Surviving the Santa Fe Indian Market
And why it’s the “Indian Artist Oscars.”
Categories: Featured Travel Stories
By: Johnny D. Boggs 05/01/2008
Now I know what it feels like to be a piece of turquoise in the middle of a Charles Favour mosaic bracelet.
It’s shoulder-to-shoulder people inside Ortega’s On The Plaza. On the eve of the Santa Fe Indian Market, the store is holding its annual opening reception for artists. Picture a New York subway at rush hour, only everyone’s happy. I see jewelry artist Dennis Hogan talking to a customer. I’d wave, but I can’t lift my arms.
City officials say Indian Market will bring in 100,000 visitors. Skeptics question that figure, but it feels like there are 100,000 people inside Ortega’s right now.
This weekend will be peppered with lectures, auctions, movies, seminars, book signings and gallery openings featuring Indian and non-Indian artists, like Favour and Hogan. But Indian artists are the stars, and Indian art markets everywhere are booming.
“The interest in collecting Indian art goes back to the first contact between Europeans and North America,” says James Nottage, vice president and chief curatorial officer at the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art in Indianapolis. “That is why those earliest ‘tourists’ created collections of what today amount to the best 17th-, 18th- and 19th-century American Indian objects in collections in England, France, Germany, Finland, Russia and elsewhere.”
Railroads and trading posts helped create the opportunity for markets, and later, museums brought a new legitimacy to the art form, Nottage says.
“Up to and including the Great Depression, the mini-industry of Indian art production and the appetite of collectors grew,” Nottage says. “Yes, there has been an ‘explosion’ of interest and it most clearly is evident from the late 1960s on.”
It isn’t slowing down.
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