MNA bulletin on ancestral Hopi painting released

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. - Painting the Cosmos: Metaphor and Worldview in Images from the Southwest Pueblos and Mexico, the Museum of Northern Arizona's long-awaited and newly published Bulletin 67, is now available.

Edited by MNA Danson Chair of Anthropology Dr. Kelley Hays-Gilpin and Museum of New Mexico Research Associate Polly Schaafsma, this 216-page volume is the product of a unique collaboration between the Museum and the Hopi Tribe. Many Hopi traditional scholars and leaders have contributed, with final review by the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office.

In this volume, numerous authors have presented a decade of scholarship on nearly 2,000 years of ancestral Hopi painting and the values expressed in the imagery of paintings on kiva walls and pottery vessels. Many fundamentals of Hopi iconography (the study of images) are held in common with other pueblos in New Mexico, with Indigenous cultures of northwest Mexico, and with the ancient civilizations of Mesoamerica. This volume is about such connections across not only Hopi life, but across the wider Pueblo world, and into Mesoamerica.

The nine chapters focus on ancient murals, painted pottery, and rock art and petroglyphs. Contemporary artists who work with ancient images and with ideas about continuity and change have also been included in this work.

Painting the Cosmos presents most of the core scholarship of the Hopi Iconography Project, an ongoing research effort by the Museum of Northern Arizona and the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office, established by a Memorandum of Understanding in March 2005.

Supporting research and consultation was provided by the Getty Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Rockefeller Foundation. Access to collections and other data was provided by the American Museum of Natural History, Amerind Foundation, Arizona State Museum (University of Arizona), Chicago Field Museum of Natural History, Harvard Peabody Museum, Maxwell Museum, Museum of New Mexico, Museum of Peoples and Cultures (Brigham Young University), University of Pennsylvania Museum, Smithsonian Institution Museum of Natural History, and National Museum of the American Indian.

Copies of Painting the Cosmos: Metaphor and Worldview in Images from the Southwest Pueblos and Mexico are available in the Museum's Bookstore for $34.95. You can reach the MNA Bookstore at (928) 774-5213, ext. 261.

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