CategoriesCultural and Religious Styles
Native American, First Nations, and Alaska Native Art
Art by Indigenous peoples of the United States and Canada, from ancient mound-builder works and Northwest Coast carving to contemporary practice.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for Native American, First Nations, and Alaska Native Art are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
Hundreds of nations across what are now the United States and Canada have made art for millennia, and no single style unites them. Hopewell artists in the Ohio valley cut hands and birds from sheets of mica, Mississippian artists at Cahokia engraved shell and hammered copper, and Mimbres potters in New Mexico painted bowls with crisp black animals around 1100. On the Northwest Coast, Haida, Tlingit and Kwakwaka'wakw carvers developed formline design, the swelling black and red outlines on crest poles, boxes and Chilkat robes. Alaska Native carvers worked ivory and wood.
Colonisation, removals and bans on ceremonies broke many traditions, yet makers adapted. Maria Martinez of San Ildefonso Pueblo developed black-on-black pottery from about 1919, and Inuit artists at Kinngait began releasing prints in 1959. Norval Morrisseau founded the Woodland school in the 1960s, Allan Houser made monumental sculpture, and James Luna lay in a museum case as an exhibit in The Artifact Piece (1987).