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7 books match the query 'Indigenous art'

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Boundless

Native American Abundance in Art and Literature

Lisa A. Crossman and Heid E. Erdrich

Amherst College Press, 2025

Boundless expands conversations on Native and Indigenous art and literature by presenting words and images in kinship. Starting in the collections of the Mead Art Museum and the Collection of Native American Literature at Amherst College and centered on the creative production of Native peoples of the Northeast, the project follows relationships between Indigenous authors and artists across the United States and beyond borders. Boundless presents an engagement of Indigenous curatorial methods as practiced by guest curator Heid E. Erdrich (Ojibwe) in an exhibition in two iterations hosted by the Mead in 2023 and 2024. Advisors to Boundless include Mohegan, Nipmuc, Shinnecock, and Wampanoag artists and scholars, along with others, who supported Erdrich in her urge to center the project in the Northeast. Advisors contributed both visual art and writing to the exhibition and publication. Collaborative co-creation between artists, students, faculty, Mead staff Lisa Crossman and Emily Potter-Ndiaye and the guest curator are also explored in this illustrated volume.

Amherst College’s Collection of Native American Literature contains thousands of Indigenous-authored works spanning centuries. The Collection’s abundance of books, prints, music, ephemera, and artist-made works, all by Native people, provide rich selections for Boundless. Crosscurrents of Indigenous visual art and literature are considered in this broad and interdisciplinary project. Boundless crosses generations to explore relatedness, kinship, and collegiality.

Boundless brings artists and writers together across generations, often drawing together works by members of the same tribe or even the same family to show the history, presence, and futurity of Native American creative and intellectual production.

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Indigenous Collections

Transformations in Stewardship and Conservation Practices

Ellen Pearlstein

J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 0

A critical survey of the values, challenges, implications, history, and future of conserving Indigenous collections globally.

Once the exclusive realm of non-Indigenous curators and conservators, the care of Indigenous works in museums is now largely carried out either in collaboration with or by community members—a significant change from the colonial origins of museum collections and conservation practice.

This volume brings together over 100 readings—by Indigenous and non-Indigenous authors from around the world—that trace the development of the conservation of Indigenous collections. The writers provide a wide range of expertise, from archaeology and ethnography to law, and include community leaders, anthropologists, and art historians, as well as conservators and curators.

The book begins with an examination of the changes in terminology that reflect trust and respect, Indigenous care practices that predate the emergence of museums, and the impact of policy and legislation on Indigenous art and artifacts. Other readings explore the challenges associated with managing large, complex collections and the changes that resulted from addressing them: the development of specialized technical approaches, the incorporation of intangible heritage in conservation agendas, and a broadening view of what conservation means and how to practice it. Indigenous Collections concludes by looking at new approaches to museums—managed by or jointly with the people most closely connected to the holdings—and to the future, through innovations in conservation education.

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Indigenous Visual Cultures in Latin America

Seeing, Being, and Meaning

Edited by Tamara L. Bray and Carolyn Dean

University of Texas Press, 2026

Reframing the study of Indigenous visual cultures, this volume explores how images and objects generate affect and relation in non-Western contexts, foregrounding alternative modes of material engagement and meaning-making.

While traditional approaches to Indigenous visual cultures have often centered on iconography and representation, this volume turns toward other ways that images and objects act in the world. Indigenous Visual Cultures in Latin America explores how material productions function not merely as signs that point elsewhere but as agents that help shape relationships, environments, and affective experience.

Spanning Mesoamerica, the Andes, and Amazonia from 1500 BCE to the present, the chapters examine how meaning may reside in materials themselves; how making is a form of exchange between maker and matter; and how visual forms participate in configuring relations among humans, ancestors, deities, and place. These works are not passive containers of meaning, but charged presences—generative forces within ongoing worlds. Attuned to Indigenous ways of knowing and being, the volume invites readers to think beyond the frame, beyond the image, and beyond representation itself.

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