Gourds with Southwestern Motifs


Book Description

Gourds -- with their infinite variety of unusual shapes and sizes, and their smooth surfaces -- have provided a perfect canvas for artists in the American Southwest over many years. It's easy to carve, paint, and stain them, and add embellishments like beads and feathers. These beautiful projects, including rainsticks, masks, and bowls, reflect the traditional designs, techniques, and colors that are indigenous to this region.




Gourds


Book Description

Gourds -- with their infinite variety of unusual shapes and sizes, and their smooth surfaces -- have provided a perfect canvas for artists in the American Southwest over many years. It's easy to carve, paint, and stain them, and add embellishments like beads and feathers. These beautiful projects, including rainsticks, masks, and bowls, reflect the traditional designs, techniques, and colors that are indigenous to this region.




Gourd Pyrography


Book Description

A guide to gourd pyrography--using heat to create works of gourd art--that discusses gourd prep and work basics, provides step-by-step instructions for several designs and techniques, and presents secrets from fifty artists.




Creative Native American Beading


Book Description

The 19 highlighted jewellery and accessory projects include a Huichol Lace Sun Catcher and a Ladder Chain Bracelet (perfect for beginners) along with advanced-level projects like the Waterbird Pendant and Sun Rosette Medallion.




Deaf Artists in America


Book Description

Presents a collection of black-and-white and full-coclor photographs, drawings, and paintings by a number of deaf artists in America and includes illustrations and descriptions of each selection.




Big Book of Bird Houses & Bird Feeders


Book Description

Big, beautiful, and filled with breathtaking photographs and unique projects, this is one book every bird lover simply must have. It’s got everything, from design considerations to construction basics to a jaw-dropping assortment of feeders, baths, and houses to make. Information on the planning stages explains how to choose the right home for a particular bird, discourage unwanted guests, and mount and site the piece. There’s advice on feeding habits, too, but the main feature is the incredible projects, which will delight humans as much as our feathered friends. They include a charming Dutch Treat home with a windmill; a Cuckoo Condo; a rustic Bird Cage Feeder made from grapevines; and even a swimming pool complete with diving board.




Towns, Ecology, and the Land


Book Description

A pioneering book highlighting the dynamic environmental dimensions of towns and villages and spatial connections with surrounding land.




Along an African Border


Book Description

The divination baskets of south Central Africa are woven for a specific purpose. The baskets, known as lipele, contain sixty or so small articles, from seeds, claws, and minuscule horns to wooden carvings. Each article has its own name and symbolic meaning, and collectively they are known as jipelo. For the Luvale and related peoples, the lipele is more than a container of souvenirs; it is a tool, a source of crucial information from the ancestral past and advice for the future. In Along an African Border, anthropologist Sónia Silva examines how Angolan refugees living in Zambia use these divination baskets to cope with daily life in a new land. Silva documents the special processes involved in weaving the baskets and transforming them into oracles. She speaks with diviners who make their living interpreting lipele messages and speaks also with their knowledge-seeking clients. To the Luvale, these baskets are capable of thinking, hearing, judging, and responding. They communicate by means of jipelo articles drawn in configurations, interact with persons and other objects, punish wrongdoers, assist people in need, and, much like humans, go through a life course that is marked with an initiation ceremony and a special burial. The lipele functions in a state between object and person. Notably absent from lipele divination is any discussion or representation in the form of symbolic objects of the violence in Angola or the Luvale's relocation struggles—instead, the consultation focuses on age-old personal issues of illness, reproduction, and death. As Silva demonstrates in this sophisticated and richly illustrated ethnography, lipele help people maintain their links to kin and tradition in a world of transience and uncertainty.




Indian Designs


Book Description

Located in Southwest Collection.




Continuum Encyclopedia of Native Art


Book Description

This lavishly produced voulume is the first reference work to focus on the symbols, meaning, and significance of art in native, or indigenous, cultures.