Reviews

This is a collection of essays by authorities in the field, mostly on topics related to the aesthetics and meaning of 3000 years of North American Indian art down to the present. Just as ambitious is its geographic sweep, from the art of Eastern woodlands Indians to Alaska to the Plains and the Southwest. A superbly designed volume, it is richly illustrative of the variety of Indian arts, with a generous supply of both color and black-and-white reproductions of hundreds of objects. Unfortunately, the text is marred by a defensive tone set by the editor and a few of the contributors who seem to feel compelled to overmake the case for Indian art by assaulting European and European-derived art and civilization. Otherwise recommended. Raymond L. Wilson, Hu man i ties Dept., San Francisco State Univ.

Contemporary American Indian art is part of an ongoing struggle for identity. Ron Anderson's protest piece Car Scaffold Buriala Mercury wrapped in a funerary blanket and hoisted on a Plains burial scaffoldbespeaks the anguish of the dislocated Indian. Aleut sculptor John Hoover affirms the tribal artist's ability to communicate with the spirit world in his carved-cedar Winter Loon Dance. This collection of essays by American, Canadian and European scholars overturns the stereotype of a changeless Indian culture by investigating Native Americans' adaptation of European styles, their responses to colonialism, interaction among tribes and the continual evolution of tribal arts. Even when Amerindian artists adopt Cubist or Photorealist techniques, their goal is to give concrete form to myths and archetypes. Illustrated with nearly 300 color plates and halftones, this panorama catalogues a nationally touring exhibition. (May 16)