Visual arts by indigenous peoples of the Americas

Visual arts by indigenous peoples of the Americas encompasses the visual artistic practices of the indigenous peoples of the Americas from ancient times to the present. These include works from South America and North America, which includes Central America and Greenland. The Siberian Yupiit, who have great cultural overlap with Native Alaskan Yupiit, are also included.

Indigenous American visual arts include portable arts, such as painting, basketry, textiles, or photography, as well as monumental works, such as architecture, land art, public sculpture, or murals. Some Indigenous artforms coincide with Western art forms; however, some, such as porcupine quillwork or birchbark biting are unique to the Americas.

Indigenous art of the Americas has been collected by Europeans since sustained contact in 1492 and joined collections in cabinet of curiosities and early museums. More conservative Western art museums have classified Indigenous art of the Americas within arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, with precontact artwork classified as pre-Columbian art, a term that sometimes refers to only precontact art by Indigenous peoples of Latin America. Native scholars and allies are striving to have Indigenous art understood and interpreted from Indigenous perspectives.

Lithic and Archaic stage

The Lithic stage or Paleo-Indian period is defined as approximately 18,000 to 8,00 BCE. The period from around 8000 to 800 BCE is generally referred to as the Archaic period. While people of this time period worked in a wide range of materials, perishable materials, such as plant fibers or hides, had seldom been preserved through the millennia. Indigenous peoples created bannerstones, Projectile point, Lithic reduction styles, and pictographic cave paintings, some of which have survived in the present.

Belonging in the lithic stage, the oldest known art in the Americas is a fossilized megafauna bone, possibly from a mammoth, carved with a profile of walking mammoth or mastodon that dates back to 11,000 BCE. The bone was found early in the 21st century near Vero Beach, Florida, in an area where human bones (Vero man) had been found in association with extinct pleistocene animals early in the 20th century. The bone is too mineralized to be dated, but the carving has been authenticated as having been made before the bone became mineralized. The anatomical correctness of the carving and the heavy mineralization of the bone indicate that the carving was made while mammoths and/or mastodons still lived in the area, more than 10,000 years ago.

The oldest known painted object in North America is the Cooper Bison Skull from approximately 8,050 BCE.Bement, Leland C.
Bison hunting at Cooper site: where lightning bolts drew thundering herds.'' Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999: 37, 43, 176. . Lithic age art in South America includes Monte Alegre culture rock paintings created at Caverna da Pedra Pintada
dating back to 9250 to 8550 BCE. Guitarrero Cave in Peru has the earliest known textiles in South America, dating to 8000 BCE.

The southwestern United States and certain regions of the Andes have the highest concentration of pictographs (painted images) and Petroglyphs (carved images) from this period. Both pictographs and petroglyphs are known as rock art.

File:MtnSheepPetroglyph.jpg, A petroglyph of a caravan of bighorn sheep near Moab, Utah, United States; a common theme in glyphs from the southwestern desert
File:Coso archaic.jpg,
Image:Petroglyphs in the Columbia River Gorge.jpg,

North America

Arctic

The Yup'ik of Alaska have a long tradition of carving masks for use in shamanic rituals. Indigenous peoples of the Canadian arctic have produced objects that could be classified as art since the time of the Dorset culture. While the walrus ivory carvings of the Dorset were primarily shamanic, the art of the Thule people who replaced them circa 1000 CE was more decorative in character. With European contact the historic period of Inuit art began. In this period, which reached its height in the late 19th century, Inuit artisans created souvenirs for the crews of whaling ships and explorers. Common examples include cribbage boards. Modern Inuit art began in the late 1940s, when with the encouragement of the Canadian government they began to produce prints and serpentine sculptures for sale in the south. Greenlandic Inuit have a unique textile tradition intregrating skin-sewing, furs, and appliqué of small pieces of brightly dyed marine mammal organs in mosaic designs, called avittat. Women create elaborate netted beadwork collars. They have strong mask-making tradition and also are known for an art form called '' tupilaq'' or an "evil spirit object." Traditional art making practices thrive in the Ammassalik. Sperm whale ivory remains a valued medium for carving.

Basket with bear and seal carving by George Omnik, Point Hope, Alaska, Eskimo, HAA.jpg, Baleen basket with whale tooth finial, by George Omnik ( Iñupiaq, 1905–1978), Alaska; Honolulu Museum of Art (Hawaii, USA)
Tupilak 1.jpg, A carved representation of a tupilaq, from Greenland
Alaska, yup'ik, maschera giimaquq, xix secolo.jpg, Yup'ik mask; from Alaska; Musée du quai Branly (Paris)
PaQi 2.jpg, Toy Angakkuq (shaman); 6 February 1998; serpentine, caribou bone & feathers; by Palaya Qiatsuq

Subarctic

Cultures of interior Alaska and Canada living south of the Arctic Circle are Subarctic peoples. While humans have lived in the region far longer, the oldest known surviving Subarctic art is a petroglyph site in northwest Ontario, dated to 5000 BCE. Caribou, and to a lesser extent moose, are major resources, providing hides, antlers, sinew, and other artistic materials. Porcupine quillwork embellishes hides and birchbark. After European contact with the influence of the Grey Nuns, moosehair tufting and floral glass beadwork became popular through the Subarctic.

