GENERATIONS The Helen Cox Kersting Collection of Southwestern Cultural Arts [SOLD]

GENERATIONS The Helen Cox Kersting Collection of Southwestern Cultural Arts

This collection is located at Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art located in Indianapolis, Indiana

Edited by James H. Nottage

Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art

Hardback with slip cover, first edition, 2010.  New Condition, 440 pages, beautifully illustrated with 600 color plates and nearly 800 objects in the collection.

Generations: The Helen Cox Kersting Collection of Southwestern Cultural Arts celebrates an important collection of pottery, jewelry, baskets, weavings, katsinas, and paintings donated to the Eiteljorg Museum in 2008.  Representing the work of Native American artists from the late 1800s to the present, the collection and this book concentrate upon the twentieth century and demonstrate the survival and the flowering of work by Navajo, Pueblo, and others artists across the generations.

Helen Cox Kersting grew up in Illinois, but gained fame as an opera star in Europe.  As a child, she explored the Southwest on vacations with her parents and gathered souvenirs of those travels.  As an adult, she became a sophisticated collector of the best work by famed jewelers such as Leo Poblano, John Gordon Leak, Charles Loloma, Frank Dishta, and many others.  She was fascinated by the pottery of masters such as Maria Martinez, Lucy Lewis, Margaret Tafoya, and Nampeyo. Purposefully, she gathered fine examples by these distinguished individuals and many more, following the influences of their work on the generations that followed them.  

Leading artists today, descendants of these and other individuals, were enthusiastically collected by Kersting.  Brilliant works by Veronica Poblano, Tammy Garcia, Grace Medicine Flower, Tony Da, Jacob Koopee, Les Namingha, and dozens more joined the collection.  

With insights into the history of the collection and with a focus upon the pottery and jewelry, the Eiteljorg Museum along with the authors of this volume present a visual feast of Native arts of the American Southwest.  This is a story about connoisseurship and the vitality of these arts.