LibGuides: Native American Heritage Month: Art and Fashion

Books in the JSCC Library

Contemporary Native American Artists by Suzanne Deats; Kitty Leaken (Photographer)
Call Number: N6538.A4 D43 2012
Publication Date: 2012
Located in the Native American Heritage Month display through November.
Contemporary Native American artists have a strong presence in the North American and international art markets. This talented group’s work can be found in many annual events, an ever-changing array of fine art galleries, and a number of museums throughout North America. These artists give visible form to the past, present, and future of American Indian life. In Contemporary Native American Artists, key luminaries of the Native American art world are brought together through stunning photography and intimate portrayals of their lives and art.
Horace Poolaw, Photographer of American Indian Modernity by Laura E. Smith
Publication Date: 2016
Laura E. Smith unravels the compelling life story of Kiowa photographer Horace Poolaw (1906–84), one of the first professional Native American photographers. Born on the Kiowa reservation in Anadarko, Oklahoma, Poolaw bought his first camera at the age of fifteen and began taking photos of family, friends, and noted leaders in the Kiowa community, also capturing successive years of powwows and pageants at various fairs, expositions, and other events. Though Poolaw earned some income as a professional photographer, he farmed, raised livestock, and took other jobs to help fund his passion for documenting his community. Smith examines the cultural and artistic significance of Poolaw's life in professional photography from 1925 to 1945 in light of European and modernist discourses on photography, portraiture, the function of art, Native American identity, and American Indian religious and political activism.

Art Websites

Indigenous Arts of North America
The Denver Art Museum was one of the first art museums in the nation to collect Indigenous arts from North America. As early as 1925, the DAM recognized and valued the fine aesthetic qualities of Native arts, when many other institutions only valued them as anthropological material. While we collected the early artwork of Indigenous people, we also focused on the work of contemporary Native artists at every moment in time. The collection illustrates the multi-faceted nature of Native experiences and represents the Indigenous arts of North America as a vibrant continuum that is advanced by individual artists and craftspeople. From ancient Puebloan and Mississippian ceramics to nineteenth-century beaded garments and carved masks to cutting-edge contemporary paintings, sculpture, photography and variable media art, the collection offers a rich diversity of art forms, histories, and artistic styles coming from Indigenous North American artists and communities.