First American Art Magazine No. 18, Spring 2018 | Page 10

EDITOR’S GREETING
B
EES FAMOUSLY SEE a different
color spectrum than humans.
They are capable of seeing ultravi-
olet, which is invisible to us. You’re
likely familiar with photographs of flowers
with the ultraviolet waves enhanced to
reveal the lines and patterns on flower
petals. These UV waves draw the bees
toward the stigmas and pollen-bearing
stamens. Ultraviolet has shorter wave-
lengths—10 to 400 nanometers—than the
light spectrum visible to us. However, bees
lack the ability to see red, on the other end
of the spectrum with longer wavelengths
at 620 to 750 nanometers.
The visible spectrum forms
the rainbow—tangakwunu in Hopi,
ᎤᏅᎪᎳᏛ in Cherokee, kurumi in
Aymara—which are electromagnetic
waves from 390 to 700 nanometers.
Ultraviolet and infrared lurk beyond the
edge of that spectrum; they exist even if
we cannot see them with the naked eye.
The Native art world is much like
this spectrum with nebulous divisions.
Just as different cultures divide the
rainbow into distinct colors, we divide
our art world into different fields or wave-
lengths. Which is fine—we must make
sense of it all; however, do we get stuck in
our own wavelengths? Do we narrow the
bandwidth of our perception too much
and miss out on the rest?
Some people focus on the circuit
of international art fairs, others focus on
art museums, while others only register
artists vetted by gallerists or dealers they
trust. The lively Native art market scene
can become its own world. Still other
audiences are drawn toward the revo-
lutionary potential of street art. Within
Native communities, there are artists,
particularly regalia makers, that never
show in galleries or markets.
Art lovers can be drawn only to
historic materials or to precontact art
forms. No matter where you stand on
the spectrum—the media and art venues
that are your ultraviolet attraction—please
consider this issue of First American Art
8 | WWW.FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM
left America Meredith (Cherokee
Nation), ᎬᎨᏳᎯ, ᏩᏚᎵᏏ, 2008, acrylic
on hardboard panel, 12 × 12 in.
Magazine as your personal invitation to
skip around, to get out of your aesthetic
comfort zone, and to see another aspect of
art from a different wavelength within our
spectrum. The Native art world is large
and small and remains intimate enough
that themes permeate throughout, and a
vastly different approach to art can still
resonate across miles or centuries.
In this issue, we begin with the
Gaussoin family—Connie Tsosie, David,
Wayne Nez, Lt. Col. Jerry Jr.—a Picuris-
Navajo family of artists based in New
Mexico, who are known for their jewelry
but branch out into fashion design,
performance art, and museum conser-
vation. Nina Sanders (Apsáalooke) and
Terrance Clifford (Oglala Lakota) show us
where Native fashion is today. For those
of you who might argue that jewelry and
fashion are not “Art with a capital A,”
consider that our generation spends more
time indoors than any other generation.
Once you leave your office or home, if you
want your artwork to be seen, what is the
ideal gallery? Your own body.
Indigenous photography has also
experienced a recent groundswell of schol-
arship and exhibition. Michelle J. Lanteri
explores what happens when Native
photographers turn the lens on them-
selves in “The Imagistic, Indigenized ‘I’:
Native Self-Portraiture in Photography.”
Native art can be beneath our feet or,
in the case of monumental earthworks, the
very soil itself. In Avoyelles Parish, mounds
date from the Hopewellian Exchange (ca.
100 BCE to 400 CE) to the Plaquemine
culture, which continued into the early
18th century. Stacy Pratt, PhD (Muscogee
Creek), explores her mixed emoti ons as she
navigates the complex issues of preserva-
tion and research of the earthworks and the
people who built them.
The artist profiles, reviews, and
departments add to the different wave-
lengths of Native artistic expression.
They speak to what is both visible to our
eyes or known only through inference,
to heighten our sense of what is possible
within the spectrum of art by Indigenous
peoples of the Western Hemisphere.
—America Meredith