Some of the earliest Native expressions of prayer, self-identity, adornment and beauty were created in three-dimensional form from materials freely provided by the earth. Walrus ivory figures carried by hunters in the Arctic north, amulets carved in bone or wood or shaped from clay, totems reaching skyward-over the centuries, experienced hands have passed on their understanding and tools to younger hands.

But living traditions breathe, grow and change. Native sculpture today reflects the possibilities provided by new and varied materials, technologies and tools. Just as important, these works are creatively sparked by the ever-evolving experiences, perceptions and artistic innovations of Native peoples throughout the complex modern world. The results, in many forms and mediums, are fed by roots in the nurturing past, yet are truly contemporary art.

Roxanne Swentzell touches on the experience of her pottery-making Santa Clara Pueblo relatives and ancestors when she flattens out a piece of clay and then rolls it into a long coil. She lays the coil on top of itself and presses it together, around and around, to build a vessel shape. But even before we see the form she will make, we notice a difference in Swentzell's coil: it is big and thick, rolled in the air between the artist's hands instead of on a table. We watch as the large, hollow vessel sprouts a leg, and then two. Arms come out, a head materializes, and expressive features begin to give the figure character. Lots of it.

Among the captivating qualities of Swentzell's clay figures, and the bronze editions produced from some of them, are the very human traits they portray. From deep reflection to confusion, wisdom to surprise, pain to heartfelt joy, the range of emotions and experiences communicated through the clay people's faces, gestures and body language is like our own. This, along with the artist's superb technical skill with clay, may explain the enormous popularity of her work.

Swentzell's art has been exhibited in museums and galleries internationally, and has earned numerous awards at Santa Fe Indian Market and the Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair & Market. In 1997, her sculpture "Emergence of the Clowns" was included in an exhibition of Native sculpture at the White House curated by the Heard Museum.

From the beginning, Swentzell's clay creations have served as an articulate voice for her feelings and experiences. Because of a childhood speech impairment that made verbal expression difficult, her first small clay figure-a little girl with her head down on her desk-was the only way she knew to let her mother know she was unhappy at school.

Today, Swentzell is a perceptive and empathetic observer of human nature and society. She uses her art, often with a touch of humor, to mirror what it means to be alive, to be Native American, to be connected to and nurtured by the past, and to be caught up in the present world. Among her recent pieces is a sultry, reclining female with a large flower behind her ear. The work was influenced by a visit the artist made to Hawaii, and her impressions of ever-present fruits and flowers and a sensuous, softly enveloping climate.

Other clay figures over the years have emerged out of issues such as identity-Swentzell is the daughter of a Pueblo mother and a non-Native father-politics, family and community relationships, Pueblo cosmology, and the effects of pressure to conform to social standards and roles. Another recent piece reflects a core aspect of the human experience: transition and transformation. The curly-haired female is holding a flower vase. Flowers, the artist notes, symbolize a ripening, an opening, and a marker for important changes in life, such as births, weddings and deaths.

"There's a slight smile on her face," Swentzell says of the figure. "It's kind of like a Mona Lisa smirk. You can see her thinking, but she doesn't know what will come. She's almost excited about what's to come."

John Hoover, born in 1919 in the Alaskan coastal village of Cordova, could hardly have imagined what was to come through the evolution of his creative expression over the years. As a young man he worked as a fisherman, clam digger, taxi driver and jazz drummer. He was also an artist, initially focused on painting and drawing.

But the Aleut side of Hoover's ancestry extends into a woodworking tradition many centuries old and includes the carving of masks and the creation of bentwood boxes and hunting hats. Woodworking became part of Hoover's own life beginning in 1958, when he and a neighbor used hand tools to build a 58-foot fishing boat almost entirely out of old-growth fir.

The early 1960s found the artist teaching at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe alongside other innovators in Native art, including Warm Springs/Chiricahua Apache sculptor Allan Houser. At about that time, Hoover began carving artworks in wood. In the manner of earlier Alaskan and Northwest Native carvers, he first makes paper patterns or templates of the images he will carve. Hoover's art, however, has never adhered to the formal design conventions of Northwest Coast tradition.

Instead, he delves into a self-acquired storehouse of ancient myth, ceremony and culture to create original freestanding and wall sculpture in his distinctive, fluid style. Carved in red cedar, often with identical designs on front and back, his sculpture frequently portrays mythic figures such as Salmon Woman or Loon Woman. Other carvings depict birds, fish, spirit animals and ancestral creatures. Stylized and elongated, Hoover's figures seem to undulate like seaweed, assimilating the worlds of water, air and spirit. They range in size from a few inches to 13 feet tall, many cast in bronze.

Shamanism, in particular, has been a subject of deep study and inspiration in Hoover's art for many years. Raised outside the traditional Aleut culture, he sought out and read innumerable volumes to teach himself what he wasn't able to learn from his elders. He also has undertaken spiritual journeying to meet his personal spirit helper in the shamanic tradition.

For the past 30 years, Hoover has found inspiration as well in the place where he lives, on the shore of Washington's Puget Sound. "There are 20 or 30 tall, old-growth trees around my house-it's like living in a tree house," he says. "I have a great view of the water and mountains, and [there's] a breeze off the water. There are loons crying, eagles flying, fish jumping. It's just a Garden of Eden."

