Festival of Native Peoples

If you live anywhere near Western NC, please go to the 6th Annual Festival of Native Peoples in Cherokee, NC this weekend:

Indigenous tribes from across the Americas gather for the sixth Annual Festival of Native Peoples this August at the Cherokee Indian Fair Grounds in Cherokee, N.C. Considered the finest showcase of native dance, song and art in the southeast, the event honors the collective history, customs and wisdom of some of the oldest documented tribes.

Adult admission $10.  I've been two or three times in years past, and it's wonderful.  Last year's art on display (and for sale) by native artists was of great quality and diversity.  I highly recommend it!

Indian Artist Frank Wesley

I wanted to provide some information about a great 20th century Indian Christian artist named Frank Wesley (1923-2002).  The following five paragraphs are directly quoted from the Kerrmuller Collection Art Gallery:

I continue to be bogged down by other responsibilities, while I try to prepare more blog posts.  In the meantime: though not indigenous-made, I thought this was an interesting "Raven Cross" that references a contextualization of a Tlingit myth.

Here is a Northwest Coast version of the same Raven, by First Nation artist Todd Baker, which is accompanied by a description of the story:

I've been a bit busy lately, hence the low post rate.  I just finished a painstakingly short missions article called “Contextualizing Visual Arts in Communities Around the World" which, at 1,000 words, doesn't scratch the surface (or at least doesn't give adequate depth to the limited number of examples I found).  In any case, I used some information from this blog, and some new research and contacts to write about three examples of contextualized nonwestern Christian art.  I'll soon be posting about all three of them, one of which will be an update to a previous post.  In addition, I plan to post a book review about an Australian indigenous artist.  So stay tuned!

In the meantime, enjoy this close-up of the Maori face of Christ from a church altar that I used previously in this post.