Santa Fe Indian Market

A History of Native Arts and the Marketplace

Each August, one hundred thousand people attend Indian Market in Santa Fe, the nation's largest Native arts event. One thousand artists, representing 160 tribes, nations, and villages from the United States and Canada, proudly display and sell their works of art.

Reviews

"With his particularly deep knowledge of Pueblo pottery, Bernstein has used historical photos, early journals, advertising materials, letters, newspapers, and magazines to track the making and selling of Native art over hundreds of years, documenting the origins of efforts to help artists eliminate the middlemen in curio shops and trading posts and to sell their work directly to customers... Bernstein makes a very thorough investigation of the changes in Indian Market's organizational structure from its founding to its present-day incarnation... If themes thread through the whole of Bernstein's book, they are these: that Native arts -- and artists -- transcend ethnography to occupy a place in the world of fine art; and that the ongoing tension between tradition and innovation, persistence and change, is at the heart of Native art -- and Indian Market."
-The Santa Fe New Mexican (Indian Market supplement)