Navajo sandpainting in the age of cross-cultural replication

• Autores: Janet Catherine Berlo
• Localización: Art history: journal of the Association of Art Historians, ISSN 0141-6790, Vol. 37, Nº. 4, 2014 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Theorizing imitation in a global context / coord. por Paul Duro), págs. 688-707
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This essay examines more than one hundred years of collaboration between Navajo sandpainters and non-Native interlocutors, and the circulation of scared images not only within Navajo culture, where they are made for use in ceremonial healing rituals, but also outside of this traditional context. Together, some Navajo medicine men and their non-Native collaborators sought to introduce the aesthetic beauty and philosophical intricacy of this ephemeral art to a wider audience, through drawings, paintings, silkscreen prints and textiles. At issue was sacred nature of the imagery and the belief that such images should remain ephemeral since in ancestral times the Supernaturals who, in George Kubler's terms, made the 'prime objects', decreed it to be so. Consideration is also given to the way that replicas, copies, and translations were made in the early twentieth century. In many cases, this was a fraught topic at the time, and it has become even more complicated today.