Bruce Bernstein – författare

Kansas-born educator Dorothy Dunn established America's first Indian art school, thus ushering in the flat-art style by which Native American painters have been celebrated as the first modernists. Reproduced here are over ninety paintings by such prominent artists and former students as Pablita Velarde, Joe H Herrera, Allan Houser and Pop Chalee.

Each August, one hundred thousand people attend Indian Market in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the nation's largest and most anticipated Native arts event. One thousand artists, representing 160 tribes, nations, and villages from the United States and Canada, proudly display and sell their works of art, ranging from pottery and basketry to contemporary paintings and sculptures. The history of Indian Market as related in this new publication is the story of Indian cultural arts in the twentieth century beginning with Edgar L. Hewett and the founding of the Museum of New Mexico in Santa Fe in 1909. At the turn of the last century, the notion of Indian art as art in its own right and not ethnography was a foreign concept. With the arrival of the railroad and tourism in New Mexico, two thousand years of utilitarian Pueblo pottery tradition gave way to a curio trade intended for visitors to the area. The curators and archaeologists at the Museum of New Mexico began to collect prehistoric and historic pottery and encouraged potters to make pottery modeled on traditional ideas thought to represent authentic culture. Maria and Julian Martinez countered the idea that art was a matter of studying the past when in 1922, at the first "Indian Fair", they introduced their revolutionary Black-on-black pottery. Bruce Bernstein links these early developments to Indian Market's ninety-year relationship with Native arts, cultural movements, historical events, and the ever-evolving creativity of Native artists to shape their market.

A massive panorama of Native American art from Navajo weaving to Apache basketryPublished with Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.Spanning nearly 1,000 years of artistic creativity, this wide-ranging volume brings together 206 artworks that exemplify both exquisite aesthetics and rich cultural histories. The majority of the collection is from the American Southwest—19th-century Navajo weavings, ancestral and historical Pueblo pottery, Hopi and Zuni carved figures, and Yavapai and Apache basketry—along with art from the Pacific Northwest and the first Plains ledger drawings to enter the museums' collections.This book, which features new research and specially commissioned essays and extended captions, developed in collaboration with cultural advisors, reflects the complex and multilayered nature of the artworks in the field of Native American art. Contributions from more than 80 authors from different disciplines and cultural backgrounds, including scholars, culture-bearers, artists, collectors and museum professionals, illuminate details about the living histories of the works. With striking new photography and full-color reproductions, this is a cornerstone publication in the field of Native American art history.