Lucy Fowler Williams – författare

The Barnes Foundation’s historic Pueblo and Navajo collections are explored alongside works by contemporary Native American artistsThis richly illustrated book makes the Barnes Foundation’s exceptional collection of Native American art from the Southwest available to the public for the first time. Collector and educator Albert C. Barnes traveled to the U.S. Southwest in 1930 and 1931 and, deeply impressed by the generative art practices he saw there, formed a collection of Pueblo and Navajo pottery, textiles, and jewelry. Water, Wind, Breath illuminates the materials, forms, and designs of the objects as they relate to Pueblo and Navajo histories and ideas. The book blends postcolonial and Indigenous perspectives, introducing readers to living artistic traditions filled with purpose, intention, and a deeply embedded spirituality that connects places, practices, and Native identities. Works by contemporary Native American artists are juxtaposed with historic pieces, illuminating the connections between heritage traditions and modern practices.Distributed for the Barnes FoundationExhibition Schedule:The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia(February 20–May 15, 2022)

Totaling approximately 40,000 objects, the University Museum's ethnographic holdings represent native peoples from ten North American culture areas-the Arctic, Subarctic, Northwest Coast, California, Plateau, Great Basin, Southwest, Great Plains, Northeast, and the Southeast. This guide highlights the strength of the collections and demonstrates how objects are tied to history and people living within different cultural and social contexts. It also underscores that objects have different multiple meanings. Some objects illustrate intertribal relations; others best reflect collecting attitudes at the turn of the century when much of the Museum's collections was acquired. Visitors and off-site readers will learn about such related archival resources as documentation and photographs, past and present Museum exhibitions, current research, repatriation, and contemporary collections development.

The dynamic discourse stimulated by 78 magnificent objects created by Native Americans over the years, now housed in the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, and the responses of contemporary Native Americans to those objects forms the core of this book. As seen in these vibrant pages, the Museum is not a place of dead objects from the past. It is, rather, a place of people and ideas about human societies and cultures, a place of living, active objects, a place where the present can connect to the past. The volume editors frame important issues and concepts-the nature of Native American identity in the past and present, indigenous sovereignty, the active destruction of Native American cultures and languages over the past half-millennium, along with their perseverance and strength to survive, and, finally, the power of ancestors. As Richard M. Leventhal, the Museum's Williams Director, notes in his Foreword, the Native American scholars and artists who contribute to this book are assisting the Museum in its attempt to become a more integral part of today's world. It is the preservation of ideas embodied within objects from the past and present that allows for the representation and strength of Native American identity.