Mexican Indian Designs from Textiles and Pottery

       "The indigenous population is distributed throughout the territory of Mexico but is especially concentrated in the Sierra Madre del Sur, the Yucatán Peninsula, the Sierra Madre Oriental, the Sierra Madre Occidental, and neighboring areas. The states with the largest indigenous population are Oaxaca and Yucatán, with the latter having the highest percentage of indigenous population in its own territory. Since the Spanish colonization, the North and Bajio regions of Mexico have had lower percentages of indigenous peoples, but some notable groups include the Rarámuri, the Tepehuán, the Yaquis, and the Yoreme." Wikipedia   

       Below are sample designs by modern indigenous peoples living in Mexico today.

Shown here are strong designs from textile and pottery motifs
 by modern Mexican Indians.

Huichol Folk Art.

Designs by The Incan Indians of Peru

      "Below are designs from the work of the remarkable Inca Indians of Peru. The Inca designs have interested artists and designers around the world immensely, and influenced many craftsmen toward a simpler but more thoughtfully arranged form of motif." Lemos

Animal designs by Peruvian Indians of South America.

 

Designs from old Inca Indian weavings found in Peru.

Bird, animal, fish and plant designs made by the Inca of Peru.

Bird borders from textiles and pottery designed by
the Indians of Peru, South America.

Peruvian Indian weaving and two bowls showing their
application of design to objects of utility.

Hopi Ceremonial Artifacts

       The Hopi are a Native American tribe who primarily live on the Hopi Reservation in northeastern Arizona, United States. As of the 2010 census, there are 19,338 Hopi in the country. The Hopi Tribe is a sovereign nation within the United States and has government-to-government relations with the United States federal government. Particular villages retain autonomy under the Hopi Constitution and Bylaws. The Hopi language is one of 30 in the Uto-Aztecan language family. The majority of Hopi people are enrolled in the Hopi Tribe of Arizona but some are enrolled in the Colorado River Indian Tribes. The Hopi Reservation covers a land area of 2,531.773 sq mi (6,557.26 km²). Read more...

• Read more about Katchina Dolls
• Hopi Nation: Essays on Indigenous Art, Culture, History and Law (pdf)
• Hopi Origin Story - English captions, delivered in Hopi

Color clip art of Hopi Ceremonial artifacts: dolls and woven crests from Arizona.

Clip Art of Popular Native American Artifacts

        Clip art page depicting popular cultural artifacts crafted by many Native American tribes include" bows and arrows, wampum drill, tom-tom drum and dance rattles. Students make wish to paste these resources inside of a journal about cultural artifacts or arts and craft methods.

• The Dress of A Blackfoot Brave - Naskapi boys have toy bows and arrows
• Craft a Paper War Bonnet - worn by Plains indians
• The Jungle Dance - drums and rattles used in many native cultures
• Navajo Rag Dolls - wear copies of native jewelry

Popular Native American Crafts.

Motifs for Native Pottery

       The Maricopa or Piipaash are a Native American tribe, who live in the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community and Gila River Indian Community along with the Pima, a tribe with whom the Maricopa have long held a positive relationship. The Maricopa at the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community consist mostly of Xalychidom Piipaash members and are concentrated in Lehi. The Maricopa at the Gila River Indian Community are concentrated in Maricopa Colony. The Maricopa are a River Yuman group, formerly living along the banks of the Colorado River. Read more...

• Learn more about the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community
• Read more about 4 different varieties of pottery and watch a video by Native American potter

       Below is a page of clip art depicting motifs from pottery made by Maricopa Natives: wavy lines, single loops and scrolls, double loops and scrolls. Students may wish to keep these samples in their journals to remember how they can decorate their own hand-built pots. 

Maricopa native motifs found on pottery.

How to Cast Plaster Tiles

        "How To Cast Plaster Tiles" for teachers and students to include in their journals and or lesson plans. The illustrated text is in black and white.

The text reads...

1. Modeling clay is used to make plaque 1/2" thick.
2. Put plaque in wall of cardboard 1 1/4" high & oil all surfaces with linseed or cooking oils.
3. Pour in Plaster of Paris and smooth flush with top.
4. When set pry pieces apart and oil the plaster surface.
5. Repeat 2 & 3 using cast for mold & make as many tiles as desired. 
6. Paint with tempera paints.
7. Finish tile with many coats of clear lacquer as necessary to give the tile the look of a fired tile.
   

