Books by Bruce Bernstein

Life keeps knocking 12-year-old Alan down. Can he find the courage to get back up? Orphaned at a young age, all Alan Michaels wants is a place to belong. But the independent, streetsmart kid, who lacks self-confidence, has no clue how to deal with disappointment or a formidable bully who won't back down. And New York City is a tough town to grow up in if you are a kid who doesn't have much. But when he starts training at Sensei Hideki's School of Karate, he hopes his life will change forever. Determined to prove he's got what it takes to become a true warrior, he pushes his body and mind to the limit. But just when the karate school starts to feel like home, tragedy strikes again. Does Alan have the courage and inner strength to overcome the odds stacked against him? ';When you get knocked down, you just keep getting back up You never give up.' Sensei paused for a moment and spoke louder. ';That's what takes real guts.' He stared at Alan intently. ';You know, sometimes failures are your steppingstones to success.'

Each August, one hundred thousand people attend Indian Market in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the nation's largest and most anticipated Native arts event. One thousand artists, representing 160 tribes, nations, and villages from the United States and Canada, proudly display and sell their works of art, ranging from pottery and basketry to contemporary paintings and sculptures. The history of Indian Market as related in this new publication is the story of Indian cultural arts in the twentieth century beginning with Edgar L. Hewett and the founding of the Museum of New Mexico in Santa Fe in 1909. At the turn of the last century, the notion of Indian art as art in its own right and not ethnography was a foreign concept. With the arrival of the railroad and tourism in New Mexico, two thousand years of utilitarian Pueblo pottery tradition gave way to a curio trade intended for visitors to the area. The curators and archaeologists at the Museum of New Mexico began to collect prehistoric and historic pottery and encouraged potters to make pottery modeled on traditional ideas thought to represent authentic culture. Maria and Julian Martinez countered the idea that art was a matter of studying the past when in 1922, at the first "Indian Fair,"they introduced their revolutionary Black-on-black pottery. Bruce Bernstein links these early developments to Indian Market's ninety-year relationship with Native arts, cultural movements, historical events, and the ever-evolving creativity of Native artists to shape their market.

Kansas-born educator Dorothy Dunn established America''s first Indian art school, thus ushering in the flat-art style by which Native American painters have been celebrated as the first modernists. Reproduced here are over ninety paintings by such prominent artists and former students as Pablita Velarde, Joe H Herrera, Allan Houser and Pop Chalee.