The Southwest Indian Art Fair is proud to name Delbridge Honanie as its 2013 Lifetime Achievement Award Winner.
Delbridge is a Hopi artist specializing in paint and wood carvings, born in 1946 in Winslow, Arizona. He grew up in Shungopavi Village, Second Mesa, on the Hopi Reservation and has spent the last 20 years living in Flagstaff, Arizona. … » Read more »
Arizona State Museum’s Southwest Indian Art Fair brings together a cross-section of Native American cultural traditions through art sales, music and dance performances and demonstrations by highly skilled artists. Living cultural practices, coupled with meaningful conversations with the artists, provide context for understanding the artwork produced and on sale. This year’s fair, on February 23rd and 24th, presents 200 different artists and six performing groups from Native nations throughout the Southwest U.S..
ASM director Dr. Beth Grindell explains why ASM has held this fair for the last 20 years. “For 120 years we at ASM have worked to fulfill our founding mandate–to collect and preserve Arizona’s antiquities, its cultural resources. Our mission is to promote understanding of and respect for the peoples and cultures of the region. Our vision is a community, indeed an entire state, which knows and celebrates its diverse cultural heritage and uses that heritage to build a better future. Mandate, mission and vision come together in our Southwest Indian Art Fair–ASM’s largest and signature annual event. Two hundred artists gather with us every year. As descendants of ancient cultures, each artist is a representative of a rich heritage, his talent the culmination of centuries of tradition, each piece the latest iteration of an ancient and enduring form of aesthetic expression. It is this they come to share with you.”
Each year we look forward to seeing the incredible beauty and ingenuity of the artists, to enjoy the dance and music performances, to savor the fry bread, tamales, and other Southwest foods, to renew friendships and to share this with our visitors. The following series of blog entries will feature some of the artists and traditions that are highlighted at this year’s Southwest Indian Art Fair.
We look forward to seeing you at SWIAF!
For more information about tickets, parking and schedules visit our website’s SWIAF pages.
–Lisa Falk
ASM blog editor, Lisa Falk, serves on the SWIAF committee and organizes the performances presented at the fair.
ASM Library
Today’s blog was written by Arizona State Museum’s archivist Amy Rule. She can be found working alongside the rest of the Library and Archives staff in the beautiful second floor reading room at ASM providing preservation and access to over 1500 linear feet of archival and manuscript holdings.
Bird-lovers are heading out to Willcox, Arizona, to watch the majestic Sandhill Cranes stopping off to eat during their migration to northern lands. But a special variety of migrating birds are to be seen right here in the ASM Library. … » Read more »
Today’s blog is written by Dr. John McClelland,
Lab Manager for ASM’s Osteology Lab and NAGPRA Coordinator.
Most people think of museums as places where things are preserved in perpetuity. It may surprise you to learn that my job at the Arizona State Museum is to find ways to give things back! As Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) Coordinator, I supervise efforts to account for Native American human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and other objects of central importance to tribes and to facilitate their return as required by federal law.
For tribes, this process is not only about the return of their ancestors and objects of spiritual importance, but also about restoring the social and spiritual bonds that were severed when a burial was excavated or a sacred item was removed from tribal control. Working with tribal representatives on repatriation projects has helped me to gain new perspectives on the past and present. … » Read more »
In honor of GIS day, ASM research specialist Shannon Twilling wrote today’s blog. Shannon is the Assistant Manager of the AZSITE Database and ASM’s Archaeological Records Office. AZSITE is the official geographic information system for managing cultural resources in the state of Arizona.
November 14, 2012 is the annual celebration of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and its nearly limitless applications. While the concepts of cartography, topography, and geography go back centuries, when the first computerized GIS program was developed in the 1960s, it was like nothing the world had ever seen. No other software can be as applicable to such a wide variety of fields. You can apply GIS to anthropology, hydrology, crime analysis, fire prevention, real estate, education, zoning, census data…and pretty much everything in between!
