The art of Native America is among the oldest continuous artistic traditions on the continent, and among the most alive. A Pueblo potter coiling clay today uses a method practiced in the same valleys for many centuries, while a painter trained at a contemporary art school may be reworking the same symbols in an entirely new language. Understanding this art means holding both facts at once. In this guide, we trace the history of Native American and Southwest art through its principal mediums: pottery, jewelry, painting and sculpture. We then look at the traditions that grew alongside them in the region, from the painters of Taos to Western art, abstraction and the folk art of Mexico and Hispanic New Mexico. Each section introduces a subject and points to a more detailed guide.
Our overview of traditional Native American art explores the balance between inherited forms and individual innovation, and our collector's guide offers a practical introduction for those beginning a collection.
For most of its history, objects we now admire as art were made to be used: vessels for storing water and grain, ornaments worn in daily life and ceremony, images painted on hide or rock, tools shaped with evident care. Beauty and function were never separate. Modern history begins in the late nineteenth century when railways brought travelers and traders. The market shaped what artists made, but also gave makers new recognition. Over the following century, signed works by named artists moved from trading posts into museums. The line between craft and fine art largely disappeared.
Two terms are worth knowing. "Native American art" refers to work by Native American artists, in any style. "Southwest art" is a regional term covering art of the American Southwest, including Native work but also Hispanic traditions. Both overlap constantly. This guide focuses on the Southwest, where Santa Fe has served for more than a century as a meeting point.
Joy Navasie (Frog Woman), Small Mouth Polychrome Pottery. View Work
Pottery is most closely associated with the Pueblos of New Mexico and Arizona. Traditional Pueblo pottery is built by hand from coils of local clay, smoothed, coated with slip, painted with mineral or plant pigments and fired outdoors. Each Pueblo developed its own clays and designs. Two revivals shaped modern history: Nampeyo, a Hopi-Tewa potter working in the late nineteenth century, drew on ancient Sikyatki designs. Maria and Julian Martinez of San Ildefonso Pueblo developed black-on-black ware in 1918. Regional character varies: Acoma is known for thin walls and crisp painting on white slip, Santa Clara for deeply carved blackware developed by Sarafina Tafoya and Margaret Tafoya, and Hopi for warm golden tones from yellowware. Family lineages remain central.
Our guide to Pueblo pottery traditions examines forms and materials pueblo by pueblo, and a companion article explains how to identify authentic Native American pottery.
Jewelry began with shell and stone. Turquoise from the Cerrillos Hills, shell traded from the Gulf of California and the Pacific. Silver arrived in the mid-nineteenth century when Navajo smiths learned from Mexican silversmiths. Zuni artists applied their lapidary skill to silver, developing needlepoint and petit point styles. Hopi artists developed the overlay technique in the late 1930s and 1940s.
Our guide to traditional Native American jewelry follows these regional styles and the stones behind them. Individual hallmarks became common in the second half of the twentieth century, and learning to read them is an essential skill. Our guide to Native American jewelry hallmarks explains how marks developed and how to use them with care. In Santa Fe, Native artists sell under the portal of the Palace of the Governors every day, through a program run by the New Mexico History Museum.
Textiles and baskets are among the most accomplished arts of the Southwest, sometimes overlooked beside pottery and jewelry. Navajo weavers learned the upright loom from Pueblo neighbors and developed wearing blankets prized by Plains nations leaders, later transitioning to rugs. In the late nineteenth century, traders encouraged weavers to make rugs for eastern markets, and distinct regional styles emerged named for trading posts.
Basketry has an even longer history. Apache and Tohono O'odham weavers made coiled baskets of remarkable technical refinement. Few are made today in the old styles, and fine early examples are highly sought. Both weaving and basketry share a vocabulary of geometric design with pottery.
Earl Biss, Riders Across the Plains. View Work
Painting has deep roots in rock art and ceremonial murals. Plains artists of the late nineteenth century recorded battles and daily life on ledger book pages in a flat, linear style. Native American ledger art remains a living tradition: contemporary ledger art received its own category at Santa Fe Indian Market in 2009.
Easel painting emerged in the early twentieth century, when artists at San Ildefonso Pueblo began painting in watercolor. In September 1932, Dorothy Dunn opened the Studio at Santa Fe Indian School. Dunn encouraged students to paint Native subjects in a flat, two-dimensional style drawn from pottery painting. Pablita Velarde of Santa Clara Pueblo was among the first women to enroll, painted Pueblo life, and completed a series of more than 70 paintings for Bandelier National Monument from 1937 to 1943. Allan Houser came to the Studio in 1934 and later became the most influential Native sculptor.
Navajo, Yei Rug. View Work
IAIA opened in Santa Fe in 1962 with a different philosophy: Native students should have access to the full range of modern art. Early faculty included Fritz Scholder and Allan Houser. The first students came to be called the Miracle Generation. Painters T.C. Cannon and Kevin Red Star emerged from those classes, along with Earl Biss, whose richly layered paintings of Plains riders drew on modern and abstract art. Scholder challenged the romantic image of the Native American with expressionist canvases.
