The Year of the Hopi: Paintings and Photographs by Joseph Mora, 1904-06

The artist

Joseph Jacinto "Jo" Mora (1876–1947), born in Uruguay and raised in the American Northeast, became one of the West's great polymaths — illustrator, cartographer, sculptor, and author of the pictorial maps still beloved today. In 1904 he moved to Hopi and Navajo country in northern Arizona and spent nearly three years there, learning the languages and living closely enough to photograph and paint ceremonial life from within.

The book

Published in 1979 by the Smithsonian Institution for a traveling exhibition (1979–81) organized by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, after Mora's paintings were rediscovered — stored away — at Fisher Galleries in Albuquerque in the mid-1970s. It carries essays by Tyrone Stewart, Frederick Dockstader, and Barton Wright, authorities on Hopi and Native American art.

How it has aged

As a valued visual record, now seen with the added awareness that all early outside documentation of Native ceremony raises real questions of consent and representation. Mora's evident respect and rare access make it more sympathetic than most such accounts, but it remains an outsider's view of a living, sovereign culture.

For more context

Barton Wright's reference books on Hopi kachinas; and the larger literature on Jo Mora's wide-ranging work across the West.

Sources

• The Year of the Hopi (Smithsonian catalog)
• HathiTrust catalog record
• Jo Mora (HistoryNet)