Step-by-Step Clip Art Illustration of Casting Plaster Tiles.

llustrations About The Story of Water Travel

       The following black and white thumbnail drawings are of the history of travel by sea, ocean or river. Each clip art shows the following: the log, the raft, air filled animal skins, reed raft, tree dugout boat and a wooden fishing boat. There are also kayaks, canoes and outriggers for the south seas. Boats and ships are included with oar rudders, sail and rudder. Big ships by Vikings, modern sportsmen, for fishing, Gondolas, sailboats and even a giant steam ship!

Clip Art Page About The History of Light

       A series of small simple illustrations in black and white depicting the History of Light include: fire light, candle light, torch light, tallow, grease light, oil lamps, fire beacon, tin lantern, a candle stick, a glass lantern, electric light bulbs, gas asbestos and an oil lamp.

History of the stove clip art page

       The page below depicts the history of the stove as it relates to multiple purposes. The black and white illustrations include: an altar, a tile oven from Europe, a Pueblo fireplace, a series of campfires and fire places, wood and coal burners, gas stoves and finally an electric stove.

Things found in the art classroom...

       Things found in the art classroom include: a brayer set, paint brushes, garbage cans, wood tools, charts, bulletin boards, block printing equipment, paper easels nail box and a bulletin board. These clip art  pages are for students and teachers to use within the context of a classroom only. They may not be sold or republished from alternative resources.

       More supplies found in an art classroom might include the following clip art: shelves, windows, saw horse, benches, drawing benches, drawing boards, file cabinets and jars of paint.

• See an art supply cabinet for Dolls too!

Click to download the largest file size.

The history of the wheel clip art page

       The following clip art page by Lemos is based upon the history of the wheel from many different cultures, throughout human history. Cultures included here: Ancient Egypt, Ancient Rome,  Ancient India, Assyria, Ancient Greece, France, China and others. The clip art is in black and white and would make a nice page to include inside a student journal about designs, inventions, cultures, etc...

Encourage students to sketch inside their journals in order to sharpen their memory.

vintage clip art of compasses

      Illustrations of compasses for the classroom below are for exploration on land and at sea.

Find your way wherever you are.

A Mariner's compass for sea voyages.

"Ferment" by Roxy Paine

The first view of "Ferment" by Roxy Paine.

       Roxy Paine was born in 1966, New York City and is an American artist. He was educated at both the College of Santa Fe (now Santa Fe University of Art and Design) in New Mexico and the Pratt Institute in New York.

       Since 1990, Paine's work has been internationally exhibited and is included in major collections such as the De Pont Museum of Contemporary Art, Tilburg, The Netherlands; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. His dendroid sculptures can be found at various museums and foundations including the Olympic Sculpture Park, Seattle; Wanas Foundation, Knislinge, Sweden; Montenmedio Arte Contemporaneo NMAC, Cadiz, Spain; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario. Roxy Paine lives and works in Brooklyn and Treadwell, New York. Read more...

"Ferment" by Roxy Paine. A second view.

"Ricardo Cat" by Niki De Saint Phalle

"Ricardo Cat" by Niki De Saint Phalle.
Mosaic work: stones, mirror pieces, tiles etc...

       Niki de Saint Phalle was born on the 29th of October 1930 and she died on the 21rst of May 2002. She was a French-American sculptor, painter, and filmmaker. She was one of the few women artists widely known for monumental sculpture.

       She had a difficult and traumatic childhood and education, which she wrote about decades later. After an early marriage and two children, she began creating art in a naïve, experimental style. She first received world-wide attention for angry, violent assemblages which had been shot by firearms. These evolved into Nanas, light-hearted, whimsical, colorful, large-scale sculptures of animals, monsters, and female figures. Her most comprehensive work was the Tarot Garden, a large sculpture garden containing numerous works ranging up to house-sized creations. Her idiosyncratic style has been called "outsider art"; she had no formal training in art, but associated freely with many other contemporary artists, writers, and composers.

       Throughout her creative career, she collaborated with other well-known artists such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers, composer John Cage, and architect Mario Botta, as well as dozens of less-known artists and craftspersons. For several decades, she worked especially closely with Swiss kinetic artist Jean Tinguely, who also became her second husband. In her later years, she suffered from multiple chronic health problems attributed to repeated exposure to glass fibers and petrochemical fumes from the experimental materials she had used in her pioneering artworks, but she continued to create prolifically until the end of her life. Read more...

