Native American art finds its inspiration in ritual but brings these traditional forms into a contemporary context. By combining repetition and innovation, it seeks novel ways to integrate the past into the present. Most Native American tribes have specific rules that... [more]

Native American art finds its inspiration in ritual but brings these traditional forms into a contemporary context. By combining repetition and innovation, it seeks novel ways to integrate the past into the present. Most Native American tribes have specific rules that guide artistic production. Thus, creativity is never a matter of purely individual expression -- the Native American artist always interacts with an established set of formal requirements. However, the actualization of these rules gives rise to an infinite number of variations. In many works of Native American art, traditional forms ground the perspective from which the artist views the modern world. The distortion of traditional forms according to contemporary demands reveals the specific ways that time tangles together in art. David Neel, for example, carves traditional totem poles, canoes, and masks. However, his masks display a complex relation between tradition and modernity: facial expressions and symbolic adornments evoke a satirical, even mocking, perspective on the present. By taking traditional forms to their limit and beyond (his work often deviates from tribal rules), Neel negotiates the borders of his own culture and articulates its sometimes-contradictory relationship to the outside world. Native American art often employs a prodigious amount of symbols and ritualized forms. These symbols and forms make up a kind of second pallet from which the artists work, a set of signifiers that gives rise to new artistic constructions. Whether in the medium of wood, beads, fabric, or paint, Native American art tends to be an improvisation on a culturally sanctioned theme, a stylistic experiment that twists symbols, celebrates them, or assigns them new meanings altogether. [show less]