SEATTLE, WA.- Drawn from the celebrated Native American art collection of Charles and Valerie Diker, Indigenous Beauty: Masterworks of American Indian Art from the Diker Collection is organized by the American Federation of Arts (AFA) and features 122 masterworks representing tribes and First Nations across the North American continent. Premiered in Seattle on February 12, 2015 at the Seattle Art Museum, the exhibition is the first traveling exhibition drawn from this collection and showcases a number of recent acquisitions never seen before by the public.

Indigenous Beauty highlights native North American artists whose visionary creativity and technical mastery have helped preserve cultural values across generations. The exhibition includes artists from many tribes and nations, each the product of complex and intertwined histories; and the captivating objects they created convey the extraordinary breadth and variety of Native American experience in North America. The exhibition shows both the deep historical roots of Native art and its dynamism, emphasizing the living cultures and traditions of Native American groups through to the contemporary era.

“Shaped by the Dikers’ passion for American Indian art and culture, and coupled with a sensibility honed by their long engagement with modern and contemporary art, this collection is renowned as one of the largest, most comprehensive, and exquisite of Native American art in private hands,” says Kimerly Rorschach, Illsley Ball Nordstrom Director and CEO. “We are thrilled to bring these superb works to Seattle.”

Selections from the collection have been presented previously at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1998–2000) and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (2004-6).

Indigenous Beauty emphasizes three interrelated themes—diversity, beauty, and knowledge—that relate both to the works’ original contexts and to the ways in which they might be experienced by non-Native visitors in a contemporary museum setting. The exhibition is organized in 11 clusters; while the objects within each one demonstrate common formal and functional qualities, the groupings are based primarily on geographic and cultural factors, allowing the viewer to perceive the impact of historical events as well as stylistic shifts over the course of decades or centuries. The range of work represented includes ancient ivories from the Bering Strait region; Yup’ik and Aleut masks from the Western Arctic; Katsina dolls of the Southwest pueblos; Southwest pottery; sculptural objects from the Eastern Woodlands; decorative clothing from Eastern and Plains tribes; pictographic arts of the Plains; sculpture and weaving of the Northwest Coast; and Western baskets.

A hallmark of the Diker Collection is the beauty and visual richness of the objects it contains. Visitors will be awed by an ancient carved antler figure from the Columbia River region; bedazzled by a Sioux dress decorated with thousands of glass beads; intrigued by a ball-headed club used during the fur trade; and fascinated with the Katsina spirit dolls of the Southwest Pueblos.

The diversity of Native artistry is borne out by the wide range of styles exhibited by hundreds of unique groups whose languages, mythologies, and customs have evolved over the centuries. Artists are identified as members of a great variety of tribes and nations, each a product of deep and intertwined native histories. These rich backgrounds inform the objects; some are rooted in particular episodes in the ancient past, while others stem from historic challenges and experiences. Together, these captivating objects and their individual stories convey the extraordinary breadth of Native American experience in North America.

By coming face-to-face with these superlative carvings, weavings, masks and ornamented clothing, visitors will see how cultural knowledge is imbedded in each work of art, passed down and refined over the generations. Artists learn from their elders techniques for gathering and processing materials; production methods; a repertory of designs and patterns and the meanings they may contain; and often songs, prayers, and rituals that are closely tied to artmaking. Over the last few decades, increased scholarship and closer collaborations between museums and Native communities have resulted in the recovery of knowledge about how objects were made, as well as their provenance, and the ways they might have been used and understood in the contexts in which they originated.

“This exhibition affords a rare opportunity to see true masterpieces of art from across the continent,” says Barbara Brotherton, Curator of Native American Art for the Seattle Art Museum. “These works reveal the creative transformations that took place when new materials and ideas acquired from Euro-American fur traders and settlers inspired Native artists. Exciting interpretive materials and public programs will bring the works to life and allow visitors to experience Native art and culture as never before.”