Backside views of "Ricardo Cat"

Inside and up-close views of Niki De Saint Phalle's "Ricardo Cat"

"Vase de Fleurs" by Pierre Bonnard

"Vase de Fleurs" by Pierre Bonnard.

       Pierre Bonnard was born in  Born in Fontenay-aux-Roses, in the Ile-de-France, France in 1867 and he died in 1947. He studied at the Academie Jullian, where he met Vuillard, Maurice Denis, K. X. Roussel, and Serusier, with whom he participated in the Nabis. As a young student he was influenced by Degas, Renoir, Van Gogh, and Toulouse-Lautrec, and developed a great interest in Japanese prints. In 1891 he exhibited for the first time at the Salon des Independants and in group shows with the Nabis. Five years later he had his first one-man show of paintings, posters, and lithographs at Durand-Ruel's. During this period his lithographs appeared in the Revue Blanche and L'Escarmouche, as well as in a portfolio called Quelques Aspects de la Vie de Paris which Vollard published in 1895. He also worked on sets, costumes, and posters for the Theatre de l'CEuvre and the Theatre des Pantins and modeled marionettes for a play with music by his brother-in-law, Claude Terrasse. In 1900 Ambroise Vollard commissioned him to illustrate with lithographs Parellilement and Daphnis et Chloi. Both are masterpieces of graphic art. In 1903 Bonnard exhibited in the first Salon d'Automne and in the Viennese Secession show and subsequently participated in many important exhibitions in Europe and America. He also had a number of one-man shows in Paris, London, New York, and other cities. His style, at first decorative and subdued in color, became much freer and brighter after 1900. Transposing the universe into colors, he painted landscapes, still lifes, and nudes transfigured by a shining light. Revolting against the fashions and theories of his contemporaries, Bonnard went his own way. He was an extremely modest man and very hard on himself, but his work is characterized by a charming ever-youthful, good-natured cheerfulness and by an increasing audacity of color harmonies. In 1912 he bought a house at Vernnet, in the Seine Valley, not far from Paris, and subsequently divided his time between there and the south of France. He died in 1947 in his house in Le Cannet on the Cote d'Azur.

"Sunflowers" by Van Gogh

"Sunflowers" by Vincent Van Gogh

       Born into an upper-middle-class family, Van Gogh drew as a child and was serious, quiet and thoughtful. As a young man he worked as an art dealer, often travelling, but became depressed after he was transferred to London. He turned to religion, and spent time as a Protestant missionary in southern Belgium. He drifted in ill health and solitude before taking up painting in 1881, having moved back home with his parents. His younger brother Theo supported him financially, and the two kept up a long correspondence by letter. His early works, mostly still lifes and depictions of peasant labourers, contain few signs of the vivid color that distinguished his later work. In 1886, he moved to Paris, where he met members of the avant-garde, including Émile Bernard and Paul Gauguin, who were reacting against the Impressionist sensibility. As his work developed he created a new approach to still lifes and local landscapes. His paintings grew brighter in colour as he developed a style that became fully realised during his stay in Arles in the south of France in 1888. During this period he broadened his subject matter to include olive trees, cypresses, wheat fields and sunflowers. 

"Egyptian Girl" by Alexej Jawlensky

"Egyptian Girl" by Alexej Jawlensky.

       Alexej Georgewitsch von Jawlensky was born on 13 March 1864  and died on the 15th of March 1941. He was a Russian expressionist painter active in Germany. He was a key member of the New Munich Artist's Association (Neue Künstlervereinigung München), Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) group and later the Die Blaue Vier (The Blue Four). Read more...

"Aurelia Roma" by Manuel Neri

"Aurelia Roma" by Manuel Neri.
 Laumeier Sculpture Park.

       Manuel Neri was born April 12, 1930 is an American sculptor who is recognized for his life-size figurative sculptures in plaster, bronze, and marble, as well as for his association with the Bay Area Figurative Movement during the 1960s. In Neri's work with the figure, he conveys an emotional inner state that is revealed through body language and gesture. Since 1965 his studio has been in Benicia, California; in 1981 he purchased a studio in Carrara, Italy, for working in marble. During the past four decades, Neri has worked primarily with the same model, Mary Julia, creating drawings and sculptures that merge contemporary sculptural concerns with classical forms. Read more...

