Search results

Facing the monumental issues of our time. In a 2012 performance piece, Rebecca Belmore transformed an oak tree surrounded by monuments to colonialism in Toronto's Queens Park into a temporary "non-monument" to the Earth. For more than 30 years, she has given voice in her art to social and political issues, making her one of the most important contemporary artists working today. Employing a language that is both poetic and provocative, Belmore's art has tackled subjects such as water and land r...

In the aftermath of the sixteenth-century Spanish conquest of Mexico, Spanish friars and authorities partnered with indigenous rulers and savants to gather detailed information on Aztec history, religious beliefs, and culture. The pictorial books they created served the Spanish as aids to evangelization and governance, but their content came from the native intellectuals, painters, and writers who helped to create them. Examining the nine major surviving texts, preeminent Latin American art hist...

An in-depth exploration of the history, authentication, and modern relevance of Codice Maya de Mexico, the oldest surviving book of the Americas. Ancient Maya scribes recorded prophecies and astronomical observations on the pages of painted books. Although most were lost to decay or destruction, three pre-Hispanic Maya codices were known to have survived, when, in the 1960s, a fourth book that differed from the others appeared in Mexico under mysterious circumstances. After fifty years of debat...

Who owns the past and the objects that physically connect us to history? And who has the right to decide this ownership, particularly when the objects are sacred or, in the case of skeletal remains, human? Is it the museums that care for the objects or the communities whose ancestors made them? These questions are at the heart of Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits, an unflinching insider account by a leading curator who has spent years learning how to balance these controversial considerations....

This is a diverse and ground-breaking exploration of contemporary indigenous art from around the world. Close Encounters documents a ground-breaking exhibition of contemporary indigenous art with artists from Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Europe and South America. Through a myriad of histories, trajectories, tensions, collisions, and self-images, 34 artists imagine the future within the context of present experiences and past histories. By radically reconsidering encounter n...

"Uncommon Legacies" celebrates the power, significance, and exceptional artistic quality of one of the most important collections of early Native American art. Assembled in the course of trade and missionary activities beginning in the late eighteenth century, the spectacular examples illustrated provide a rare opportunity to observe the creativity of Native artists in response to their interactions with non-Natives. Included here are magnificently illustrated chapters on the art of the American...

Masks, bowls, bentwood boxes, and weavings from Native artists of the Northwest Coast grace museums around the world. Northwest Coast art has always been a changing and evolving tradition, as is evidenced by the varieties of style visible in artifacts collected from the area over the last two centuries. This richly informative book includes photographs of more than 160 objects from Seattle-area private collections and the Seattle Art Museum, grouped chronologically to illustrate evolutionary cha...

What makes Northwest Coast Native American art authentic? And why, when most of art history is a history of the avant-garde, is tradition so deeply valued by contemporary Native American artists and their patrons? In Privileging the Past, Judith Ostrowitz approaches these questions through a careful consideration of replicas, reproductions, and creative translations of past forms of Northwest Coast dances, ceremonies, masks, painted screens, and houses.Ostrowitz examines several different art f...

First in Canada is a unique expression of the many accomplishments Indigenous Canadians have made to Canadian society. As beautiful as it is informative, this perpetual calendar is a glimpse of 10,000 years in 365 days! Informative, innovative, and inspirational, First in Canada will take readers through one calendar year of Aboriginal history, providing visuals and details of past and contemporary achievements and challenges of First Nations, Metis, and Inuit peoples in Canada. It will appeal t...