ABSTRACT
The essays in this section, by Joseph Traugott, David W. Penney and Lisa A. Roberts, Kristin K. Potter, and Bruce Bernstein touch on the social and economic history of selected Native American art forms from the late nineteenth century through the 1970s, noting, in the case of Penney, Roberts, and Bernstein, the legacy of that history in the present. Although their subject matters are diverse - the Sikyatki Pottery Revival at Hopi in the 1890s, modern Pueblo painting in the 1920s and 1930s, the marketing of Inuit sculptures and prints in the 1950s and 1960s, and the reception of historic and contemporary Indian art in the 1960s and 1970s - these essays do have some important points of intersection. They all further our understanding, for example, of how extra-aesthetic forces and ideas located in Euro-American culture created and then appropriated the category "Indian art." Patronage, both public and private, is therefore central to the collective content of this first section. Common also to this first group of essays is an investigation of the nexus between anthropological discourse on an originary purity supposedly manifest in aboriginal art and a desire for market shares for such art. Thus, to borrow from Potter's essay, "James Houston, Armchair Tourism, and the Marketing of Contemporary Inuit Art;' this section examines the link between economic independence and efforts to preserve the "cultural integrity" of Native peoples. Much of the work done by the authors is historiographical: reading closely, analyzing, and historicizing a variety of anthropological and art historical texts that we have inherited from our predecessors.
