Gallery -(Click on the picture for a larger image)

Baskets

Basketry is one of the oldest, important, and interesting of all the Indian textile arts. Few people appreciate baskets because they do not realize the time, effort, and skill that go into creating a basket. A basket weaver must know what seasons to gather materials and where they grow.  In addition to gathering material, basket weavers must harvest, dry, preserve, and prepare the plants for use. Preparing the materials can include bleaching, dyeing, soaking, stripping and trimming. After all this preparation had been done, the time-consuming task of weaving begins. 

The baskets had many uses in the different tribes. For instance, they were used for ceremonial purposes in addition to being used as a means of gathering, transporting, storing, cooking and serving food. Most Navajo curing rights require the use of a basket in some portion of the ceremony. Many tribes also place cornmeal into baskets for use as a prayer offering or blessing during religious ceremonies. The Pomo people, who belonged to the North-Central California coast, were among the most skillful basket makers in America. They made nice burden baskets for carrying and processing food. Burden baskets were also used by the Apache's in their puberty rites, held for a young woman who has come of age. Baskets were also made as gifts or as presentations to honored people.

The Pomo Indians used slender willow stems and sometimes hazel in almost all of the foundations of their baskets. On decorative baskets they used beads, bits of shell, and various feathers in addition to slender willow stems. Women were usually the main basket weavers in the tribe, and women always did the designs on the baskets.

To appeal to a collector's interest for particular types of designs and shapes, the basket makers started to make baskets with different shapes, colors and designs. Distinctive shapes such as bottleneck baskets and more literal design elements such as human figures or animal forms were in great demand in the early collector market. However, these basketry shapes and designs were only produced by a few tribal groups and then only occasionally. Thus, borrowing of shapes from other tribal groups became, if not common practice among some of the basket makers.

Prices of baskets are determined by the fineness of weave, for instance the number of stitches and coils per inch, symmetry, complexity of design, size and shape, as well as materials. Simply the more time and skill that go into creating baskets, the more they will cost. Collecting Baskets is very popular now because the materials needed to make baskets are no longer in abundance due to the industrialization of society depleting the free and natural land, which in turn limits the supply while the demand is high, thus increasing the value of the baskets.

Handmade Art

These pictures show the time-consuming and meticulous efforts of Indian artisans in producing their art. Many Indian artists take pride and satisfaction in creating handmade art because they are drawing from their culture to create the art. Thus, traditional handmade art continues to carry their culture.

Jewelry

The first  picture is of various jewelry that are made with turquoise, a semiprecious stone found in many arid regions of the world. The second picture is a necklace called a jocia made with beads of turquoise. The third picture is a necklace of a shell covered with bits of shell and stone, and the last item is a bracelet made by the late Hopi artist Charles Loloma that has a heart shaped turquoise stone on the side.

Pottery

Pots were used in the same manner as baskets. They were used in ceremonial acts, for cooking, storage jars etc. Both form and design varied from one tribe to next, just as in all other forms of Indian art. By the early 1900's though the production of pottery had decreased due to the introduction of metal containers. But at the same time demand for small pots increased, so pottery was then made with ornamentations, such as turquoise stones, painted patterns, and carvings of various forms, for sale. For an in depth look about the history of pottery check the Women Artists of the American West website. Again, prices for pottery depends on the intricacy in which the pots are made. For instance, on the Pueblo Pottery page prices for Hopi made pottery can range from the hundreds into the thousands of dollars.

Navajo Rugs

Weaving is an ancient form of artistic expression that is an outstanding example of historic and contemporary primitive art. Navajo Indians learned how to weave cotton blankets and rugs from the Pueblo Indians of the Southwest. During the mid-1500s, the Spanish invaded the Southwest and brought sheep, which then replaced cotton with wool. The Spanish had a big influence on Navajo weaving with their trade goods, tapestry-weaving techniques, and Spanish-Mexican textile design. The 1800s brought about the Classical period in which Navajo weavers experimented with traditional  striped designs and employed the tapestry-weave technique. Early experimentation with rugs displayed various arrangements of stripes that led into the development of diagonal lines, producing shapes such as squares, triangles, and wavy bands. By the 1880s, many tourists passed through the Southwest on the Sante Fe Railroad, thus increasing the market demand of rugs.

Art collectors value Navajo rugs and blankets because some rare old Navajo weavings have sold for over six figures , while newer rugs can sell for about five figures. It takes 300 to 400 hours of work to produce a single rug, depending upon the intricacy of the design. The work that goes into creating a rug begins with the shearing of the wool from sheep, cleaning the wool, straightening the wool, which is called carding, dyeing the wool to get the desired color, and spinning. Today, many weavers send out their wool to cleaned, carded, spun and sometimes dyed. There are several different techniques to weaving. The most basic and simple  was the plain weave, which used the over and under plaited basketry-weave. Tapestry-weave is  the dominant Navajo weaving technique for the last two hundred years. The Pueblo use the Twill weave mostly. Lastly there was the pulled-warp or wedge-weave technique that forced the normally vertical warps into horizontal positions. 

Miscellaneous Art

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1. Northern Plains type of clothing    2. Fighting Dagger              3. Moon Mask               4. Hopi Fetishes             5. Pipe Tomahawk