A Fascination Becomes Livelihood : Art: Kim Martindale drew from a childhood love of Native American works in pulling off his first deal--a $100 rug he later sold for $450.
Kim Martindale has been buying and selling American Indian art since he was 13.
Now 28, he remembers the first occasion well.
With a princely $110 in his pocket, the teen-ager was searching for Indian treasures at the Rose Bowl Swapmeet in Pasadena.
“This guy had what he was calling a Navajo rug from 1920,” Martindale recalled. “I kept saying to myself, ‘This is a transitional blanket--it’s from 1890.’ ” Martindale was right. He bought the piece for $100 and sold it a half-hour later for $450. A career was born.
Martindale said he has been interested in American Indian art “from the beginning of memory.” When he was 4, he found his first arrowhead in a field near the family home in Regina, Canada. When his mother took him to that city’s museum of natural history, he would hang around a diorama depicting fur traders doing business with local Indians, entranced by the miniature costumes and artifacts.
Martindale, who has a showroom in West Hollywood, flies all over the country to meet sellers and collectors. He deals in all kinds of American Indian art but specializes in Navajo textiles (as well as basketry). As he points out, most of the items he sells were made to be used or traded. However artful, they were not created as art objects in the European fine-arts sense. Although their work is infused with balance, harmony and other aesthetic values, he said, “many of the tribes didn’t have a word for art.”
According to tradition, Martindale said, the Navajo learned to weave from Spider Woman.
Historians and anthropologists believe that the Navajo learned to weave from Pueblo Indians, probably in the 17th Century.
Among the Pueblo Indians, weaving was a religious act, performed by men. Navajo weavers have traditionally been women, and their work has been secular, even commercial, almost from the beginning.
As Martindale pointed out, the Navajo originally wove water-resistant wool blankets, which they often wore around their shoulders. “Textiles from this classic period were much sought after by other tribes, especially Plains Indians,” he said. “To the Plains Indians, a Navajo blanket might be worth 50 or 60 buffalo hides.”
Especially desirable were chiefs’ blankets--not worn by Navajos, since they didn’t have any chiefs--but especially fine blankets that only the most powerful individuals in other tribes could afford.
The transitional period in Navajo weaving began with the tribe’s forcible relocation by Kit Carson from traditional lands to Ft. Sumner, N.M. In exile, the Indians were given manufactured blankets and virtually stopped weaving blankets to wear. Their textiles became a trade item, a key element in their economy when they returned to the Southwest’s Four Corners area in 1868, Martindale said.
The transitional period, which lasted until 1890, also saw the reservation trader become an important element in the creation and distribution of their work. The weavers got commercial dyes and yarns from the traders, to whom they brought their finished goods.
The traders often paid the Navajo weavers by the pound, he said, and sometimes the result was a so-called “pound blanket,” a thick, loosely woven item that occasionally had pebbles and sand added to maximize the weaver’s return.
The Navajo began making rugs between 1870 and 1900, he said. For decades after 1900, the work was influenced by the traders and the Indian Department of the Fred Harvey Co., which provided dining cars for the Santa Fe Railroad and ran restaurants and tourist shops along the railway. As Martindale pointed out, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County has an excellent collection of Navajo textiles given to the museum by newsman and legendary acquirer William Randolph Hearst, who obtained most of them from the Fred Harvey Co.
The company touted the exotic attractions of the Indian West to potential train-travelers back East and arranged to have Navajo weavers and other artisans sit by the tracks to get the tourists off the trains and into the company’s showrooms.
Non-Indian middlemen even advised the weavers on what colors and designs to use, according to Nancy Blomberg, assistant curator of anthropology at the Natural History Museum, who wrote about the cross-cultural history of Navajo weaving in the catalogue to an 1988 exhibit of pieces from the Hearst collection. At one point, she noted, a well-known Arizona trader urged local weavers to return to traditional designs and colors, instead of trying to copy the Oriental rug patterns many white buyers preferred.
In American Indian art circles, textiles created before 1940 are considered antique, Martindale said.
Although Navajo textiles have been valued and collected almost since they first appeared, they are more popular than ever, Martindale said. An early Navajo blanket sold last year for $522,500, setting a record for American Indian art. Right now, he said, pieces with pictorial elements (one of the rugs in the Hearst collection features a train) are especially prized.
Martindale has a small personal collection of about 60 items he regards as gems. His favorites include a large dough bowl from New Mexico’s Santo Domingo pueblo and an extremely rare Chumash basket, valued at $7,000.
Martindale is producer of the Los Angeles Antique American Indian and Tribal Art Show and Sale, to be held this Saturday and Sunday in the Glendale Civic Auditorium.
Martindale said he sometimes has mixed feelings about dealing in American Indian art, especially when confronted with Indians angry that the descendants of the people who created it can rarely afford it.
“Many of these things were not treasured,” he said. “If they hadn’t been collected, they wouldn’t exist. They would have been worn out.” He thinks unique items should stay in the United States, but he does not hesitate to sell to foreign collectors. “I love Oriental art,” he said. “I would hate to see all Chinese art, all Japanese art, all Korean art returned to those countries.”
He said he agrees with Indians that they should control all sacred objects, but he believes there should be a consensus definition of what constitutes a sacred object.
Sometimes Indian objects lose their religious significance if they are not cared for in traditional ways, he pointed out. And sometimes, he said, objects were made specifically for trade that closely resemble sacred objects.
“It has to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis,” said Martindale, who added that he always passes on offers of sacred objects.