So what is this GIS, and how does it work? … » Read more »
Arizona State Museum Deputy Director Dr. Irene Bald Romano reports on her summer 2012 research in Italy. Dr. Romano came to ASM and the University of Arizona last February. She is a specialist in Greek cult practices, Greek and Roman sculpture, terracotta figurines, and Hellenistic pottery, and is the author/co-author of five books and numerous articles on those topics. Dr. Romano has conducted fieldwork in Spain, Italy, Greece, and Turkey. She currently serves as a senior archaeologist with the Mt. Lykaion Excavation and Survey Project in Greece.
This past summer I was deeply immersed in ancient Italian sculpture! Not so unusual since my area of scholarly expertise is Greek and Roman sculpture and the use and presentation of classical sculpture in various contexts. My summer’s research in Italy was mostly picking up loose threads of work that I had begun in previous years — in Rome, the Alban Hills, the Bay of Naples region, and Umbria. … » Read more »
“Reports of rattlesnake bites in Arizona on rise,” proclaimed the Arizona Daily Star on August 21st. Recently, I had an encounter with a rattler—stepped on it while running one evening. So when ASM Archivist Amy Rule submitted her latest blog titled Snake Season in the Library I feared that even while at work I might have to keep a sharper eye out for snakes. Read on to discover ASM’s snake story. –Lisa Falk, blog editor … » Read more »
As Tucson’s temperatures soar in continuous triple digits, many of us seek out the AC. If you haven’t been to ASM in a while, perhaps now is when you’d like to enjoy some cool culture. Our AC is on full, and as students are gone for the summer, parking is easy. So come spend a cool afternoon in ASM’s galleries. Parking and other visit info is on our website.
Currently on display are exhibits showcasing Native basketry, American Indian pottery (we’ve added more cases of pots), Hopi quilts, Mexico’s history, and photographs of Southwest landscapes, along with our core Paths of Life exhibit about Native peoples of the Arizona and northern Mexico. Be sure to pop into the museum store for a choice of items to take home with a story.
Curious about all that we did this (fiscal) year? Check out the Director’s report. 
For those far away, enjoy a cool afternoon at home or in a library browsing our website. You’ll find virtual exhibits, research reports, games, podcasts (including interviews with American Indian artists and recordings of some of our past programs), and more.
And stay tuned for a full array of programs and new exhibits in the fall. Hints of things to come: Coffee with the Curators talks, book signing by Caroline O’Bagy Davis and discussion, Hopi quilt programs, la frontera/border photographs, basketry lectures, Native Eyes film showcase, Woodbury estate sale/auction, and more!
Stay cool: appreciate culture!
Lisa Falk, ASM Director of Education/Blog Editor
Today’s blog was written by Arizona State Museum’s archivist Amy Rule. She can be found working alongside the rest of the Library and Archives staff in the beautiful second floor reading room at ASM providing preservation and access to over 1500 linear feet of archival and manuscript holdings.
It is not every day that a 150 year-old book in the ASM Library can precipitate controversy and debate, but this happened recently when a visiting scholar examined Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s book, The Indian Tribes of the United States. … » Read more »
Today’s blog is written by Dr. Michael Brescia, Arizona State Museum’s Associate Curator of Ethnohistory, who is on sabbatical. A Fulbright-Carlos Rico Award for North American Studies has taken him to Canada and Mexico. Last fall, he wrote about his teaching and research activities in Canada. This post focuses on his research on water rights in Mexico’s Biblioteca Palafoxiana, a rare book library founded in 1646. He returns to ASM later this summer.
It’s the ultimate of intellectual sensations, standing in the library that was founded in 1646 by the Spanish bishop, Juan de Palafox y Mendoza, and surrounded by a beautifully crafted three-tiered cedar bookcase that holds over 50,000 volumes. Take just a few moments to gaze at the impressive collection of books, manuscripts, incunabula, and ephemera, and you’ll understand why the celebrated Italian author, Umberto Eco, could imagine old manuscripts conversing with one another in a medieval monastery. In the Biblioteca Palafoxiana, located in the city of Puebla, I have eavesdropped on some of those conversations taking place between books—sometimes not so discretely, I might add—and they have informed my research on the living legacies of Spanish and Mexican water rights in the greater Southwest. … » Read more »
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