NORTH AMERICAN INDIAN ART - First Edition [R]

NORTH AMERICAN INDIAN ART - First Edition

By Peter T. Furst and Jill L. Furst

Publisher: Rizzoli, New York, 1982

Soft Cover, first edition, 1982, 236 pages, profusely illustrated in color

Table of Contents

1.     “ . . . To Beautify the World”

2.     Arts of the Southwest

3.     Arts of California

4.     Arts of the Northwest Coast

5.     Arts of the Eskimos

6.     Arts of the Plains

7.     Arts of the Eastern Woodlands

The six areas whose religious and decorative arts are illustrated in these pages—from the semi-arid Southwest, with its cultural mix of long-time sedentary, corn-growing villages and sheep herders, through nonagricultural California and the Pacific Northwest to the Arctic shore, and across the Plains to the eastern Woodlands, with its Iroquois and Algonquian farmers—were selected because they represent most of the principal environments and lifeways of the first inhabitants. They also give a representative cross section of most of the major styles, materials, and functions of the Native American arts during the past two centuries, from the purely spiritual to decorative but still extraordinarily high-quality art made for the white market. 

Of course, selection means frustration: lasting reminders of imagination, taste, and skill were produced beyond the environmental and cultural boundaries of these areas that could not be included—the Subarctic, the Plateau, the coast between California and British Columbia, for example,  or the Southeast with its remarkable sophisticated tradition of archaeological art reminiscent, in some respects, of ancient Mexico, and its historic cultures that were uprooted and driven west by the relentless advance of white colonization before there was any interest at all in preserving the Native arts for posterity.