Born Of Fire

Regarded as one of the great masters of Pueblo ceramics, Margaret Tafoya (1904-2001) is known for her trademark large black polished ceramics, decorated with traditional imagery of rain clouds, water serpents, bear paws, and other symbols. An award-winning artist, she was recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts, and a National Heritage Fellowship.

Four Winds Gallery is proud to be a part of this amazing book written by Charles King. The gallery's Tafoya collection is featured in the book with stunning photographs by Pittsburgh photographer Duane Rieder. This collection will go on exhibit at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History on October 3, 2008. Stay tuned for more detailed information. Visit our web site to purchase.

Perry Shorty

Perry shorty is a young Navajo jewelry maker who has found his niche in the classic period which began in the late 1920's and early 1930's. He's a stickler for quality and won't sacrifice it for quantity. He began making jewelry after working in a store in Gallup selling materials to artists and seeing what they were getting for their work. What started out as making a few extra dollars has become a career for this 43 year old Pentecostal preacher. He doesn't produce as much as he used to but spends more time preaching fire and brimstone. See our web site for more of his work.

Cody Sanderson Awarded Best of Show

Navajo, Cody Sanderson, was awarded Best of Show at the 50th Annual Heard Museum Show for "Outside The Cube" which showcased his unique talent. This amazing piece is a working, silver smithed version of the Rubik's cube with different designs for each side of the cube.

Contemporary Southwestern Jewelry

Four Winds Gallery is pleased with the release of the book "Southwestern Contemporary Jewelry" by Diana F. Pardue. Carrying many of the artists featured in this amazing publication is an honor for us. For information on purchasing the book see our web site. The following is from the inside flap and perfectly describes the book.

Challenging the traditional look of Native American turquoise and polished silver, a group of contemporary Southwest artists are creating stunning jewelry using rough metals and stones of all kinds. Abstract configurations twist through wristbands, weave through necklaces, and transform the art of jewelry making. Beginning in the early 1950s, Hopi artist Charles Loloma, Navajo silversmith Kenneth Begay, Mexican/Mission jeweler Preston Monongye, and others emerged with a new style of Native American jewelry. Contemporary Southwestern Jewelry delves into their lives, allowing us to better understand their revolutionary motives, methods, and sources of inspiration. Native American jewelry of today, though carved, cast, and stamped much differently from its predecessors, still celebrates the freedom and beauty found in nature that have been interpreted by American Indians for thousands of years.

Diana Pardue is author of Shared Images: The Innovative Jewelry of Yazzie Johnson and Gail Bird (2007) and The Cutting Edge: Southwest Jewelry and Metalwork (1997). She has written articles about jewelry for Ornament, American Indian Art, and Frontdoors magazines. She is curator of collections at the Heard Museum, where she has worked since 1978.

Keri Ataumbi

We are pleased to announce the addition of jewelry by Keri Ataumbi to our gallery. Keri's says of her work that it "is in the unique category of wearable art. In creating this type of jewelry the artist develops a concept and design, addresses the relationship between object and the body and thus engages in and deepens the discussion of fine art. My jewelry falls into the category of ‘wearable art’ as it has a conceptual narrative exploration at its core. This enquiry happens through an exploration of imagery and materials to create a small sculpture complete upon its own, as well as worn on the body. Informed by current visual culture, the history and theory of modern art and my personal aesthetic, my goal is to create work that strives to embrace contemporary jewelry making strategies by applying artistic methodologies that are different from traditional design processes. Different in that their dynamic comes from a content-based enquiry rather than ‘tried and true’ design, marketability or a traditional form."

Edward S. Curtis

Edward Sheriff Curtis was born in 1868 in Wisconsin, and at the age of 19 moved to the Puget Sound. After constructing his own camera he began photographing the Native Americans of the Washington state waterfront. He went on to photograph on a major expedition with naturalist John Muir and ornithologist John Burroughs. On this trip he photographed his first major series of Native Americans. George Bird Grinell, the editor of Forest & Stream magazine, had Curtis spend a season with the Piegan and Blackfoot tribes of northern Montana, and Curtis began to realize he was viewing the passing of a great race and set himself to the task of preserving it through photographic documentation, and ethnological notes.

