The definitive guide to the richly imaginative folk art of the Navajo. Witty polka-dotted chickens. Purple pickup trucks sculpted out of mud. A Navajo grandma riding an orange cardboard giraffe. For more than two decades, Chuck and Jan Rosenak have been avid collectors of unique pieces of Navajo folk art like this. Their collection, research, and writing have helped to define and illustrate an art form that ranges from wooden carvings of eerie three-headed skinwalkers to vibrant pictures painted on old bed sheets. This new edition of the Rosenaks' groundbreakingNavajo Folk Artis the essential guide to a comic, intensely creative, truly American art.

Authors Chuck and Jan Rosenak, renowned collectors of American folk art, embarked in 1983 on a ten-year journey through one of the last outposts of America's shrinking West, the Navajo Nation. In the flickering firelight of a Yeibichai dance, in a sun-dappled brush arbor, in the cool of an adobe trading post, they found innovative folk art and the remarkable individuals behind the art. Among the Diné, the People, artists brave taboos to express their personal visions, picking up cardboard and cottonwood, clay and wool to produce wonderful, whimsical, warm-hearted creations. Within these pages, these artists receive the recognition they deserve.--From publisher description.

A survey of Navajo pictorial weaving which comprises over 170 examples selected from hundreds in museum and private collections as well as from major dealers in the field.

As the Great Depression touched every corner of America, the New Deal promoted indigenous arts and crafts as a means of bootstrapping Native American peoples. But New Deal administrators' romanticization of indigenous artists predisposed them to favor pre-industrial forms rather than art that responded to contemporary markets. In A New Deal for Native Art, Jennifer McLerran reveals how positioning the native artist as a pre-modern Other served the goals of New Deal programs—and how this sometimes worked at cross-purposes with promoting native self-sufficiency. She describes federal policies of the 1930s and early 1940s that sought to generate an upscale market for Native American arts and crafts. And by unraveling the complex ways in which commodification was negotiated and the roles that producers, consumers, and New Deal administrators played in that process, she sheds new light on native art’s commodity status and the artist’s position as colonial subject. In this first book to address the ways in which New Deal Indian policy specifically advanced commodification and colonization, McLerran reviews its multi-pronged effort to improve the market for Indian art through the Indian Arts and Crafts Board, arts and crafts cooperatives, murals, museum exhibits, and Civilian Conservation Corps projects. Presenting nationwide case studies that demonstrate transcultural dynamics of production and reception, she argues for viewing Indian art as a commodity, as part of the national economy, and as part of national political trends and reform efforts. McLerran marks the contributions of key individuals, from John Collier and Rene d’Harnoncourt to Navajo artist Gerald Nailor, whose mural in the Navajo Nation Council House conveyed distinctly different messages to outsiders and tribal members. Featuring dozens of illustrations, A New Deal for Native Art offers a new look at the complexities of folk art “revivals” as it opens a new window on the Indian New Deal.

Produced in conjunction with Southwest Art magazine. Profiles 100 artists, presenting color plates of paintings and sculptures along with text describing each artist's background and point of view. Arrangements is according to theme: landscapes, animals and wildlife, the romanticized West, cowboys and ranch life, and other Wests.

Will Evans's writings should find a special niche in the small but significant body of literature from and about traders to the Navajos. Evans was the proprietor of the Shiprock Trading Company. Probably more than most of his fellow traders, he had a strong interest in Navajo culture. The effort he made to record and share what he learned certainly was unusual. He published in the Farmington and New Mexico newspapers and other periodicals, compiling many of his pieces into a book manuscript. His subjects were Navajos he knew and traded with, their stories of historic events such as the Long Walk, and descriptions of their culture as he, an outsider without academic training, understood it. Evans's writings were colored by his fondness for, uncommon access to, and friendships with Navajos, and by who he was: a trader, folk artist, and Mormon. He accurately portrayed the operations of a trading post and knew both the material and artistic value of Navajo crafts. His art was mainly inspired by Navajo sandpainting. He appropriated and, no doubt, sometimes misappropriated that sacred art to paint surfaces and objects of all kinds. As a Mormon, he had particular views of who the Navajos were and what they believed and was representative of a large class of often-overlooked traders. Much of the Navajo trade in the Four Corners region and farther west was operated by Mormons. They had a significant historical role as intermediaries, or brokers, between Native and European American peoples in this part of the West. Well connected at the center of that world, Evans was a good spokesperson.

Witchcraft, magic, and events from everyday life provide lively twists to these twenty-three folktales that evoke the rich traditions of the early Spanish settlers and their descendants.