"Girl in Yellow" by Moses Soyer

"Girl in Yellow" by Moses Soyer. 

       Moses Soyer (December 25, 1899 – September 3, 1974) was an American social realist painter. He was born in Borisoglebsk, Russian Empire, in 1899. His father was a Hebrew scholar, writer and teacher. His family emigrated to the United States in 1912. Two of Soyer's brothers, Raphael (his identical twin) and Isaac were also painters. Soyer's wife, Ida, was a dancer, and dancers are a recurring subject in his paintings. Soyer studied art in New York, first at Cooper Union and later at the Ferrer Art School, where he studied under the Ashcan painters Robert Henri and George Bellows. He had his first solo exhibition in 1926 and began teaching art the following year at the Contemporary Art School and The New School. He died in the Chelsea Hotel in New York while painting dancer and choreographer Phoebe Neville. 

"Eye" by Tony Tasset

"Eye" by Tony Tasset.
(fiberglass, steel, resin, oil paint)

        Tony Tassset is an American multimedia artist. His works consists mainly of video, bronze, wax, sculpture, photography, film, and taxidermy. He has exhibitions that can be seen in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Germany, Canada, Portugal, Italy, Ecuador, and London.

       Tasset was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. He is the cousin of Robert Sunderman. He received his BFA from The Art Academy of Cincinnati, and his MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1985). In 1986, 13 pieces of his art were purchased by two New York art dealers at the Chicago Art Expo. Tasset received an Award in Visual Arts along with $15,000 cash in 1989. He was also awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006 and The Louis Comfort Tiffany Award. He currently resides in Chicago, Illinois and is represented by Kavi Gupta of Chicago and Berlin. He is an art professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Read more...

"Bird Garden" by Klee

"Bird Garden" by Paul Klee.

       Paul Klee was born 18 December 1879  and died on the 29th of June 1940. He was a Swiss-German artist. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism. Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented with and eventually deeply explored color theory, writing about it extensively; his lectures Writings on Form and Design Theory (Schriften zur Form und Gestaltungslehre), published in English as the Paul Klee Notebooks, are held to be as important for modern art as Leonardo da Vinci's A Treatise on Painting for the Renaissance. He and his colleague, Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, both taught at the Bauhaus school of art, design and architecture. His works reflect his dry humor and his sometimes childlike perspective, his personal moods and beliefs, and his musicality.

"Lunch In Normandy" by Edouard Vuillard

"Lunch In Normandy" by Edouard Vuillard.

       Edouard Vuillard was born in Cuiseaux, Saone-et-Loire, France 1868 and he died in 1940. His family moved to Paris when Edouard was nine, and during the rest of his life he rarely went far from Montmartre, where his mother, to whom he was devoted, ran a dressmaking shop. He was enrolled in the Military Academy of St. Cyr, but gave it up to attend the Ecole des Beaux-Arts with his friends Maurice Denis and K. X. Roussel. In 1888 the three young artists enrolled in the Academie Jullian, where they met Serusier, Ranson, Piot and Bonnard, and formed the group called the Nabis. Vuillard's early paintings, mostly still lifes and small portraits, revealed a debt to Chardin and Corot, but by 1890 the influence of Gauguin and the Japanese was apparent in his simplification of form and his use of color in the painting "La Femme Endormie." He had his first exhibition in the rooms of the Revue Blanche, one of the meeting places of the Nabis, in 1891 and, about the same time, began exhibiting in the Nabis group shows at Le Bare de Boutteville's. With his friends, he helped establish the Theatre de l'CEuvre, and designed scenery for its productions. From 1893 until the beginning of World War I he painted a number of decorative panels such as "Le Jardin des Tuileries" (nine panels now in the Musee d'Art Moderne in Paris), did scenic designs for the Comedie des Champs Elysees and the Theatre de Chaillot, and produced many lithographs and easel paintings, particularly the intimate interior scenes in which the figures of his mother and close friends appear. After 1918 his style changed to a more emphatic Realism and in the thirties he did a series of commissioned portraits of fashionable people. In his last years he painted decorative murals for the Palais de Chaillot in Paris and the League of Nations in Geneva. A master of the intimate, who could create a whole world in his bourgeois Victorian interiors, Vuillard always remained outside the main stream of the aesthetic of his time. He died in La Baule in June, 1940, a short time after leaving Paris to escape the advancing Nazis.

