Zuni Art : Business: In April, the New Mexico tribe opened its second off-reservation outlet among the upscale boutiques in Venice. It’s part of a highly effective effort to market arts and crafts.
Sometimes people read the sign and think it’s a scam.
After all, the sign says the new crafts gallery in Venice is owned by the Zuni tribe, who occupy a pueblo a thousand miles away in New Mexico.
But the sign speaks the truth. In April, the tribe opened its second off-reservation outlet for Zuni-made jewelry, pottery, carved fetishes and other crafts. The new store was not in a predictable place such as Santa Fe, but among the upscale boutiques on Main Street, under the watchful eye of Venice’s patron saint, the bearded ballerina clown.
However unlikely, a Zuni presence on the Westside is part of a shrewd, highly effective effort begun by the tribe in 1984 to market its own arts and crafts. As tribal employee Jim Ostler explained, the Zuni have more than 1,000 jewelry makers, fetish carvers, potters and other artists among its fewer than 9,000 residents.
“There are more artists per capita in Zuni than anyplace I’ve ever seen,” said Ostler, who is director of the tribal enterprise known as Zuni Arts and Crafts.
Ostler, an anthropologist and former art professor who also has trading post experience, is not a Zuni, but has been involved with the business since its inception. “The tribe made me a proposition I couldn’t refuse,” he said.
As Ostler pointed out, the Zuni, who live in New Mexico near the Arizona border, have been doing business with non-Zunis for centuries. “They’ve been at a trading crossroads for a thousand years. Whether it’s an outsider Comanche or an outsider Anglo or an outsider Hispanic, they’re comfortable dealing with outsiders--and I’m comfortable being an outsider in that context.”
For decades, said Ostler, the Zuni have wanted to market their handcrafted objects directly, instead of selling them to trading posts and other typical Southwestern outlets for Indian goods. In 1984 the tribe received $200,000 from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development to start the business.
From the beginning, it targeted markets outside the Southwest, already saturated to the point of parody with Indian crafts, some actually made in Asia. Instead, the tribe looked for affluent customers who weren’t already up to their elbows in squash-blossom necklaces--in California, on the East Coast, in Europe and Japan.
Ostler said there was really no good model for how to make a tribal arts business go, so the Zuni created one. Zuni Arts and Crafts began attending trade shows, for instance, including the California Gift Show and overseas trade shows.
Initially, Zuni and non-Zuni alike predicted the business would fail, Ostler said, but within three months it was in the black.
Zuni artists set their own prices for the pieces they sell to Zuni Arts and Crafts. If the managers of the business think the artist wants too much, they will suggest that he or she try to sell the piece elsewhere. Zuni sells to other retailers worldwide. It opened its first tribally owned store in 1984 on the reservation, where it competes with several non-tribal stores. At the Zuni-owned stores, the markup is usually three times what the artist is paid.
Zuni Arts and Crafts’ first off-reservation store opened last year in San Francisco. “Lots of people from California were going to Santa Fe,” said Milford Nahohai, a Zuni who manages the company. “We felt we might as well go directly to California to do a store.”
The tribe hired non-Zuni Brad Allan to run the Union Street operation, in part because Allan had earlier persuaded two major national chains, the Nature Company and Natural Wonders, to carry Zuni work. Occasionally, Nahohai said, customers saw an Anglo in charge of the San Francisco shop and wondered just how authentically Zuni it was. But the only reason no Zuni was on the staff was because Zunis think California is a nice place to visit, Nahohai said. “We were not able to get any Zunis to live out there.”
In its first year of operation the Northern California store grossed $250,000, 20% more than projected. Nahohai estimated the business’s overall annual earnings at about $1 million.
The business has done several good things for the tribe, according to Ostler. Most Southwestern shops carry merchandise made by members of many tribes. Zuni’s shops focus exclusively on the work of tribe members, who are especially well known for their carved fetishes and for setting tiny pieces of turquoise and other stones in silver jewelry in a style called needlepoint.
“It also gives us a chance to focus on individual artists,” Ostler said, citing such increasingly well-known individuals as needlepoint silversmith Edith Tsabetsaye and potter Anderson Peynetsa.
For the new Venice store, Allan spent months looking for space on the Westside before choosing 222 Main St., just over the border from Santa Monica. Montana Avenue was too pricey, and he decided he could do without the walk-in traffic that makes the Third Street Promenade so attractive to retailers. “I think as the store gets to be known, it’s going to be a destination,” said Allan. “We don’t need to rely too much on the cafe and movie-house crowds coming in.”
Zuni Pueblo, as the store is called, carries everything from simple $3 silver earrings inlaid with bits of turquoise and coral to concho belts worth thousands. Beadwork, weaving, pottery and other traditional crafts are represented, as are newer arts such as miniature painting. There are hundreds of carved fetishes, including tiny bears of jet (Zuni carvers couldn’t produce wolf fetishes fast enough last year in the wake of the Oscar-winning film, “Dances with Wolves”).
Olster notes that fetishes are increasingly collectible, much like Japanese netsuke, carvings traditionally used to attach pouches to kimono sashes.
All the objects in the store bear the names of the Zuni artists who made them. Nahohai is the brother of one of the best-known contemporary artists, potter Randy Nahohai, whose pots are often decorated with geometric designs inspired by Zuni patterns from the 16th Century.
At Zuni pueblo, Nahohai explained, children learn crafts by watching and assisting their elders. Certain designs or techniques are identified with individual artists or families, and people do not imitate them without permission.
Nahohai routinely helps his octogenarian mother, Josephine, make her widely admired pots, one of which is in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. She is losing her eyesight, and so he does much of the painting, using pigments taken from the earth or concocted according to ancient recipes from local plants.
The reservation is a place where the quality of one’s silversmithing, like everything else about everyone in a homogeneous community, is noted.
“Zuni is a town of critics,” Nahohai said. “Nobody is immune from it.” Ostler agreed. “There is a lot of comment about really good pieces.”
One consequence of the company’s success is that more and more Zuni are working as artists and craftsmen. According to Ostler, the number of fetish carvers has increased from 10 to 100 over the past six years. There has also been a revival of certain crafts, notably pottery and weaving, that had been in decline. Most important, perhaps, a lot of Zunis have been able to trade their bicycles in for pickup trucks.
Ostler estimated that 60% of the community’s income is derived from arts and crafts.
Ostler said he believes the company has largely managed to avoid the major obstacle to such enterprises--tribal politics. No tribal politician can skim off profits. Everything the company makes is reinvested in the company. And instead of succumbing to such tribal temptations as nepotism, the company is run according to sound business principles, he said.
One popular class of traditional objects you won’t find for sale in Zuni shops are kachina dolls, the carved figures given to children to teach them Zuni religious practices.
Nahohai recalled that he had a kachina on display when he first opened the reservation shop. Two old men, members of the tribe’s kachina society, asked him if he intended to sell it. There was no threatening, no talk of the Native American equivalent of blasphemy, but the old men did counsel him, “If you want your shop to prosper, we suggest you don’t.”
He didn’t, and the business did.
In fact, planning is underway for a shop in Paris, where the market for carved fetishes is really untapped.
