Sunday, August 25, 2024

Indian Market Week

I thought about whether I should write yet again about this event in Santa Fe and then I thought, would I not write about The European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) or Art Basel Miami Masterpiece in London or the Biennale in Paris?


Santa Fe Indian Market is the most important of the fairs in the Native American world and there are always many events in the week surrounding the Market itself. Every year the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, a private museum devoted exclusively to Native art, has a collectors’ sale of works that have been donated and, as in an auction, you can watch cherished objects change hands yet again. We acquired such a piece this year, a small cast bronze sculpted by Roxanne Swentzell which she created of her daughter many years ago. It is titled “Little Rosie” and that is the name by which we first knew the now-grown and nationally recognized artist, Rose B. Simpson. Knowing Rosie’s mother and grandmother made it something important to us.


The day before Indian Market there is an event at the Santa Fe Convention Center where the works submitted for prizes are laid out along with the winning selections. They are labelled with the booth numbers serving as a guide to the artists you many want to seek out on the next morning. Also, the Blue Ribbon Winners in the various classifications such as Jewelry, Weaving & Quill Work, and Pottery are called up to the podium to be presented with a certificate which they can show off in their booths together with their ribbons. Here is the winner of the Youth division, Aydrian Day (Ho-Chunk, Anishinaabe, and Lakota)


What struck me was the genuine emotion with which they accepted their awards, speaking of their creation and thanking their families, praising all the other participants and even thanking the collectors for their support. They had worked hard to create works to qualify to be in this show and the honor of recognition means much more than the prize money and the extra they can ask when selling the object. Here is a prize winner, Dan Vallo, his proud mother, and the laboriously crafted bow and arrows commemorating the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 that won Best of Show.



As you might guess from the name of the sponsoring organization SWAIA (Southwestern Association for Indian Arts) most of the participants are from the Pueblos and tribes of the Southwest, but increasingly Plains as well as the Northwest Coast nations have been represented. During this extraordinarily hot summer, it was rather jarring to see these two seal skin coats in the booth of artist Quki-Golga Oscar who is from the Kosigluk - Yup’ik Tribe in Alaska.


We visited the booth of one artist couple, Gary and Elsie Yoyokie, from whom we have made several acquisitions in years past. They had hardly anything left on their stand. Their work is so popular in Japan that Japanese dealers turn up first thing and there is little left by the time others arrive after eight on Saturday morning. Some artists sell out and leave the first day.


We have been collecting Native American Art for over 25 years, not to mention the collections in different fields we built for the 25 previous years, so we now donate more than we collect. But there was one piece at Indian Market that we could not pass up. It is by a Native American (Cochiti) cartoonist, Ricardo Caté, a baseball cap that we hope will be prophetic.


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