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In this fascinating study of Northwest Coast art, Jonathan Meuli has not only outlined a history of ideas associated with Northwest Coast art objects from pre-Contact time to the present day, but has also examined the ways in which the physical location and contexts in which the objects are produced has helped to determine their meanings. Locating his linear historical narrative within a wider exploration of ethnographic art ideas, which emphasizes links across cultures, Meuli examines the differing attitudes towards Northwest Coast material culture, particularly as these are embodied in oral mythic narratives, collection methods and architectural constructions.
The first American national museum designed and run by indigenous peoples, the Smithsonian Institution?s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington DC opened in 2004. It represents both the United States as a singular nation and the myriad indigenous nations within its borders. Constructed with materials closely connected to Native communities across the continent, the museum contains more than 800,000 objects and three permanent galleries and routinely holds workshops and seminar series. This first comprehensive look at the National Museum of the American Indian encompasses a variety of perspectives, including those of Natives and non-Natives, museum employees, and outside scholars across disciplines such as cultural studies and criticism, art history, history, museum studies, anthropology, ethnic studies, and Native American studies. The contributors engage in critical dialogues about key aspects of the museum?s origin, exhibits, significance, and the relationship between Native Americans and other related museums.
The author goes on to explore a startling shift at midcentury in the perception of the tropical forest--from the jungle, a place that endangers human life, to the rain forest, a place that is itself endangered.
In this concise, student-friendly look at the public appropriation of archaeology, Troy Lovata examines outright hoaxes, fanciful re-creations, artistic representations, commercial enterprises, and discredited replicas of the past.
Based on two international conferences held at Cornell University and the Freie Universität of Berlin in 2010 and 2015, this volume is the first ever to explicitly address the destruction of plaster cast collections of ancient Mediterranean and Western sculpture. Focusing on Europe, the Americas, and Japan, art historians, archaeologists and a literary scholar discuss how different museum and academic traditions – national as well as disciplinary –, notions of value and authenticity, or colonialism impacted the fate of collections. The texts offer detailed documentation of degrees of destruction by spectacular acts of defacement, demolition, discarding, or neglect. They also shed light on the accompanying discourses regarding aesthetic ideals, political ideologies, educational and scholarly practices, or race. With destruction being understood as a critical part of reception, the histories of cast collections defy the traditional, homogenous narrative of rise and decline. Their diverse histories provide critical evidence for rethinking the use and display of plaster cast collections in the contemporary moment.
As the Great Depression touched every corner of America, the New Deal promoted indigenous arts and crafts as a means of bootstrapping Native American peoples. But New Deal administrators' romanticization of indigenous artists predisposed them to favor pre-industrial forms rather than art that responded to contemporary markets. In A New Deal for Native Art, Jennifer McLerran reveals how positioning the native artist as a pre-modern Other served the goals of New Deal programs—and how this sometimes worked at cross-purposes with promoting native self-sufficiency. She describes federal policies of the 1930s and early 1940s that sought to generate an upscale market for Native American arts and ...
During the global Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, many called upon the United States to finally face its painful past. Tim Gruenewald’s new book is an in-depth investigation of how that past is currently remembered at the national museums in Washington, DC. Curating America’s Painful Past reveals how the tragic past is either minimized or framed in a way that does not threaten dominant national ideologies. Gruenewald analyzes the National Museum of American History (NMAH), the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), and the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). The NMAH, the nation’s most popul...
The seventy-five masterpieces presented here, drawn from public and private American collections, are among the most celebrated icons of African art, works that are superb artistic creations as well as expressions of a society's most profound conceptions about its beginnings. All are reproduced in color and are accompanied by entries that illuminate the distinctive cultural contexts that inspired their creation and informed their appreciation."--BOOK JACKET.
Don Smith - or Lelooska, as he was usually called - was a prominent Native American artist and storyteller in the Pacific Northwest. Born in 1933 of “mixed blood” Cherokee heritage, he was adopted as an adult by the prestigious Kwakiutl Sewid clan and had relationships with elders from a wide range of tribal backgrounds. Initially producing curio items for sale to tourists and regalia for Oregon Indians, Lelooska emerged in the late 1950s as one of a handful of artists who proved crucial to the renaissance of Northwest Coast Indian art. He also developed into a supreme performer and educator, staging shows of dances, songs, and storytelling. During the peak years, from the 1970s to the early 1990s, the family shows with Lelooska as the centerpiece attracted as many as 30,000 people annually. In this book, historian and family friend Chris Friday shares and annotates interviews that he conducted with Lelooska, between 1993 and ending shortly before the artist's death, in 1996. This is the story of a man who reached, quite literally, a million or more people in his lifetime and whose life was at once exceptional and emblematic.
"Washington, DC is Indian land, but Indigenous peoples are often left out of the national narrative of the United States and erased in the capital city. To redress this myth of invisibility, Indigenous DC: Native Peoples and the Nation's Capital maps and analyzes historical and contemporary sites of Indigenous importance in the District of Columbia. This manuscript derives from the "Guide to Indigenous DC," a public history iOS mobile application and decolonial mapping project. Now, as a full length manuscript, Indigenous DC intervenes in US History, Native American and Indigenous Studies, and Critical Geography Studies to reveal the centrality of Native peoples to the history of the District of Columbia, highlight Indigenous contributions to the United States and its capital city, and emphasize that all American land is Indian land"--