Later artists including Hopi-Tewa painter and sculptor Dan Namingha (great-great-grandson of Nampeyo) and Navajo painter Tony Abeyta (son of Studio painter Narciso Abeyta) continued to move freely between ancestral imagery and contemporary form.
Three-dimensional work has ancient roots: Pueblo clay figures, stone animals carved at Zuni, katsina figures carved from cottonwood root. In 1964, Helen Cordero of Cochiti Pueblo created the first storyteller figure, a seated grandfather covered with listening children. That first storyteller is now in the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe. Modern Native sculpture owes most to Allan Houser, who turned from painting to stone and bronze and became the first Native American to receive the National Medal of Arts. His students and successors, along with artists such as Tammy Garcia of Santa Clara Pueblo, who carries the carved geometry of Pueblo pottery into bronze, made sculpture one of the most dynamic fields.
Our guide to Native American sculptors explores the materials they use and the lineages that connect them.
The Southwest also shaped the history of American painting more broadly. In 1915, six painters trained in Paris and New York founded the Taos Society of Artists. Their images of Taos Pueblo and Hispanic villages reached audiences across the country through traveling exhibitions and Santa Fe Railway calendars. After the Society ended, modernists drawn by Mabel Dodge Luhan made Taos one of the centers of avant-garde painting in the United States. Santa Fe developed its own colony in parallel. In 1921, five young painters formed Los Cinco Pintores. Together the two towns made northern New Mexico one of the most important regional art centers in the country.
Tony Abeyta, Evening Dance. View Work
Western art, the art of the American West as both place and idea, is closely linked to the Southwest but has its own history. It runs from the artist-explorers of the nineteenth century to Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell, who turned the working cowboy into an American icon, and on to the Cowboy Artists of America, founded in 1965. In recent decades, Native American and Hispanic artists have widened the genre. The Whitney Western Art Museum in Cody, Wyoming, and the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City preserve its history. Our guide to famous Western artists traces that story from Remington to the present.
The landscape of the Southwest, with horizontal bands of mesa and sky and intense light, has drawn abstract painters for a century. The Taos Moderns worked in abstract and semi-abstract idioms from the 1940s onward. Agnes Martin made Taos her home, and the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos devotes a gallery to her work. Abstraction also has deep Native roots: the geometric designs of pottery, basketry, beadwork and textiles are abstract compositions. Our introduction to styles and techniques of abstract art offers a foundation for new collectors, and a dedicated article explores Native American and Southwest abstract art.
The Southwest was part of New Spain and then Mexico. Hispanic traditions run as deep as any in the region. In northern New Mexico, santeros carved and painted images of saints since the eighteenth century: bultos in the round and retablos on flat wooden panels. Each July, the Traditional Spanish Market is held on the Santa Fe Plaza. South of the border, the folk arts of Mexico encompass an extraordinary range: painted wood, ceramics, textiles. The Museum of International Folk Art holds the vast collection of Alexander Girard, more than 100,000 objects gathered on trips to Mexico. In Mata Ortiz, Chihuahua, Juan Quezada taught himself to recreate ancient Paquime pottery, and by the mid-1970s had launched a movement that supports an entire community.
Our guide to traditional forms of Mexican folk art introduces these media, and a companion article explains how to buy authentic Mexican art.
Julia Arriola, Eagle Guardian. View Work
Federal law has prohibited selling goods falsely presented as Indian-made since 1935. The Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990 is an effective truth-in-advertising law protecting both artists and buyers. Older objects are governed by other laws. NAGPRA (1990) protects human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects and objects of cultural patrimony. Federal law also restricts the removal and sale of archaeological material from public and tribal lands.
Our guide to identifying Native American artifacts explains these laws and what they mean for collectors. The legal framework reflects a broader principle: some objects were made to be shared with the world, while others belong to the ceremonial life of a community and were never meant to leave it. Respecting that distinction is part of understanding Native American art.
Few places offer as many opportunities to study this history in person as Santa Fe. On Museum Hill, the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture presents Native art from ancient times to the present, while the neighboring Museum of Spanish Colonial Art and Museum of International Folk Art cover Hispanic and folk traditions. The Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian adds further perspective. Downtown, the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts presents work by living artists. Each August, Santa Fe Indian Market, first held in 1922, fills the Plaza with work by Native artists from across North America. Together with Spanish Market in July, it makes Santa Fe one of the few cities where the full range of Southwestern traditions can be seen and bought directly from their makers.
For those beginning a collection: spend time with great examples before buying. Focus at first on one medium or one region. Ask for a clear written description of every significant piece. Buy work that continues to hold your attention. We have worked in Santa Fe since 1988, and every piece we offer carries our unconditional guarantee of authenticity.
The history of Native American art is not a closed chapter. It is a living conversation between ancient forms and contemporary voices, and between the communities that created these traditions and the collectors who care for them.