Children's Book of Art Review

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(More customer reviews)Specifically designed and published for the benefit of children ages 10 and older, the "Children's Book Of Art" from DK Publishing is a 144-page compendium of information that offers a historical survey of art down through time and around the world. Significant and influential artists and sculptors are profiled with examples of their work. Young readers will learn about the processes of how different forms of art are created from paintings to frescoes to statuaries. Of special note are the profuse examples of how different artists in different cultures represent in their work similar subject matter. Superbly and profusely illustrated throughout, there is a timeline provided with respect to changing styles in art down through history such as Chinese art, Impressionism, and more. DK Publishing has one of the best art departments in children's book publishing. This is particularly demonstrated in the pages of their "Children's Book Of Art" which is enthusiastically recommended for family, school, and community library collections.

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Native American Architecture Review

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(More customer reviews)This book is an excellent bioregional overview of Native American structures. What I appreciate most is the way the authors have actually shown HOW the structures were made, sometimes in actual step-by-step procedures, which would allow someone to actually build in that style and using many of the same natural materials today. Another thing I love about the book is that the authors have sincerely tried to understand my Native American relationships to all the materials and the sacredness of the spaces we created. The authors treat that understanding with respect and honor. In this day when material resources are dwindling at alarming rates and the Earth is being devastated by the mindless rape of resources, it is a reminder to us all that we can choose alternatives to conventional wood-frame homes and return to more sustainable and natural housing for our respective bioregions. This book, though maybe not necessarily intended as such, is a hands-on, how-to book for us all. It reminds us that Native Americans lived in harmony and balance with our lands and our local plant and animal family for tens of thousands of years without destroying the places in which we lived. The photographs are instructive and beautiful and the architectural-type drawings are a delight. They make the actual building of these structures possible. I use parts of this book as required reading for all my students, especially my graduate students, and have taught actual classes using this book as the text, though it is not written in a "textbook" style. It is a very readable book and most useful for these times. I recommend it highly to all.

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For many people, Native American architecture calls to mind the wigwam, tipi, iglu, and pueblo. Yet the richly diverse building traditions of Native Americans encompass much more, including specific structures for sleeping, working, worshipping, meditating, playing, dancing, lounging, giving birth, decision-making, cleansing, storing and preparing food, caring for animals, and honoring the dead.In effect, the architecture covers all facets of Indian life.The collaboration between an architect and an anthropologist, Native American Architecture presents the first book-length, fully illustrated exploration of North American Indian architecture to appear in over a century. Peter Nabokov and Robert Easton together examine the building traditions of the major tribes in nine regional areas of the continent from the huge plank-house villages of the Northwest Coast to the moundbuilder towns and temples of the Southeast, to the Navajo hogans and adobe pueblos of the Southwest.Going beyond a traditional survey of buildings, the book offers a broad, clear view into the Native American world, revealing a new perspective on the interaction between their buildings and culture.Looking at Native American architecture as more than buildings, villages, and camps, Nabokov and Easton also focus on their use of space, their environment, their social mores, and their religious beliefs.Each chapter concludes with an account of traditional Indian building practices undergoing a revival or in danger today. The volume also includes a wealth of historical photographs and drawings (including sixteen pages of color illustrations), architectural renderings, and specially prepared interpretive diagrams which decode the sacred cosmology of the principal house types.

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From the Land of the Totem Poles: The Northwest Coast Indian Art Collection at the American Museum of Natural History Review

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(More customer reviews)This is more than the average coffee-table book about Northwest Coast Indian art. It is lavishly and beautifully illustrated with color photographs by Stephen Myers and historical black-and-white photographs from the Museum's collection. The text by Aldona Jonaitis is an outstanding examination of intercultural conditions along the Coast, from the late 1700's when Captain Cook first arrived at Nootka Sound to the present.
The life stories of the collectors and anthropologists who lived among the tribes are intriguing, though at times the "collecting" seems more like theft, as in the case of George Emmons who had few compunctions against taking artifacts from Tlingit shaman's gravesites.
The book is more a history of the Musuem collection--how it was acquired and who did the financing and the gathering and the exhibiting--than it is a history of the native people who created the art itself. That history, oral in nature, has been somewhat obscured by the fogs of time, and Jonaitis only picks up the thread of it with the arrival of the first European explorers, when the written history began.
It could be considered tragic that these tools, implements, masks, charms, were removed from cultural context and lost the meaning inherent in thier use, and became pieces of "art" that now languish in the storage vaults of the Museum. But it's better to be grateful, I suppose, that they were preserved and that we can see them and be inspired by their beauty. They are indeed objects of great beauty, and the way that they are presented here is respectful and knowledgeable.


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In 1943 French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss arrived in New York City, along with countless refugees from the war in Europe.He became a frequent visitor to the North Pacific Hall at the American Museum of Natural History where he could lose himself in what he affectionately called "a magic place where the dreams of childhood hold a rendezvous, where century-old tree trunks sing and speak, where undefinable objects watch out for the visitor, with the anxious stare of human faces, where animals of superhuman gentleness join their little paws like hands in prayer."Two and a half million people now visit the Museum each year to share in these enchantments.
The American Museum houses the most extensive collection of Northwest Coast Indian art in existence.It includes material from virtually every Indian group that once lived along the west coast of British Columbia and Alaska.In this book, Dr. Aldona Jonaitis traces the history of this magnificent collection, beginning in the late nineteenth century before those coastal peoples had much contact with Europeans, and their customs, languages, and art were still intact.Shortly after the collections was formed, between 1880 and 1910, Indian culture in this region went into a severe decline, to be revived a half century later as another generation of North Americans discovered their heritage.
The story alternately captivates and distresses.Populations were decimated by disease in the last years of the nineteenth century, art objects left their makers' hands bound for museums all over the world, traditional rituals were outlawed, and governments exerted strong pressures on the Indians to become assimilated.On the other side of the story are the individuals--like Franz Boas, under whose direction much of the Museum collection was assembled, Lt. George Thornton Emmons, who immersed himself in the native cultures, George Hunt, prized Kwakiutl informant for Boas and other researchers, and Charles Edenshaw, master Haida carver and painter--whose colorful lives intersect the Age of Museum Collecting.
Artifacts in the American Museum come alive through the details Dr. Jonaitis provides of their cultural context, their traditional uses, and their acquisition by collectors.Viewers see spoons and bowls that held food eaten by Boas at a potlatch; feel the spirit power emanating from a shaman's charm removed from its owner's grave by Lieutenant Emmons; sense the sadness behind the display of family crests on a house model carved by Edenshaw.
Nearly 100 color plates in the book and numerous historical photographs from the Museum's archives recall a bygone era and are a tribute to the stunning artworks of the North Pacific region.Dr. Jonaitis has written the first book devoted solely to the collection of Northwest Coast Indian art in the American Museum of Natural History.As such, the book is both an essential work for scholars and a valuable resource for the general reader.

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