbohm, Oscar Wilde, and W.B. Yeats, whose works are placed in dialogue with authors who gained prominence during this period. Bringing women's writing to the fore, Extraordinary Aesthetes rebalances the achievements of artists and writers during the rapidly transforming cultural world of the fin de siecle.

Images on rocks depicting birds, serpents, deer, and other designs are haunting reminders of prehistoric peoples. This book documents Missouri's rich array of petroglyphs and pictographs, analyzing the many aspects of these rock carvings and paintings to show how such representations of ritual activities can enhance our understanding of Native American culture. Missouri is a particularly important site for rock art because it straddles the Plains, the Ozarks, and the Southeast. Carol Diaz-Granados and James Duncan have established a model for analyzing this rock art as archaeological data and have mapped the patterning of fifty-eight major motifs across the state. Of particular importance is their analysis of motifs from Mississippi River Valley sites, including Cahokia.

The authors include interpretive discussions on iconography and ideology, drawing on years of research in the ethnographic records and literature of Native Americans linguistically related to earlier peoples. Their distribution maps show how motifs provide clues to patterns of movement among prehistoric peoples and to the range of belief systems. Rock art is an aspect of the archaeological record that has received little attention, and the art is particularly subject to the ravages of time. By documenting these fragile images, this book makes a major contribution to rock art research in North America.

A River Apart presents multi-vocal perspectives on the pottery of Cochiti and Santo Domingo Pueblos, located along the central Rio Grande Valley in New Mexico. Separated by a great river, Cochiti and Santo Domingo Pueblos shared a ceramic tradition for centuries until increasing contact with outsiders ushered in tumultuous changes that set the pueblos on divergent paths. Cochiti Pueblo more freely modified its traditional forms of painted pottery to appeal to new markets while the Santo Domingo Pueblo shunned the influences of the tourist trade and art market, continuing an artistic trajectory that was conservative and insular. A River Apart brings together a distinguished a team of anthropologists, artists, and art historians from Native and non-Native perspectives to examine the pottery traditions of the two Pueblos and decipher what discoveries can be made and identities established through these representations of material culture. As the essays reveal, the pottery represents more than anthropology's artifacts and art for the marketplace. From the pottery we learn much about the pueblos' history, myths and legends, communities, and the artist's responses to influences from the outside world. This volume is a fascinating case study in how cultures develop; how art, culture and community are interwoven; and how art is created, interpreted, valued, bought and sold. This publication is companion to an exhibition to open at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture (Museum of New Mexico) in Santa Fe in Fall 2008 and featuring over 200 Santo Domingo and Cochiti pots. A River Apart is a valuable addition to the libraries of those interested in Pueblo Indian pottery, Native American arts andculture, and southwestern history and anthropology.