On this month’s cover we have a pot by Nampeyo of Hano, the famous Hopi-Tewa artist whose vessels from the late 19th century started a pottery renaissance in what is now Northern Arizona. Nampeyo created the Sikyatki Revival style of Hopi pottery after visiting a partially excavated cemetery in the ruins of Sikyatki in 1895. It was there, within an active dig site run by Jesse Walter Fewkes of the Smithsonian Institution, that Nampeyo would lay eyes upon remarkable Sikyatki pottery that had been unseen for more than 400 years. The potter and her husband, Lesso, soon began creating artwork in the Sikyatki style. Even as she was celebrated for the revival, Nampeyo also took those older designs and techniques and added her own innovation and adaptations.
It’s a remarkable story for many reasons, but the reason I want to draw attention to it is its simplicity: an artist makes something, another artist views it and then changes it. This is how art survives, thrives and transforms. Last issue we ran a piece about the Navajo Germantown weavers, which was essentially the same story. Art is not made in a vacuum. It exists in the world, around people and around other art forms and sources of stimuli. And then others come along and respond to it. And then someone comes after them to respond to that. On and on for generations.
We haven’t had a historic piece of art on the cover in several years, so when Nampeyo’s pot became available to us (see our coverage of the Western Spirit exhibition on Page 40), it became the perfect symbol for what happens in every art community, but especially in Native American art communities, where art from the past mingles freely with art from the present. For many artists, part of their creativity is to do what Nampeyo did more than 130 years ago: they celebrate the past but, using innovation, carry it forward into the future.
Native American Art has always embraced both historic and contemporary material in our pages. That will never change. You can’t have one without the other.
Michael Clawson
Executive Editor
mclawson@nativeamericanartmagazine.com
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