NEW YORK.- Totems to Turquoise: Native North American Jewelry Arts of the Northwest and Southwest, a landmark exhibition that celebrates the beauty, power, and symbolism of modern Native American jewelry arts, opens at the American Museum of Natural History. More than 500 objects, including dazzling contemporary and historic Native American jewelry and artifacts, honor a rich, complex, and diverse art form, the foundations of which lie in thousands of years of culture and experience. Totems to Turquoise illustrates how techniques, materials, and styles have evolved as Native American jewelers have adapted to technical, societal, and commercial changes, transforming traditional craft into a full-fledged mode of artistic _expression. On view through July 10, 2005, Totems to Turquoise focuses on the cultural similarities and differences of the Northwest and Southwest, the role of tribal and individual identity in design, and how artists incorporate images from their physical landscape into their work.

“This magnificent exhibition honors the remarkable depth, continuity, and growth of Native North American artistic traditions,” said Ellen V. Futter, President of the American Museum of Natural History. “By presenting the finest Native American jewelry arts in cultural and historical contexts, and offering examples from both the Northwest and the Southwest, Totems to Turquoise showcases the vitality of Native North American cultures today. It is a perfect extension of the anthropological work of this Museum which has, since it was founded in 1869, studied the cultures of the world, including North America. An early example of that groundbreaking work is the Museum’s extraordinary Hall of Northwest Coast Indians, which first opened in 1899.”

The Museum is celebrating the exhibition’s opening day on Saturday, October 30, with an afternoon program featuring Native American dancers in ceremonial regalia, including representatives of the Haida Nation in Canada and Zuni Pueblo in New Mexico. (For more information, see page 5.)

Totems to Turquoise showcases artwork from the Haida, Kwakwaka’wakw, Tsimshian, Gitxsan, Nisga’a, Tlingit, Nuu-chah-nulth, Haisla, and Salish tribes of the Northwest, and the Navajo, Zuni, Hopi, Santo Domingo, Taos and other Pueblos, Apache, and Tohono O’odham tribes of the Southwest, including a selection of contemporary sculptures, historic and contemporary masks, boxes, weavings, figures, pottery, and other artworks, including more than 100 from the Museum’s renowned collections.

Totems to Turquoise is co-curated by Peter Whiteley, Curator of North American Ethnology in the Museum’s Division of Anthropology, and Lois Sherr Dubin, lecturer, curator, and author of several authoritative books on Native American jewelry. Advising artists are Jim Hart, a Hereditary Chief of the Haida Nation and an accomplished carver and jeweler, and Jesse Monongya, a highly regarded Navajo jeweler whose inlay work is considered to be among the finest today.

“This exhibition brings together some of the most exciting and vital contemporary Native American art forms from two geographic areas where traditional cultures remain very strong,” said Dr. Whiteley. “Both the marine Northwest Coast and the desert Southwest feature an uninterrupted tradition of extraordinary indigenous artwork and iconography: transformed into silver, gold, and lapidary jewelry, this tradition achieves a powerful cultural continuation.”

“We wish to honor these magnificent cultures and illustrate how art is not a thing apart, but is fully integrated into all aspects of the people’s lives,” noted Ms. Dubin. “Every piece selected for the exhibition has been created by a Native artisan who is both highly gifted and has strong connections with his or her community. This is above all an exhibition about connections: the people to the land, the sacred to the pragmatic, ancient to contemporary, Native to non-Native, the universe to adornment.”