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Book Reviews

Wheeler, Stephen M.

Patterson, Wade

The Rise of the Regional City: Spatial Development of the Albuquerque Metropolitan Area

Hutton, Paul Andrew

Silver Screen Desperado: Billy the Kid in the Movies

Dungan, Ron

English

He Is Constantly Angry: Eshkeldahsilah, White Mountain Apache Chief

Thompson, Jerry

Advance and Retreat: Lt. Franklin Cook Recalls the Battle of Valverde

Hendricks, Rick

Mandell, Gerald

Fernando de Valdés Llanos: Asturian Merchant of Parral, 1639-1651

Parezo, Nancy J.

Review Essay
INDIGENOUS PALETTES: SOUTHWEST NATIVE ART AND ARTISTS
Nancy J. Parezo
America has had a long love affair with Southwest Native American art.It has been admired, coveted, collected, analyzed, speculated on, and
discussed since contact. Native art is a major component of the southwest-
ern economy and helps shape regional identity. It is almost assumed that
anyone living in the Southwest has a Navajo rug, a Pueblo pot, a Tohono
O'odham basket, or a painting by an Indian artist in their living room. The
art market, which began in the sixteenth century, continues to expand, as
does our knowledge about the producers, purchasers, retailers, and the art
Indian Painters ofthe Southwest: The Deep Remembering. By Katherin L. Chase, foreword by
Diane Reyna. (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 2002. 95 pp. 80 color plates,
halftones, bibliography, index. $19.95 paper, ISBN 0-933452-66-7); Collective Willeto: The Vision-
ary Carvings ofa Navajo Artist. Contributions by Shonto Begay, Walter Hopps, Lee Kogan,
Greg LaChapelle, and John and Stephanie Smither, photographs by Bruce Hucko. (Santa Fe:
Museum of New Mexico Press, 2002. viii + 115 pp. 100 color plates, notes, bibliography. $45.00
cloth, ISBN 0-89°13-396-4, $29.95 paper, ISBN 0-89°13-397-2); Native America Collected: The
Culture ofan Art World. By Margaret Dubin. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,
2001. viii + 184 pp. Color plates, halftones, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95 cloth, ISBN 0-8263-
2174-7); and Pueblo Pottery Figurines: The Expressions ofCultural Perceptions in Clay. By Patricia
Fogelman Lange. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002. xi + 162 pp. 48 half-
tones, notes, bibliography, index. $45.00 cloth, ISBN 0-8263-2799-0). Nancy J. Parezo is Profes-
sor ofAmerican Studies at the University ofArizona. She has worked with Native artists for over
twenty-five years and currently has a book in press documenting the Native peoples who per- 199
formed at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition.
200 ~ NEW MEXICO HISTORICAL REVIEW VOLUME 81, NUMBER 2
itself. Literature on Native art is vast. In 1985 I published a bibliography of
published information on these topics; from the mid-1850s to 1985, over eleven
thousand articles and books had been published on art and material culture
produced by Southwest Indians. With a corpus ofworks this large, one might
think nothing is left about which to write. Over the last twenty years, how-
ever, books on Native art have continued to proliferate, reflecting changes in
academic and popular scholarship as well as the relationships among muse-
ums, collectors,.and Native artists and their communities.
Indian Painters ofthe Southwest: The Deep Remembering is a book about
a novel research project undertaken by the School of American Research
(SAR) under the direction of Katherin L. Chase, a writer and museum cu-
rator well versed in the history and aesthetics of painting. SAR is well known
for its outstanding collections and for its innovative programs that open the
doors to its intimidating but gorgeous vault for Indian artists to view the
work of others and hopefully to find inspiration for their own art. In 1988
Chase, along with Diane Reyna and Gary Yazzie, organized a gathering of
ten respected Pueblo and Navajo painters and asked them to reflect on and
share ideas about their art, struggles, goals, and cultural heritages. Artists
were also asked to contemplate the future directions their work might take.
Participating artists included Michael Kabotie (Hopi), Jeanette Katoney
(Navajo), Linda Lomahaftewa (Hopi/Choctaw), Felice Lucero (San Felipe),
Marcellus Medina (Zia), Diane Reyna (Taos), Mateo Romero (Cochiti),
Alex Seotewa (Zuni), Emmi Whitehorse (Navajo), and Gary Yazzie (Na-
vajo). A brief biography of each artist, along with examples of their works
and their feelings on their lives as artists, forms the heart of the book.
Indian Painters ofthe Southwest records the group's discussion so that oth-
ers can reflect on their insights and perspectives, best summarized by White-
horse as all their attempts to "take tradition and mold it into modern concepts
and a universal language" (p. 13)' This short book, richly illustrated with paint-
ings by the participants and examples from the SAR's extensive collections,
also includes discussion of the project "Deep Remembering," the project
goals, and an essay by Chase on Indian painting traditions in the American
Southwest. Her essay is an excellent overview of issues, cross-cultural influ-
ences, and artistic developments since the 1860s.
One of the insightful comments found in Indian Painters of the South-
west was written by Kathleen Whitaker in her introduction: "No longer can
the Native American canvas be annexed to the tenets of tribal and therefore
'primitive' art" (p. Il). It is too bad that the essayists who wrote for Collective
SPRING 2006 PAREZO -> 201
Willeto: The Visionary Carvings ofa Navajo Artist did not understand that
fact, for that is just what they did. The weakest of the four books reviewed
here, Collective Willeto is a catalogue that accompanied a 2002 exhibit of
works produced between 1961 and 1964 by Navajo carver Charlie Willeto.
The catalogue has gorgeous photographs that memorialize the intriguing
