Ancient to Contemporary—Continuity in Native American Art

by Bruce Bernstein

Native arts are alive and well. A look around New Mexico, whether in Santa Fe or any other town, confirms it. New Mexico’s museums, galleries, and private collections contain pieces of unsurpassed beauty and artistry offering a full spectrum of Native arts—from the most sophisticated in conceptual form to the most intriguingly traditional. We are indeed fortunate to live within the beauty created by generations of Native artists.

Native art expresses volumes about worldview and the relationship of the people to their surroundings; the patterns, shapes, and material are direct, symbolic connections to place and history. In turn, these art works—whether made for home use or for sale, traditional or non-traditional, of well-known materials or new—are the outcome of Native philosophical systems, an outpouring of an ethical way of living, put into practice.

The materials and techniques employed in Native art are nothing less than the landscape itself— certainly a physical land, but more importantly, the deeply held and rooted consciousness that continues to create Native peoples’ lives. Using the plants, water, and earth of which the world is concretely and figuratively made imbues objects with sacredness. Moreover, using Native concepts and worldviews further inculcates the cosmological. There is nothing mysterious here: quite simply, art is emotion as much as it is intellectual idea.

Pueblo, Navajo, and Apache cultures all possess a long distinguished art history intertwined and made accessible through each of their particular worldviews and cultural processes.

For Native people in particular, having survived the last 500 years, art—visual culture if you will—is one of the most powerful mechanisms they have to express who they are and why they are.

A Brief Social History of New Mexico Native Arts

I have always considered the making of art to be one of the most courageous of acts: an artist puts herself (or himself) into a piece, revealing and exposing her own as well as her culture’s worldview and perspectives. For Native people, this has not always been the most “accepted” route.

At the beginning of the twentieth century many non-Indians believed that Native cultures would soon be extinct and, in order for Indian people to survive, they would need to become “productive citizens.” For Indian people this generally meant a forced separation from their families and traditions, to erase their languages and customs, and to become a lower-class labor force for American society. Children were removed to Indian schools which were little more than military camps that sought to march and regulate the “Indian” out of our nation’s first citizens.

Fortunately, for us, Indian peoples’ determination to survive and their vitality enabled them to overcome this era of assimilation. Creating art has helped them to not only maintain their cultural identity, but also to explore it and express it in many ways.

Around 1915, a group of non-Indian Santa Feans showed interest in contemporary Native culture and peoples, asking questions about how Pueblo people might live in the modern world but still retain their unique traditions. While there had been prior interest in Native cultures, it was primarily as curiosity or interest in “memory” culture, which hypothesized a purer form of culture before influences from the Spanish or Americans occurred. Anthropologists of the early twentieth century best exemplify this sentimentalist viewpoint: seeking to record cultural practices and ideas while all around them were the results of 400 years of interactions with European cultures. They failed to recognize that a strength of Puebloan culture is that it has for millennia absorbed and rejected ideas; the introduction of European cultures was met with the same cultural strength and attitudes.

Curio Art Emerges

Museum men did seek to buy newly made objects, but only if they were replicas of older pieces that could represent traditional Native life. People like Museum of New Mexico founder Edgar Hewett believed that the true Indian history could only be found through archaeology and that surviving Pueblos should only be used as social science laboratories for re-constructing archaeology.

Fortunately, more progressively minded individuals rejected this view and began asking Pueblo people what they thought of themselves and suggesting that they express it through pottery and paintings. Encouragement came from people like Museum of New Mexico curator Kenneth Chapman who urged potters to make more dignified and culturally appropriate forms rather than those desired by the curio trade.

Native artists were able to use older traditions to adapt to new social conditions. Curators, anthropologists, traders, and advocates helped develop new markets and acceptance for these Native arts. Then, as now, a wide divergence existed between antique or historic Indian art or artifacts and contemporary pieces. However, because of the lack of available markets one hundred years ago, any newly made Indian object was labeled and destined to be sold as curio.