This process began in 1897 with his first exhibit in 1904. The first nine years of his work were self-financed until he met President Theodore Roosevelt who introduced him to J.P. Morgan. All told Morgan and his estate contributed half of the total $1,500,000 cost of Curtis' life work. Curtis focused on the Native Americans west of the Mississippi beginning in the southwest with the Apache, Jicarilla, and Navajo. He tried to participate in the daily life of the tribes he photographed, and in 1922 he became a Snake Priest in the Hopi Snake Ceremony.

Curtis and his assistant W.E. Myers documented over 10,000 native songs as well as biographical studies such as Crow Bull Chief's tracing Crow history through ten chiefs. He studied the Little Big Horn Battlefield with three Crow scouts who guided Custer's command and interviewed Sioux participants about their memories of the battle. What became a thirty year project and included the study of over eighty tribes, yielded 40,000 photographs, a twenty volume set of books with 500 editions entitled "The North American Indian" each with 300 pages and a total of 1500 photogravure prints. Each volume also had an accompanying portfolio of 36 or more copperplate photogravures totaling 722 plates.

Curtis died in 1952 at the age of 84 with little acclaim and nearly penniless, but he succeeded in capturing images of a way of life drastically changing by the time he completed his work in the 1930's.

Four Winds Gallery is lucky to still have in it's collection two goldtones, over 60 signed original platinum prints, over 100 portfolio gravures and over 100 volume gravures. Please see our web site for information or contact us.

Repousse

We wanted to take a moment to explain a term that appears quite a bit on our web site for those of you who aren't jewelry makers or sellers. The term is repousse, (pronounced rupoosay). It is the process or the product of ornamenting metal with designs in relief pushed or hammered out from the back. The metal is pushed but, its thickness remains the same. The process is of ancient origin, having been employed by most early civilizations. Above is repousse work done by Cody Sanderson. Cody often stamps the outline of the raised area and darkens it as well. Visit our web site for more examples by artists such as Thomas Curtis, Alex Sanchez and Harry Begay.

Zuni Knife-Wing

The Zuni Knife-wing figure was a favorite among tourists during the early 1900's. As described by anthropologist Frank Hamilton Cushing, who lived with the Zunis from 1879-1884:

"This curious god is the hero of hundreds of folklore tales, the tutelary deity of several societies of Zuni. He is represented as possessing a human form, furnished with flint knife-feathered pinions, and tail. His dress consists of the conventional terraced cap (representative of his dwelling place among the clouds)... His weapons are the Great Flint-Knife of War, the Bow of the Skies (the Rainbow), and the Arrow of Lightning. His guardians or warriors are the Great Mountain Lion of the North and that of the upper regions. He was doubtless the original War God of the Zunis."

Zuni silversmith Horace Iule is credited with creating the first knife-wing design in the late 1920s. His first one was cut and filed out of wrought silver. Loved by Indian traders, they asked him to make more. Later, the knife-wing became one of the first designs that the Zuni jewelry artists inlaid with stones.

Exhibit Opens Friday

Pictured above is a stunning Helen Hardin painting and a small taste of the jewelry that will be on display and for sale in this exhibit. Please join us if you can or contact us for inquiries about the collection.

Upcoming Event

We are pleased to announce the opening of our exhibit, "Tradition And Innovation, Masterworks In Native American Art". This event includes paintings by R.C. Gorman, Helen Hardin and Fritz Scholder as well as the jewelry of Charles Loloma, Leekya and John Gordon Leak. These are only a few of the masters of Native American arts included in this recently purchased collection. We feel honored to offer these works to the public and invite you to view them on site or on our web page following the exhibition's opening on November 30, 2007.

Cody Sanderson Goes To The Heard Museum

This unusual piece shows the amazing range of Cody Sanderson's metal smithing and design ability. It is a tea infuser that opens when you pull up on the lower handles, and the movement is so smooth. We sold this infuser quite some time ago to a loyal customer of ours and now the piece is going to the Heard Museum for an exhibit entitled "Young Jewelers." Cody will by one of eight prominent jewelers in the exhibit, and we are so proud to carry his work, especially an amazing design like this.

Our Space

For those of you who have never been to our gallery in Shadyside, Pittsburgh, we though we would share a view of our wonderful space with you. It's a great place to visit with so many beautiful things. Come by when you get a chance.