Word: kachinas
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Kachinas are the Hopi Indians' holy spirits, sometimes personified by masked, dancers or represented by wooden dolls. Thus the Hopis protested when Kentucky's Ezra Brooks distillery hit upon the less than divine idea of marketing its bourbon in bottles shaped like kachina dolls. "How would a Catholic feel," asked Tribal Chairman Clarence Hamilton, "about putting whisky in a statue of Mary...
...Indians enlisted the influence of Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, himself a noted collector of kachina dolls. While Brooks had meant to sell 5,100 of the bottles in Arizona, the distillers agreed to stop at the 2,000 bottles already shipped; with the company's cooperation, Goldwater personally shattered the mold from which the bottles had been made. With that the dictates of religious sensibility gave way to the laws of supply and demand. Their rarity guaranteed, the Brooks kachinas have become an Arizona collectors' item...
...represented in this show were the last forms of "primitive" art to win general esteem outside their own tribal context. Only ethnologists were interested. The red man's images scarcely influenced white culture-unlike African art, whose impact on early 20th century painting was fundamental. Max Ernst collected kachina dolls, and Jackson Pollock, it is said, was interested in Navajo sand paintings; but as a rule, whether it was treated as knickknacks or, more decently, as ethnographical evidence, Indian art has languished on the fringes of white perception. The Whitney, by inviting its guest curator Norman Feder...
...people. Out in Newport Bay bobs his boat, Wild Goose II. Lesser men would have a yacht; Wayne's craft is a converted minesweeper. His house overflows with memorabilia and sentimental tributes from institutions as far apart as Good Housekeeping and the U.S. Marines. His collection of Hopi Indian kachina dolls is probably second only to Barry Goldwater's. Though the family car appears to be a standard Pontiac station wagon, it was custom built. "I wrote to the head man at G.M.," he beams, "and said, Tm gonna have to desert you if you don't stop makin' cars...
American Indians are on the warpath against cheap Japanese imitations of tribal handicrafts. From the Southwest, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the National Park Service have received complaints about Japanese versions of Navaho beadwork, Zuni jewelry, Hopi kachina dolls (painted wooden dolls representing Indian deities). From the Northwest have come reports of made-in-Japan totem poles and ivory carvings. The Japanese imitations sell for as little as one-fifth Indian prices. Up until last year, the Park Service had a regulation against sales of foreign-made handicrafts by concessionaires in national parks, but the ban was lifted...