The First Indian Market

The creation of Indian Fair in 1922, as Indian Market was once called, was, for its day, a daring act. At the opening of the first Fair a representative of the United States Commissioner for Indian Affairs told the audience that it was okay for older Indian people to carry on their culture; however, the new generation being educated at day schools and boarding schools would need to become productive and engaged US citizens. Consider that the very people subjected to these policies were asked to participate in the first Indian Fair and were rewarded with cash prizes and adulation for doing so.

Without the invention of Indian Market there would not be the great Native artists or traditions of today. We would have been left with just curios made by what were perceived to be remnants of bygone days—samples of great historic art considered more authentic and beautiful because it was associated with an earlier epoch, believed to be free of cultural change and interaction with Europeans or other tribes. No such era has existed in the Americas for half of a millennium.

The first Indian Fair, however, could not have succeeded without the brilliant artistic vision of San Ildefonso potters Maria and Julian Martinez. They had created, just two years before, the black-on-black style of pottery considered now to be the barometer of traditional Pueblo art pottery. Maria and her husband are held up again and again as influential artists of the twentieth century. But they needed a device to market their new art style and Indian Fair was created at just the right moment. Without the Martinez’s new pottery style there would not have been a successful first contemporary art form to show, and without the Fair there would not have existed the proper venue to introduce Pueblo art pottery to the world.

Painting and Other Arts Evolve

There had been earlier attempts to create Indian art, in baskets and textiles. Pomo, Washoe, and other California basket makers wove magnificent pieces specifically for the non-Indian buyer. Traders such as Lorenzo Hubbell at Ganado (Arizona) developed new styles of Navajo weaving, but these “Moki” style blankets were based on reviving older styles, returning Navajo weavers to their authentic traditions rather than those imposed by traders and learned from outsiders. Other traders sought to make changes but these “Crystal” and other styles were more directed at making a useful household product –a floor rug—rather than art.

The Indian painting style that began about 1908 in New Mexico was entirely an indigenous invention. Figures were painted without background or perspective and largely with unmodulated lines. By the time art classes were taught at the Santa Fe Indian School in 1932, this style was taken by Anglos to be the only acceptable style of Indian painting. It would be another thirty years, with the founding of the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, before Indian painters were again encouraged to allow their creativity to guide them instead of imposed ideas.

What do we mean precisely by Indian art or Native art? What is and what is not Indian art? One of the distinguishing features of art made by Native peoples is the inseparable nature of culture and art. [Lift out the following statement to highlight quote.] While anyone can paint an Indian scene, it is only the Indian person who can paint it from the heart and head, providing deeper meanings and appreciation for the viewer.

Maria’s and Julian’s genius was certainly in their mastery of materials and technique, but it was also in manifesting a vision that incorporated their understanding of their Anglo admirers. Were they successful in conceptualizing an art form that embodied their own culture to share with their customers? Absolutely. Of course many over the years have claimed credit for the invention of black-on-black pottery, including the overbearing Hewett who said it was copied from pottery sherds found at his archaeological excavations.

Native Art Is Sacred

We often are told how Native languages have no word for “art.” Rather than an epistemological debate, consider art as communication and a means for integrating cosmologies, histories, and identities from the everyday to the universal. Moreover, artists are often some of society’s most observant members. Art makes visible cosmology and human behavior and history.

To Native peoples, plant life, like water and earth, are all part of the First World. Therefore the making of a pot, basket, or textile that uses materials from the natural world is a pious act. Moreover, because Native cultures possess a worldview of always being within the act of creation, the creation of art is a part of the ongoing creation of the world. So, it is art, to our way of thinking, but it is also a sacred act of creation to Native peoples.

In today’s Southwest, Native societies use the arts to strengthen themselves and to demonstrate their resolve for survival. We know that Native arts are constantly changing, painting a picture of cultural strength through adapting and absorbing new influences, as well as shielding members from intrusions or rapid change. The non-Native world can entice people, but the arts have served both as a doorway to and a shield against the outside world. Since artists can work at home, in their communities, they are able to participate in community events as needs arise, to be near family, and to live as much as possible without the constraints of American society.