File:Ak moosehair tufting.jpg, 21st-century Athabaskan moosehair tufting on beaded hide box,
Fairbanks, Alaska
File:Assinaitappi.jpg, Tsuu T'ina painted hide tipi,
Alberta, Canada
File:Arctic American shirt (UBC).jpg, Man's hide jacket. The floral designs' stems feature "thorny" beadwork, typical of the Subarctic, Museum of Anthropology at UBC

Northwest Coast

The art of the Haida, Tlingit, Heiltsuk, Tsimshian and other smaller tribes living in the coastal areas of Washington state, Oregon, and British Columbia, is characterized by an extremely complex stylistic vocabulary expressed mainly in the medium of woodcarving. Famous examples include totem poles, transformation masks, and canoes. In addition to woodwork, two dimensional painting and silver, gold and copper engraved jewelry became important after contact with Europeans.

Image:Ketchican totem pole 2 stub.jpg, A totem pole in Ketchikan, Alaska, in the Tlingit style
Namgis (Native American). Thunderbird Transformation Mask, 19th century.jpg, 'Namgis thunderbird transformation mask, 19th century, cedar, pigments, leather, nails, metal plate, 71 in. wide when open, Brooklyn Museum, NY
File:Haida argillite carving BC 1850 nmai13-1875.jpg, Haida argillite carving; 1850–1900; from Haida Gwaii; National Museum of the American Indian
Image:Sombrero de jefe de balleneros Nutka (M. América Inv.13570) 01.jpg, Cedar bark hat; Nuu-chah-nulth; Museum of the Americas (Madrid, Spain)

Eastern Woodlands

Northeastern Woodlands

The Eastern Woodlands, or simply woodlands, cultures inhabited the regions of North America east of the Mississippi River at least since 2500 BCE. While there were many regionally distinct cultures, trade between them was common and they shared the practice of burying their dead in earthen mounds, which has preserved a large amount of their art. Because of this trait the cultures are collectively known as the Mound builders.

The Woodland period (1000 BCE–1000 CE) is divided into early, middle, and late periods, and consisted of cultures that relied mostly on hunting and gathering for their subsistence. Ceramics made by the Deptford culture (2500 BCE–100 CE) are the earliest evidence of an artistic tradition in this region. The Adena culture are another well-known example of an early Woodland culture. They carved stone tablets with zoomorphic designs, created pottery, and fashioned costumes from animal hides and antlers for ceremonial rituals. Shellfish was a mainstay of their diet, and engraved shells have been found in their burial mounds.

The Middle Woodland period was dominated by cultures of the Hopewell tradition (200–500). Their artwork encompassed a wide variety of jewelry and sculpture in stone, wood, and even human bone.

The Late Woodland period (500–1000 CE) saw a decline in trade and in the size of settlements, and the creation of art likewise declined.

From the 12th century onward, the Haudenosaunee and nearby coastal tribes fashioned wampum from shells and string; these were mnemonic devices, currency, and records of treaties.

Iroquois people carve False Face masks for healing rituals, but the traditional representatives of the tribes, the Grand Council of the Haudenosaunee, are clear that these masks are not for sale or public display.Shenadoah, Chief Leon
Haudenosaunee Confederacy Policy On False Face Masks.
''Peace 4 Turtle Island''. 2001. Retrieved 15 May 2011 The same can be said for Iroquois Corn Husk Society masks.Crawford and Kelley, pp. 496–497.

File:Mound City Chillicothe Ohio HRoe 2008.jpg,
File:Hopewell culture nhp raven effigy pipe chillicothe ohio 2006.jpg,
File:Hopewell culture falcon.jpg,
File:Wampum William Penn Great Treaty.jpg,

One fine art sculptor of the mid-nineteenth century was Edmonia Lewis (African American / Ojibwe). Two of her works are held by the Newark Museum.

Native peoples of the Northeastern Woodlands continued to make visual art through the 20th and 21st centuries. One such artist is Sharol Graves, whose serigraphs have been exhibited in the National Museum of the American Indian. Graves is also the illustrator of
The People Shall Continue
' from Lee & Low Books.

Southeastern Woodlands

The Poverty Point culture inhabited portions of the state of Louisiana from 2000 to 1000 BCE during the Archaic period. Many objects excavated at Poverty Point sites were made of materials that originated in distant places, including chipped stone projectile points and tools, ground stone plummets, gorgets and vessels, and shell and stone beads. Stone tools found at Poverty Point were made from raw materials which originated in the relatively nearby Ouachita and Ozark Mountains and from the much further away Ohio and Tennessee River valleys. Vessels were made from soapstone which came from the Appalachian foothills of Alabama and Georgia. Hand-modeled lowly fired clay objects occur in a variety of shapes including anthropomorphic figurines and cooking balls.

File:Poverty Point clay utensils HRoe 2009.jpg,
File:Poverty Point female figurines HRoe 2009.jpg,
File:Poverty Point gorgets atlatl weights HRoe 2009.jpg,

The Mississippian culture flourished in what is now the Midwestern, Eastern, and Southeastern United States from approximately 800 CE to 1500 CE, varying regionally. After adopting maize agriculture the Mississippian culture became fully agrarian, as opposed to the hunting and gathering supplemented by part-time agriculture practiced by preceding woodland cultures. They built platform mounds larger and more complex than those of their predecessors, and finished and developed more advanced ceramic techniques, commonly using ground mussel shell as a tempering agent. Many were involved with the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, a pan-regional and pan-linguistic religious and trade network. The majority of the information known about the S.E.C.C. is derived from examination of the elaborate artworks left behind by its participants, including pottery, shell gorgets and cups, stone statuary, repoussé copper plates such as the Wulfing cache, Rogan plates, and Long-nosed god maskettes. By the time of European contact the Mississippian societies were already experiencing severe social stress, and with the political upheavals and diseases introduced by Europeans many of the societies collapsed and ceased to practice a Mississippian lifestyle, with notable exceptions being the Plaquemine culture Natchez and related Taensa peoples. Other tribes descended from Mississippian cultures include the Caddo, Choctaw, Muscogee Creek