Native American art is at the heart of everything we do. Our Native American art collection is the broadest expression of that commitment, bringing together paintings, sculpture, textiles, jewelry, ceramics, and ceremonial objects by Indigenous artists from across the Southwest and beyond. These are works of extraordinary cultural depth and artistic achievement, created by artists who draw on traditions stretching back thousands of years while speaking with a voice that is entirely their own.
Native American art encompasses the visual traditions of the hundreds of distinct Indigenous nations and communities that have inhabited North America since time immemorial. In the context of the American Southwest, it includes the pottery, weaving, painting, sculpture, jewelry, and ceremonial object making of the Pueblo peoples, the Navajo, the Apache, the Ute, the Hopi, and many other nations, each with their own distinctive visual language and cultural tradition.
What unites this extraordinary diversity is a shared understanding of art as something inseparable from life. The designs, materials, and techniques used carry meaning that connects the maker and the object to history, ceremony, and the natural world in ways that purely decorative art does not.
The history of Native American art in the Southwest is inseparable from the history of the region itself. For thousands of years before European contact, the Indigenous peoples of the Southwest were producing art of extraordinary sophistication, from the geometric pottery of the ancestral Pueblo peoples to the rock art left on canyon walls across the region. The arrival of Spanish colonizers brought profound disruption to Native American communities throughout the Southwest, but it did not extinguish their artistic traditions. In many cases, those traditions absorbed new influences and materials while maintaining their essential cultural character.
The twentieth century saw a dramatic flowering of Native American art in the Southwest, driven in part by the establishment of the Institute of American Indian Art in Santa Fe, which gave Indigenous artists the training and the platform to bring their work to a national and international audience.
The artists in this collection represent that tradition at its fullest. Tony Abeyta, a Diné artist recognized as a Native treasure by the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, brings a lifetime of cultural knowledge to mixed media paintings of international acclaim. Dan Namingha carries a family artistic tradition into its fifth generation, transforming the symbols of his Hopi-Tewa heritage into contemporary paintings of remarkable originality. Stan Natchez fuses traditional Native American imagery with the symbols of American commercial culture in paintings that are as culturally pointed as they are visually compelling. Veloy Vigil brought a masterful command of composition and color to paintings that shift between Native Pueblo imagery and Abstract Expressionism. BC Nowlin, whose visionary work has been exhibited in Indigenous museum collections throughout America, reflects a deep and lifelong engagement with the Native American communities of New Mexico.
Collectors interested in specific dimensions of the Native American art tradition will find focused selections throughout our broader collection. Our pottery collection brings together ceramic works from across the Pueblo traditions, while our jewelry collection features silver and stone work rooted in Navajo, Zuni, and other Native American metalworking traditions. And for works that engage with the ceremonial and spiritual life of Native American communities, our fetishes and kachinas collection offers a compelling and historically significant selection.