While the in-person Santa Fe Indian Market was cancelled due to COVID-19, the event is moving ahead online through August 31, 2020. The annual market has a rich history in supporting Native arts. First launched in 1922, the annual market attracts more than 115,000 people each year. This year’s artists include a number of current and past NACF awardees. Click on the links below to shop!
Jackie Larson Bread (Blackfeet [Amskapi Pikuni]) is a 2020 Mentor Artist Fellow. She has dedicated the past fifty years to practicing and developing her unique style of beadwork. She comes from a long line of artists to whom she carefully listened, absorbing the knowledge passed on to her from her relatives. Now, she is a respected culture bearer in her community and an accomplished artist nationwide. Bread won best of show at Santa Fe Indian Market in both 2013 and 2019.
Cliff Fragua (Jemez Pueblo) is a 2020 Mentor Artist Fellow. His work signifies Jemez Pueblo culture through and through with a deep cultural understanding of the spiritual aspects of his artistic medium in stone. Although stone was not historically used as a traditional sculpting material, Fragua’s traditional upbringing embedded in cultural knowledge and respect for life has led him to understand the quality of stone. Through the shape, feel, and sound of the stone he can come to perceive what he believes the stone wants to become. Working with stone takes an immense amount of patience and skill so as one can hear its voice.
Jeremy Frey (Passamaquoddy) was awarded a 2014 NACF Artist Fellowship for Traditional Arts in recognition of the outstanding quality of the baskets he makes. Frey develops his pieces from start to finish, he harvests and prepares materials, then weaves intricate and stunning black ash baskets that have begun to stand alone in collections and exhibits around the world. He first learned the practice from his mother and developed his talent as a member of the Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance, an organization that has long nurtured a renaissance in basketry in New England.
Tahnibaa Naataanii (Navajo [Diné]) is a 2020 Mentor Artist Fellow who honors and maintains the ancestral weaving protocols and lessons that were passed on to her from her mother, her maternal grandmother, and all the grandmothers before her. She practices traditional Diné weaving methods by harvesting wool from sheep on her own land in the high desert, dying her materials using plants found in the Navajo Nation, and participating in weaving ceremonies and prayers to bless the nature of her work.
Kevin Pourier (Oglala Lakota) is a 2014 Regional Artist Fellow. Pourier has been carving Buffalo horn on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota for about 20 years, and recently won Best of Show at the 2018 Santa Fe Indian Market for his piece titled Winyan Wánakiksin, meaning Women Defenders of Others. Pourier is one of the only artists in the country working in the medium of incised buffalo horn. The works he produces carry forward Lakota artistic practices for creating spoons and vessels of sublime beauty from the horns of the revered animal. His carvings reveal the beauty he sees in the world around us, utilizing imagery intent on inspiring thought, growth and creating the opportunity for education.
Cara Romero (Chemehuevi) is a 2017 Mentor Artist Fellow whose award-winning photographs are stylistically-diverse narratives that are a testament to her well-rounded and proficient understanding of contemporary Native American photography. Strongly valuing authenticity in her work, Romero’s photographs offer viewers a new way of seeing Native American pop culture that counterpoints existing stereotypes that are still frequently perpetuated in modern culture’s media, education, and art.
Mateo Romero (Cochiti Pueblo) is a 2016 National Artist Fellow. Romero’s distinctive depictions of Southwest Native life are known throughout the Native art-painting world. Represented by Blue Rain Gallery in Santa Fe, Romero has shown at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts and is in the collections of the Denver Art Museum and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. His work has appeared in various publications and he has served on committees and boards for art organizations while periodically teaching at the Institute of American Indian Art.
Theresa Secord (Penobscot Nation) is a 2016 National Artist Fellow and ash Wabanaki basket weaver. The Emerald Ash Borer is decimating ash trees at an alarming rate, forcing basket makers to use alternative and man-made materials in order to keep the traditional art form alive. Despite this environmental challenge, while serving as founding director for more than 20 years, Secord led the Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance to substantially increase basket makers by revitalizing the art form and thereby creating new generations of basket weavers—a remarkable feat.
Dawn Spears (Choctaw Nation) received a Native Nation Partnerships award in 2018 as part of the The Northeast Indigenous Arts Alliance’s (NIAA) Youth Art Mentorship. The two phase program taught youth the history and origins of their traditional foods, and how to plant and harvest these foods. Drawing on her northeastern woodland culture she incorporates the vibrant colors symbolism, patterns and elements from the natural world on clothing.
Robert Mills (Tlingit) worked with 2018 Mentor Artist Fellow Jackson Polys as an apprentice in both traditional and advanced Tlingit carving techniques and formline design concepts. Mills works with metal and wood.