QUIET TRIUMPH - Forty Years with the Indian Arts Fund, Santa Fe [SOLD]
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QUIET TRIUMPH - Forty Years with the Indian Arts Fund, Santa Fe
Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, Fort Worth
with the cooperation of
The School of American Research, Santa Fe
January 1966
Published on the Occasion of an Exhibition of the Collection of The Indian Arts Fund, Santa Fe, New Mexico
The cover photograph is of Tony Peña of San Ildefonso Pueblo wearing the Chief White Antelope blanket found on the body of Chief White Antelope after the infamous Sand Creek Massacre, 1864. The blanket, in almost perfect condition, is in the collection of the Indian Arts Research Center of the School for Advanced Research, Santa Fe.
The IARC is the repository of thousands of pueblo pottery, Native American paintings, Navajo and Pueblo textiles, and other artifacts that are the result of an accident. A group of enthusiastic collectors, meeting in a home in Santa Fe shortly after World War I, gathered to view a Zuni jar which had been broken and mended. It was this jar, and its accident, that resulted in this small group of enthusiasts to agree to save pueblo pottery for the future. This broken and repaired Zuni jar became the first piece of pottery in the Indian Arts Fund collection.
The Indian Arts Fund was primarily successful because of Dr. Harry P. Mera and Kenneth M. Chapman, who stopped at nothing to acquire funds for purchasing pottery for the collection. They persuaded the important dealers of Indian arts in Santa Fe to give the Fund its first opportunity to purchase the best pieces the dealers had. Santa Fe dealers James L. Seligman and James H. MacMillan, and the Fred Harvey Company’s Herman Schweitzer in Albuquerque could be counted on for cooperation in giving the fund first refusal.
The IAF merged with the School of American Research in 1965, and its collection of pottery, along with that from the Laboratory of Anthropology, are now housed in a magnificent facility— The Indian Arts Research Center—built exclusively for that purpose. Visits to IARC are conducted in the summer months. If you are not familiar with the collection at IARC, go to our Item #26177 on our website and click on the Colores Video and you will be treated to one room of the pottery collection.
