Full Circle Honoring 100 Years of Indian Market
Super Summer Event Member Day and Donor Celebration Friday, August 5 and Saturday, August 6 New Mexico History Museum Museum of New Mexico Foundation members and donors are invited to preview and celebrate Honoring Tradition and Innovation: 100 Years of Santa Fe’s Indian Market 1922-2022 at the New Mexico History Museum. The exhibition commemorates a century of Santa Fe’s Indian Market, honoring the artists and collectors who have made the event possible. More than 200 pieces of artwork by Indian Market artists from private and public collections will be on view. Historic and contemporary photographs, and interviews with artists and collectors, round out the Indian Market anniversary experience. Invitations and more details will be sent prior to each event. For additional information, visit museumfoundation.org.
We often hear of events coming full circle, cycling back to where they came from. That’s certainly the case with Honoring Tradition and Innovation: 100 Years of Santa Fe’s Indian Market 1922–2022, opening to the public August 7 at the New Mexico History Museum. With the commemoration of Indian Market’s first century, the Southwestern Association of Indian Arts returns to a collaboration with Indian Market’s original organizer: the Museum of New Mexico. Overseeing Indian Market during its first five years, the museum system played a significant role in developing what is now the world’s largest Native art market. Museum of New Mexico founder and director Edgar Lee Hewett helped create Indian Market with artist-archaeologist Kenneth Chapman in 1922. Cathy Notarnicola, the history museum’s curator of Southwest history, says Hewett and Chapman rolled the first market into their (also newly created) Santa Fe Fiesta celebrations. But their intentions went beyond providing a venue for Indigenous artisans to sell their works. Notarnicola describes their main goal as “an attempt to try to revive and perpetuate Native-made goods” within the larger Pueblo Revival makeover of Santa Fe, which began in earnest in the 1920s. Hewett and Chapman, among other Anglo museum professionals, felt that older styles of Pueblo pottery and sculpture were falling out of fashion in the early 1920s. Thus, the first Indian Market, held indoors with prizes awarded, was an attempt to influence artists to create more traditional artworks. “The people running the Indian Market,” Notarnicola explains, “were encouraging artists to make the old style of pottery that was more utilitarian and larger, like storage and water jars, versus the small curios that were being sold as souvenirs.” Though Indian Market is now run by a primarily Native staff and board members, Honoring Tradition and Innovation does not shy away from its problematic origin story of white museum professionals curating an Indigenous art market. Nor does it dodge any other histories, difficult or otherwise. For example, Indian Market organizers, in conjunction with area Pueblo Indian leaders, were instrumental in helping to defeat the Bursum Bill in the U.S. Congress in 1923. The bill would have allowed non-Native people to claim Pueblo Indian lands. Honoring Tradition and Innovation traces these larger stories while celebrating the career paths of individual artists via Indian Market, where they received honors and notoriety. The interactions between artists and collectors that make the market such an enduring attraction, Notarnicola says, are also a common thread that runs through the Indian Market story.
14 museumfoundation.org
