LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Native American Art: Native Americans
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What first attracted Reno to Native American art were baskets and pottery. But, there was little or no information about the artists. Baskets for example weren’t signed. While pottery could be identified by tribal techniques and characteristic, it wasn’t signed. For example, Acoma, San Ildefonso, Zuni and Hopi Mesas still paint deer, birds, flowers, geometric designs and identifiable symbols of their villages onto their pots. New techniques are ... used.
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Other fakes are actually made of cast stone simulating actual Eskimo art carvings and wood for imitation Native American carvings. These fakes, which are harder to distinguish from authentic artwork, are often hand carved reproductions of an original piece of artwork. Workshops have illegally reproduced hundreds of copies without the artisan’s permission. The counterfeiting companies would then attach some type of tag that claims the fake pieces were influenced by aboriginal artisans and even background information on the Native designs used in the artwork. Some even go as far as adding in Inuit syllabics on the bottom of the fake Inuit Eskimo art carvings.
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Native Americans have been depicted by American artists in various ways at different historical periods. During the period when America was first being colonized, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the artist John White made watercolors and engravings of the people native to the southeastern states. John White’s images were, for the most part, faithful likenesses of the people he observed. Later the artist Theodore de Bry used White’s original watercolors to make a book of engravings entitled, A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia. In his book, de Bry often altered the poses and features of White’s figures to make them appear more European, probably in order to make his book more marketable to a European audience. During the period that White and de Bry were working, when Europeans were first coming into contact with native Americans, there was a large interest and curiosity in native American cultures by Europeans, which would have created the demand for a book like de Bry’s.
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Artifacts of American Indian art history have been preserved in such places as the Museum of the American Indian (Santa Fe, New Mexico), Museum of the American Indian (New York City), and the Museum of Mankind (London, England). As far back as 12,000 years ago, the first Indians began to inhabit North America. Remains of their art, in the forms of stone carvings and pottery, have been found all over the country. These were, of course, crude forerunners of the much finer artifacts of American Indian art found within the last 2,000 years. Most had earth tones of brown, red, and black and pottery was usually painted with images of nature, animals, or spiritual symbols.
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Organized by region, this handsomely illustrated celebration of Native American arts and crafts splices an absorbing text, 290 color plates, numerous photographs and extended captions. The study demonstrates how clothes, baskets, Navajo weavings, Hopi kachina dolls, jewelry, quillwork, pottery, carvings and ceremonial objects fit into the very fabric of Native American societies. At the same time, the authors provocatively argue that American Indian art, far from being conservative and firmly anchored in the past, has been on the cutting edge of the historical present, continually reinventing its means of expression to absorb and accommodate cultural change. The album concludes with an arresting survey of 20th-century Native painting, sculpture, photography, prints and performance art, in all of which ancient images, symbols and visual metaphors take on new meanings. Penney is a curator at the Detroit Institute of Arts; Longfish, a Seneca/Tuscarora, is an artist and professor at UC-Davis.
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The essence of Native American art is the link it provides between spirit, myth and the natural world. Historically, art ... provided the expression of a tribe's unique ideas and identity–ties to ancestry were rooted in color, material and design. Since the 1960s, however, modern Native American artists have become more open to new techniques while holding fast to the heart of their heritage.
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