exhibit. The essays, however, are disappointing and often contain contra-
dictory information about Willeto, inaccuracies about Dine culture, and
universalizing folkloristic explanations that generally show a lack of basic
understanding about holistically interrelated Dine worldview, religion, and
aesthetics. The most tantalizing parts of this book are an all-too-short (two
page) thought piece by Dine artist Shonto Begay, which addresses Begay's
own work and his reactions to Willeto's art, and the scattered references to
Willeto and his family. Unfortunately, Willeto's biographical information is .
very sketchy, and does not even include some basic information -such as
Willeto's clans- that are essential for understanding the man and his work.
The catalogue left me wantirig more of the interview with Willeto's family
and less unnecessary speculation about Willeto's "collective unconscious"
motives and symbolism.
Collective Willeto is a book designed for collectors and connoisseurs, for
those who want to look at the art from a universalizing artistic perspective.
Although it attempts to include Dine perspectives, this is not a book for
scholars of Dine or Southwest Indian art and culture or for those interested
in the socioeconomic dynamics and political history of collecting. Native
America Collected by Margaret Dubin, however, is such a book. In this "criti-
cism of contemporary Native American fine arts," American Indian Studies
professor Dubin aims to write a comprehensive history of Native American
art that is politically informed. As many other scholars have discovered, this
is a worthy but daunting task. Dubin frankly admits she had to scale back
her ambitious goals and focus only on the elite market, eliminating from
her discussion the other culturally internal and cross-culturally external
markets that constitute the contemporary Native American art world. Dubin's
book, therefore, is about one type of collecting that is influential in the
Southwest and has had a tremendous impact on Native American artists.
The result of Dubin's observations, reflections, and impressive set of in-
terviews is a series of insightful postmodern essays on topics that inform
contemporary collecting and artistic criticism. The author discusses climen-
sions of collecting that have not been given the attention they deserve; her
chapter on museum exhibits and the problems inherent in artistic critiques
202? NEW MEXICO HISTORICAL REVIEW VOLUME 81, NUMBER 2
of contemporary works is particularly good. Dubin sees each essay as an
initial attempt to map significant features of the cross-cultural interactions
of producing, selling, and buying art. Further, these essays examine the
uneven distribution and constant negotiation of power in marketplace trans-
actions. Her book contains an excellent summary of the impact of colonial-
ism and capitalism on sections of the Native American art world and shows
how market demand has homogenized Western perceptions of what consti-
tutes "authentic" lndian art.
Native America Collected has much to offer those interested in Native
American art, although the book focuses on American culture. The book
includes a fairly complete literature review of the history of collecting and an
analysis of recent legislation that affects how Native American art is produced,
marketed, and sold. Native America Collected advances the development of
historically and politically sensitive artistic criticism and connoisseurship about
contemporary Native American fine art. Dubin's strength is how she pulls
together her thoughts and observations about American elite collecting in a
systematic manner. The book is well written and nicely illustrated.
Although Dubin's work is firmly embedded in contemporary critical cul-
hlral anthropology theory, Patricia Fogelman Lange strives to formulate a theory
of Puebloan artistic and aesthetic sensibilities that is ostensively non-anthro-
pological, one that rejects the "ethnographic other," yet relies heavily on over
one hundred years of anthropological research. Pueblo Pottery Figurines is a
theoretical work that explores aesthetic expressions and cultural perceptions
of Cochiti clay figurines. Lange, a postmodern art historian, critic, and artist
looks .at creative differences based on a sense of taste and how traditional
Puebloan (i.e., Keresan) senses of aesthetic appreciation differ from those
of Euroamericans and other Native groups. Most of the well-written, well-
illustrated, and intriguing book concentrates on Cochiti aesthetic knowledge.
Lange shows how this knowledge is functionally integrated into other aspects
of Cochiti culture and society and how these sensibilities have expanded to
include production for external markets over the last one hundred years. In
addition Lange explores how artists used the figurines to make artistic state-
ments of social and political criticism using techniques of symbolic inver-
sions and parody that negotiated realities and reflected cross-cultural power
relationships in the development of commodities.
As the body of literature that addresses Native art continues to grow, the
place of these four works in that literature will change. For the time being,
each makes a contribution by revealing or illuminating the relationships
betweeil Native art, artists, collectors, cultures, and the marketplace.


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Book Reviews

The Rise of the Regional City: Spatial Development of the Albuquerque Metropolitan Area

Silver Screen Desperado: Billy the Kid in the Movies

He Is Constantly Angry: Eshkeldahsilah, White Mountain Apache Chief

Advance and Retreat: Lt. Franklin Cook Recalls the Battle of Valverde

Book Reviews

Fernando de Valdés Llanos: Asturian Merchant of Parral, 1639-1651

Review Essay: Indigenous Palettes: Southwest Native Art and Artists

Book Reviews

Comanchero: José Piedad Tafoya, 1834–1913

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