The Book
Shaping Modernism
by Steve Elmore
An incredibly comprehensive resource of storytelling and images
An enlightening, groundbreaking book
Every American should know more about this unique story
Forthcoming
Shaping Modernism: Nampeyo as America’s First Abstract Artist
Steve Elmore’s anticipated second volume on Hopi-Tewa potter Nampeyo delivers a revelatory reassessment of American art history. With the force of three decades of scholarship behind him, conducted in close collaboration with members of the Nampeyo family and leading scholars, Elmore makes a bold case for Nampeyo as a foundational figure in the emergence of modernist abstraction.
Elmore’s book draws a vivid throughline from Nampeyo’s 1895 founding of the Sikyatki Revival art movement, rooted in 1,500 years of Puebloan art history, to the abstract revolution of 20th-century modernism. In Elmore’s view, modernist abstraction is not born in Parisian salons but in the American Southwest, shaped by ancestral knowledge and symbolic vision. Elmore tracks Nampeyo’s influence with stunning clarity, showing how her pottery, already celebrated in the U.S. and Europe during her lifetime, is exhibited internationally at the precise moment artists like Hilma af Klint, Wassily Kandinsky and Pablo Picasso began formulating their radical new styles.
The connections are more than speculative. Elmore’s meticulous research uncovers museum records, correspondence and photographic evidence from over 70 international institutions to place Nampeyo’s work directly in the view of the European modernists. Her geometric abstraction, rooted in spiritual and cosmological meaning, anticipated and influenced the spiritualist abstraction of af Klint and the symbol-rich compositions of Kandinsky. Even Picasso’s engagement with so-called modernist Primitivism is refracted through a new lens when Nampeyo’s bold visual language is taken into account.
Lavishly illustrated with hundreds of full-color images, many never before published, Shaping Modernism builds upon Elmore’s earlier work, In Search of Nampeyo (2015), but expands the narrative dramatically, offering the first art historical biography of Nampeyo and a radical new context for her legacy.
Subscribe for updates on this forthcoming edition
Advance Praise for Shaping Modernism
What an incredibly comprehensive resource of storytelling and images around the contributions of Tewa-Hopi artist Nampeyo to American art. Her influence is profound and figures powerfully in the development of Modernism, including everyone from Max Ernst, Jackson Pollack and the San Ildefonso potter Maria Martinez. She was one of the country’s first recognized abstract artists. Nampeyo’s influence remains ever present. You will come to understand that the collective American imagination has its deepest roots in Native arts and cultures.
We would like everyone to know about Nampeyo’s long and successful life as a potter. We to this day still use methods and designs she created and passed down through her daughters, our grandmothers. We would like our children and all Native American children to know about Nampeyo as a success story for Native Americans. Every American should know more about this unique story so that her legacy may continue to grow.
Shaping Modernism is a compelling and illuminating biography of Nampeyo, the legendary, trailblazing artist from Hopi First Mesa. Elmore’s richly detailed, meticulously researched, and lavishly illustrated narrative effectively argues Nampeyo’s status as America’s first modernist artist and rightly places her legacy among, if not at the forefront of, the European modernists. Shaping Modernism is an enlightening, groundbreaking book about Native American artist Nampeyo and a remarkable chapter in U.S. history. A must-read, must-have for Southwest history aficionados.
Nampeyo stands out as an enduring luminary among Southwestern Native American potters. Her pleasing designs and beautifully made pottery leave a lasting cultural legacy. Native American art and craft has always been inherently abstract and modernist. Nampeyo’s art has influenced Modernist and Contemporary artists worldwide and will continue to do so in the future.
Shaping Modernism is a call to have Nampeyo heralded alongside other key women artists for whom the Southwest was a place of freedom to be and to make as they wanted. Nampeyo should really be a standard bearer of this tradition. Her circling birds, soaring clouds and opening flowers may well have influenced the sparse beauty of Georgia O’Keefe but they have been painfully overlooked as part of this history.
Shaping Modernism is a fresh and provocative overview of a masterful Indigenous innovator that reminds us of the need for thorough and capillary work on neglected collections and silenced connections. In this book, the author’s decades long research coalesces into a compelling, multifaceted and intricate tale of intellectual, aesthetic and artistic influences, appropriations, and genuine appreciations that links Nampeyo and Native American art to archaeologists, anthropologists and collectors, as well as, perhaps most surprisingly, to Theosophists, Surrealists, Art Deco, and Modernism. Elmore’s highly textured and detail-rich account of Nampeyo’s rise from local artisan to world-renowned celebrity will finally put her name among the most stimulating, creative, and original artists of all times.
The evidence is undeniable: Nampeyo was a true artist in the Western sense. This richly illustrated book will become a reference for Nampeyo’s work for decades and provide readers with the tools needed to further investigate.
A comprehensive reexamination of the life, works, and aesthetic sensibilities of Nampeyo, arguing for her significance as a pioneer of the Modernist movement.
A major contribution to a broader understanding of Nampeyo’s influence as an artist.
Elmore’s comprehensive research on Nampeyo’s life and work is the best available.
Nampeyo transcends categorization. Her influence on the modern art movement was significant.
In Search of Nampeyo (2015) by author Steve Elmore highlighted the ceramic work of one of our nation’s most important artists. Hopi-Tewa ceramist Nampeyo was a key figure at the turn of the 20th century in reviving ancestral traditions in shaping clay. Her contributions continue to reverberate in our time, through succeeding generations of artists continuing, and expanding, the canon. In Shaping Modernism: Nampeyo as America’s First Abstract Artist, Elmore again shares the fruits of his ongoing research, bringing even greater attention to Nampeyo’s many contributions.