Footnotes

• Provenance:
  El Ricon Museum, Taos
  
  Cf:
  Fognell, Eva, editor, 2010, Art of the American Indians - the Thaw Collection, pp. 59-61 for a photo of a Lakota girl dressed in a similar garment and for a second fully-beaded child's dress in the Thaw Collection.
  "While ornamentation focusing on the bodice was traditional for women's garments across the Plateau and Plains, Lakota women...created some of the most complex beaded outfits ever seen in indigenous America. Many were dresses for their small daughters (T0069, on page 61). Through the work of their needles, these mothers defiantly asserted their family's ethnicity in the face of extreme hardship and pressures to assimilate...
  Euro-American cultures generally characterize clothing as a secular art form. But the making and wearing of aesthetically pleasing garments has for centuries held a deeply spiritual place in Native lives. 'Something sacred wears me.' The individual wears powerful garments and thus the sacred forces 'wear' or animate the individual... A woman affixes hundreds of thousands of beads, each a prayer, on a dress for her daughter - something sacred wears them. Those so garbed will be protected."

---

Category: Ethnographic Art / Native American

---

Auction terms and conditions