MARKET REPORT
We ask leading dealers of historic and contemporary Native American art what their thoughts are on the market and where it might be headed.
The art market is fabulous. We’re selling pottery, paintings and jewelry of course—it’s been really strong with jewelry sales. This is mostly contemporary because that’s really my focus. Jewelry wise, we’ve been doing really well with Don Supplee, Sonwai and Carl Clark.
Don did an 8-karat gold Katsina necklace with coral, turquoise and sugilite. We didn’t have that very long at all. Sonwai did a really beautiful pair of earrings— normally people do symmetrical pairs and these were asymmetrical, so one dangle was 8 inches so it went all the way down to your shoulder, and then the other ear had one that was 3½ inches long. So it gives that real regal look. They were mostly coral and 18-karat gold. They were killer.
We recently did Andrea Vargas’ show, and it was really successful. We sold three good paintings for her. Now her show is down, and we just hung [Native artist] Eric Jon Boyd and I sold a painting right off the bat. He’s brand new. He’s doing these killer images of Native Americans on wood and floor mat materials. What he does is he’ll get a great frame, he’ll chop up and carve out the frame and paint on it, and then he’ll get materials and put [a historic photo of a Native American] on the material, distress it in a really cool way, and write things on it like “freedom” and “USA.” He’s taking historic photos and presenting them in a very different, contemporary way.