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Totem Pole Carving

Norman Tait, Bringing a Log to Life

By Vickie Jensen

In 1985, photographer and writer Vickie Jensen spent three months with Nisga’a artist Norman Tait and his crew of young carvers as they transformed a raw cedar log into a forty-two-foot totem pole for the...

Unsettling Native Art Histories on the Northwest Coast

By Kathryn Bunn-Marcuse, Aldona Jonaitis

Inseparable from its communities, Northwest Coast art functions aesthetically and performatively beyond the scope of non-Indigenous scholarship, from demonstrating kinship connections to manifesting spiritual power. Contributors to this volume foreground Indigenous understandings in recognition of...

Proud Raven, Panting Wolf

Carving Alaska's New Deal Totem Parks

By Emily L. Moore

Among Southeast Alaska’s best-known tourist attractions are its totem parks, showcases for monumental wood sculptures by Tlingit and Haida artists. Although the art form is centuries old, the parks date back only to the waning...

Shifting Grounds

Landscape in Contemporary Native American Art

By Kate Morris

A distinctly Indigenous form of landscape representation is emerging among contemporary Indigenous artists from North America. For centuries, landscape painting in European art typically used representational strategies such as single-point perspective to lure viewers—and settlers—into...

Hearts of Our People

Native Women Artists

By Jill Ahlberg Yohe, Teri Greeves

Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists explores the artistic achievements of Native women and establishes their rightful place in the art world. This landmark book includes works of art from antiquity to the present,...

Becoming Mary Sully

Toward an American Indian Abstract

By Philip J. Deloria

Dakota Sioux artist Mary Sully was the great-granddaughter of respected nineteenth-century portraitist Thomas Sully, who captured the personalities of America’s first generation of celebrities (including the figure of Andrew Jackson immortalized on the twenty-dollar bill)....

Understanding Northwest Coast Indigenous Jewelry

The Art, the Artists, the History

By Alexander Dawkins. Foreword by Corrine Hunt

Indigenous hand-engraved jewelry from the Pacific Northwest Coastis among the most distinctive, innovative, and highly sought-after art being produced in North America today. But these artworks are more than just stunning—every bracelet, ring, and pendant...

Form and Relation

Contemporary Native Ceramics

By Jami C. Powell, Anya Montiel, Sequoia Miller, Courtney Leonard, and Morgan E. Freeman

Form and Relation showcases the versatility of ceramics and its many forms through the work of seven contemporary Indigenous artists from across what is now the United States. Bringing together recent acquisitions, commissioned works, and...

Continuum

Native North American Art at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

By Gaylord Torrence, W. Richard West Jr., Stephanie Fox Knappe

This landmark publication brings North American Indigenous art to the fore with the presentation of 280 objects from the culturally and aesthetically rich collection of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. More than two-thirds of the...

Sonny Assu

A Selective History

By Sonny Assu. With Candice Hopkins, Marianne Nicolson, Richard Van Camp, and Ellyn Walker

Through large-scale installation, sculpture, photography, printmaking, and painting, Sonny Assu merges the aesthetics of Indigenous iconography with a pop-art sensibility. This stunning retrospective spans over a decade of Assu’s career, highlighting more than 120 full-color...

Art of the Northwest Coast

By Aldona Jonaitis

Originally published in 2006, Art of the Northwest Coast offers an expansive history of this great tradition, from the earliest known works to those made at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Although non-Natives often...

Before Yellowstone

Native American Archaeology in the National Park

By Douglas H. MacDonald

Since 1872, visitors have flocked to Yellowstone National Park to gaze in awe at its dramatic geysers, stunning mountains, and impressive wildlife. Yet more than a century of archaeological research shows that the wild landscape...

Preston Singletary

Raven and the Box of Daylight

By Miranda Belarde-Lewis and John Drury

The story Raven and the Box of Daylight, which tells how Raven transformed the world and brought light to the people by releasing the stars, moon, and sun, holds great significance to the Tlingit people...

Northwest Coast Indian Art

An Analysis of Form, 50th Anniversary Edition

By Bill Holm

The 50th anniversary edition of this classic work on the art of Northwest Coast Indians now offers color illustrations for a new generation of readers along with reflections from contemporary Northwest Coast artists about the...

In the Spirit of the Ancestors

Contemporary Northwest Coast Art at the Burke Museum

By Robin K. Wright, Kathryn Bunn-Marcuse

In the Spirit of the Ancestors celebrates the vitality of contemporary Pacific Northwest Coast art by showcasing a selection of objects from the Burke Museum's collection of more than 2,400 late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century Native American...

The Raven Steals the Light

By Bill Reid, Claude Levi-Strauss

This new edition of a collaboration between one of the finest living artists in North America and one of Canada’s finest poets includes a new introduction by the distinguished anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. Ten masterful, complex...

Objects of Myth and Memory

American Indian Art at the Brooklyn Museum

By Diana Fane, Ira Jacknis, and Lise M. Breen

A Wealth of Thought

Franz Boas on Native American Art

By Franz Boas. Edited by Aldona Jonaitis

Although Franz Boas--one of the most influential anthropologists of the twentieth century--is best known for his voluminous writings on cultural, physical, and linguistic anthropology, he is also recognized for breaking new ground in the study...

Contemporary Coast Salish Art

By Rebecca Blanchard and Nancy Davenport

By carving, weaving, and painting their stories into ceremonial and utilitarian objects, Coast Salish artists render tangible the words and ideas that have been the architecture of this remarkable Pacific Northwest Coast culture. The Coast...

Lelooska

The Life of a Northwest Coast Artist

By Chris Friday

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...