A deep and tradition-infused sense of place is integral as well to the art of Navajo stone sculptor Larry Yazzie. Working in Indiana limestone, Italian marble, Virginia soapstone and Utah alabaster, Yazzie elicits from the stone representational or elegantly stylized human and animal forms. These forms, and the age-old stories behind them, embody the essence of the traditional Navajo world.

It is a world alive in the artist's memory. Countless boyhood days were spent on horseback on the Navajo reservation in northeastern Arizona, herding his grandmother's sheep. He helped his grandmother move each spring from her winter hogan to a summer one, some miles away, where corn and melons could be grown and pasture was close by.

An immense land of mesas, canyons and sky was the young boy's realm by day. At night he often sat quietly in a ceremonial hogan, listening to the ancient stories. His grandfather and great-grandfather were traditional medicine men, a path Yazzie's father was walking as well before his untimely death when his son was 8.

After his father's passing, Yazzie's mother married into a Northwest Coast tribe and the family moved to Washington state. Away from his land and people, Yazzie nurtured his lonely spirit through memories, and promised himself he would return. When he did, after graduating with honors from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, he began bringing his culture to life in stone and bronze.

Success soon brought a high-intensity period of prolific output, which Yazzie now sees was beginning to move too fast. When he realized what was happening, the artist recalls, he realigned his commitments, remembering a traditional Navajo word of advice: "Take it easy, think about it, be careful." To continue for life on a creative path, he says, requires enjoyment of the process, as well as a full awareness of the sacred nature of the work. Now, he believes that as he holds true to the spirit of his people, honoring the ways that underlie traditional Navajo culture, "this gift will come freely." As acknowledgment of his gift, Yazzie's art has earned numerous honors in recent years, including Best of Class at the 2002 Santa Fe Indian Market.

"There are a lot of beautiful old stories. There are so many, and I'm still learning more," he says. "There's a lot of teaching to them, and I feel they need to be shared, because some of the old stories are leaving with the people who tell them. They need to be saved in some way."

In the striking, thought-provoking work of ceramic sculptor Anita Fields, stories of the past and present converge, like the "layers on layers of civilization" the artist glimpsed on a visit last summer to Mexico. Fields, of Osage, Creek and Irish descent, was back in the studio at her home in Stillwater, Oklahoma, after a three-month artist residency at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, which coordinated the Mexico trip. Among her most vivid impressions of Mexico, she says, are clear remnants of the region's pre-Columbian past side by side with reminders of later history and the color and swirl of Mexico today.

"There are churches that are so beautiful, but they were built on temple sites, with Native labor," Fields observes. "Their history is so laid out there, so honest. I love that. No matter how horrific or wonderful it is, it's right out there for you to make up your own mind about."

The powerful, wide-ranging emotions the artist experienced on the trip are gradually being assimilated into her own background of Osage stories and contemporary experiences, and then translated into a personal iconography in her art. Among the pieces emerging from this series is a house-shaped work on stilts of inverted cones. On the outside walls is undecipherable, graffiti-like writing. Like the visible relics of an earlier civilization, the writing contains a sense of meaning that cannot quite be grasped.

Inside the house is a figure sitting atop gold ingots. For Fields, the gold bars are a reminder of the Conquistadors' practice of melting down exquisite gold ritual objects from indigenous civilizations. Yet the figure, as a symbol of the conquered peoples, is ultimately triumphant, still retaining the strength of dignity and life.

As with all her work, Fields imbues these pieces with textural richness. Like a personal hieroglyphic, some are covered in collage-like imprints of stamps she makes from small objects she finds in nature, or Osage bead or ribbon work. As she works, Fields says, the puzzle pieces and layers of memory, history, thought and emotion meld together. The final creation, she says, is a synthesis of "little pieces of what I know and see and understand."

Exhibitions & Gallery Representation

Currently Swentzell is represented by Blue Rain Gallery in Taos, New Mexico; Four Winds Gallery in Pittsburgh; Hahn Ross Gallery in Santa Fe (for bronze editions); and Faust Gallery in Scottsdale.

The Heard Museum in Phoenix is hosting a traveling exhibition titled John Hoover: Art and Life organized by the Anchorage Museum of History and Art featuring some 75 works, including freestanding bronzes, carved panels and early paintings. It opens February 15 and closes June 15. Hoover's work is also available at Quintana Galleries in Portland, Oregon; Ancestral Spirits Gallery in Port Townsend, Washington; Decker Morris Gallery in Anchorage, Alaska; and Gallery 250 in Fairbanks, Alaska.

Yazzie is currently represented by Turquoise Tortoise Gallery in Sedona, Arizona, the Heard Museum Shop and Bookstore in Phoenix and the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff. His work also may be seen at .

The Heard Museum of Phoenix is hosting an exhibition of Fields' work through April 20 as part of its exhibit New By Two 2002: Fine Art Invitational Artist Residencies. Additional work by Fields can be seen in the museum's Crossroads Gallery of Contemporary Fine Art, and in the exhibit, So Fine! Masterworks of Fine Art from the Heard Museum. She is represented by LewAllen Contemporary in Santa Fe and Modo Gallery in Hudson, New York, and may also be seen at .

Santa Fe-based freelance writer and author Gussie Fauntleroy writes frequently on art, Native topics and other subjects for national and regional publications. Her book, ExtraOrdinary People: Roxanne Swentzell, was published in 2002 as part of New Mexico Magazine's artist series.