Making art helps preserve Native cultures: art-making offers artists a way to profitably fit an old pattern to contemporary needs and provides community members with a means to enter the American cash economy while staying at home, instead of traveling to urban centers for employment.

Visual Beauties of Native Cultures

Beyond created artworks, the venues for enjoying the visual beauty of Ancestral Native cultures are endless. National Parks in New Mexico like Chaco Canyon, Aztec Ruins, Gila Cliff Dwellings, and Bandelier, along with Coronado State Monument, document the architectural histories and responses to physical surroundings and celestial phenomenon. Many of these places include intriguing petroglyphs—some clearly readable and others beyond our comprehension—which have been deemed art as well as recorded history.

Native communities at various times of the year welcome outsiders to witness ceremonial dances which include magnificent and ageless regalia, songs, and dance. Because much of the aesthetic of Native visual art includes movement, seeing these pieces in use is a unique experience.

Opportunities abound to buy directly from artisans, strike up conversations, and have once-in-a-lifetime experiences: along the roadsides, under the Portals in Santa Fe and Albuquerque, and in Pueblo village houses where signs proclaim “pottery for sale.”

Indian Market Today

The epicenter of Native arts and culture in this country is here in Santa Fe. The museums and IAIA would not be here, the galleries of Native art would be mere curio stores, without the Market and its sponsor, SWAIA (Southwest Association for Indian Arts).

Each August, tens of thousands of people make their annual pilgrimage to Santa Fe’s Indian Market, a two-day event held on the city’s historic Plaza and surrounding streets. The 87-year Market attracts buyers from around the world for unarguably the most important Indian art event of the year. Artists spend months preparing, often producing or saving their best pieces to enter in the judging and to sell. Buyers plan year-round, making hotel reservations a year or more in advance, while others have second homes that are used sparingly except during the Santa Fe summer.

Santa Fe Indian Market is the only venue (and time of year) to see the full scope of Native arts—from traditional to cutting edge, from ageless forms to the newest concepts—in one place. With more than 1000 participating artists, the Market is a veritable feast for the eyes (and other senses). Importantly, every artist in Market has been carefully vetted and juried to ensure the highest artistic standards and authenticity of work.

New Mexico’s state capital is transformed by Market; the Plaza area is closed to all traffic and the streets are lined with 635 artist booths, food stands, information tables, tee-shirt and book sales tents. The Native art world—artists, curators, and collectors—also descends upon Santa Fe, not as entrants, but as participants in the multitude of meetings, conferences, and gallery and museum openings.

On the Friday before Market, the Plaza is bustling with activity as the artists’ booths are erected along ten city blocks and judging concludes for best of show. Nearly 1500 pieces are entered for judging and more than $80,000 will be awarded to the best works in Indian Market.

At 7:00 a.m. on Saturday morning the Market opens, with a multitude of people and artwork overwhelming the Plaza. Within the first hour, the top 25 to 40 artists will sell out. Individual pieces sell from several thousand to tens-of-thousands of dollars. By noontime, the biggest spenders—and most influential art patrons—will have removed themselves from Market, retreating to the restaurants that are filled to capacity, or to the lines outside of ice cream parlors and coffee shops.

At a noticeably less frenzied pace, Market continues through Sunday afternoon. On Sunday, one may enjoy a leisurely stroll through Indian Market—and through a largely ignored, but nonetheless vital part of American art history. The continuity in Native American art is evident: Native artists are taking ancient subject matter and putting it into a contemporary context, making it as relevant today as it was 1,000 years ago.

Bruce Bernstein, Ph.D., is the executive director of the Southwest Association for Indian Arts (SWAIA) and former director of the New Mexico Museum of Indian Arts and Culture. His museum experience includes the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, and the University of New Mexico's Maxwell Museum of Anthropology.