They call themselves Hopi, "Peaceful People." Most Hopis (pronounced Ho-pees) reside in stone-and-adobe villages clustered on craggy mesas in north-eastern Arizona's high desert. How long the tribe has lived there is unknown, but one village, Oraibi, has been occupied for over 800 years.
Most of today's 9,000 Hopis retain ancient traditions. Their villages contain kivas, semisubterranean ceremonial chambers embodying the idea of emergence from a series of womblike underworlds during the time of legends. Men masked as kachinas, supernatural spirits, appear in village plazas singing for bountiful crops of corn, beans, and squash. The Snake Dance, a rain-bringing rite in which participants clutch writhing serpents in their mouths, is still conducted.
Notably enduring among Hopis is a drive to create objects of beauty: basketry, paintings, wood carvings, jewelry, textiles, and especially pottery.
As in many non-Western cultures, Hopi art traditionally fills a functional role. Women once manufactured painted pottery to be used for storing food and water. Dolls representing kachinas are carved by men from cottonwood roots; these serve as instructional aids for children and as tangible expressions of blessings. Elegant, subtly colored weavings earlier served as everyday attire and are still employed in ceremonial garb. Coiled and plaited basketry dyed with geometric and representational designs hold sacred cornmeal and act as tokens for settling personal obligations.
Beginning around the turn of the century, outsiders set about the business of avidly collecting Hopi art. Fittingly enough, the person who attracted serious attention to this matriarchal society's art was a woman: Nampeyo.
Born around 1860, Nampeyo appreciated the rich swirls, curves, bands, and feathered motifs painted on potsherds she found at Sikyatki, a prehistoric pueblo where striking polychrome pottery was produced between 1400 and 1625.
Drawing upon and expanding on those forms and designs in her own work, Nampeyo pioneered the Sikyatki Revival. By the early 1900s, her wares were known well beyond the Southwest. A pot was a pot, but one of Nampeyo's was an artistic ceramic of merit, the product of a recognized artist's labor and vision. Small wonder that the Smithsonian Institution began acquiring her ceramics as early as 1896.
Nampeyo died in 1942, blind and in her early eighties, a legend whose legacy lay in blazing a trail into the era of the named and acclaimed American Indian artist.
Among contemporary Hopi artists whose work is eagerly sought by collectors are avant-garde jeweler Charles Loloma; abstract painter Dan Namingha; kachina doll carvers Von Monongye and Ronald Honyouti; weaver Ramona Sakiestewa; potters Desxtra Nampeyo, Fannie Nampeyo, Thomas Polacca Nampeyo (all descendants of the Nampeyo), Feather Woman (Helen Naja), Frog Woman (Joy Navasie), and Al Qoyawayma (widely known for obvious reasons of Al Q).
Ten years ago, Lee Cohen, a successful Chicago industrialist, opened Gallery 10 in Scottsdale, Arizona. He envisioned a center for Southwest Indian art
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