"Shuttlecocks" by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen

"Shuttlecocks" by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen at The Nelson Atkins Museum.

       Claes Oldenburg (born January 28, 1929) is an American sculptor, best known for his public art installations typically featuring large replicas of everyday objects. Another theme in his work is soft sculpture versions of everyday objects. Many of his works were made in collaboration with his wife, Coosje van Bruggen. Van Bruggen died in 2009 after 32 years of marriage. Oldenburg lives and works in New York. Read more...

"The Wedding" by Henri Rousseau

"The Wedding" by Henri Rousseau.

       Henri Rousseau, called Le Douanier , was born in Laval, Mayenne, France in 1844 and he died in 1910. Joined the Army when he turned eighteen and was assigned to play the saxophone in a regimental band. Served in the Franco-Prussian War, was discharged in 1871, and settled in Paris with Yadwigha, the Polish girl he had married in 1869. He got a job as a second-class clerk in the Customs Service, from whence came the nickname he has become known by, Le Douanier.

       Without any formal training, he began to paint in the 1880's. In 1886, in his early forties, he retired from the Customs Service on a small pension - which he supplemented by giving drawing and music lessons to the neighborhood children - and devoted most of his time to painting. He began submitting to the Salon des Independants in 1886, and exhibited regularly for the next twenty years without notice more favorable than ridicule. In 1905 he began exhibiting at the Salon d'Automne, and gradually attracted the attention of artists and writers like Gauguin, Derain, Vlaminck, Delaunay, Picasso, Apollinaire, Max Jacob, and Raynal. In 1907 he met Wilhelm Uhde, the famous art critic, who wrote the first monograph on him a few years later. In 1908 Picasso gave a banquet for him at the Bateau-Lavoir, and he was heralded as the pet of the avant-garde. The pleasure of success in his last few years was somewhat spoiled for him by personal difficulties, particularly the heartbreak of being turned down by a woman he wanted to marry. (He was already twice a widower.) He died of pneumonia on October 2, 1910, and was buried in a pauper's grave; his remains were later transferred to Laval, and an epitaph written by Apollinaire and engraved in stone by Brancusi and Orthiz de Zarate was placed on his grave.

       Henri Rousseau was an outstanding example of the Naive painter. Though untaught and ingenuous, he produced a remarkable body of work that includes scenes of family occasions, military events and sports, landscapes of Paris and its environs, bouquets of flowers and exotic and allegorical scenes such as "The Dream" and "Sleeping Gypsy." His paintings have won universal recognition, and are found in the Louvre and important museums of modern art throughout the world.

"Composition in Primary Colors" by Mondrian

"Composition in Primary Colors" by Piet Mondrian

       Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) was born in Amersfoort, Holland. He studied to be a teacher, then decided to be a painter instead, and in 1892 enrolled in the Academy of Amsterdam. From 1895 to 1907 he painted naturalistic landscapes in delicate but rather dull colors, then a stay at Dombourg on the island of Walcheren in 1 908 changed his manner and brightened his palette. He arrived in Paris in 191 1, where he was influenced by Cubism and inclined toward abstraction. He spent the war years in Holland, continuing his experiments with abstraction until in 1916 he produced openly non-figurative paintings, rhythms consisting of horizontal and vertical lines which later became known as the "plus and minus" series. While in Holland, he became the center of a group of artists interested in geometrical proportions as the basis of art. With Theo van Doesburg, a member of this group, Mondrian founded an art magazine called De Stijl, which gave its name to the group and in which its ideas of Neo-Plasticism were set forth. Mondrian elaborated on these theories in his book LeNeo-Plasticisme, published in 1920 after his return to France. In Paris he became a member of the Circle and Square Group and, later, of the Abstraction-Creation group. He participated in large international exhibitions of abstract art in Paris and the United States. He lived in London from 1938 to 1940, then came to New York, where he was very warmly received, and had two exhibitions at the Valentine Gallery in 1 942 and 1 943 . He began painting in the more exuberant mood of "Broadway Boogie-Woogie," which is still geometrically abstract but uses bright, garish color in insistently repeating patterns that suggest the jangling pulse of Times Square at night. Since his death at Murray Hill Hospital in February, 1944, important retrospective exhibitions of Mondrian's work have been held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitechapel Gallery in London and the Municipal Museum at The Hague. His canvases, which inaugurated a new style, are in the principal museums of modern art throughout the world.