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Needlework Designs from the American Indians: Traditional Patterns of the Southeastern Tribes
Anne Cheek Landsman
A 1977 pattern book with more unusual roots than its craft-shelf category suggests. Anne Cheek Landsman, working from her own Southeastern heritage, went to the material culture of the Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, and Cherokee — baskets, pottery, jewelry, body painting, woven fabric — and adapted more than a hundred traditional motifs for the needlepoint canvas. The result sits at an interesting crossroads: part practical stitch guide, part act of cultural transmission, translating designs made in one set of materials into the grammar of another. Presented in full color with full-size patterns, it is both a working handbook for the needleworker and a small archive of Southeastern Native design for anyone drawn to pattern, ornament, and the ways visual traditions get carried across media.
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The author
Anne Cheek Landsman described herself as a part-Cherokee Alabaman, and the book grows out of her searching the cultures of the Southeastern tribes, including her own. That gives it a double character — a craft manual written from inside a tradition rather than a collector's appropriation of it, even as, like any adaptation, it lifts motifs from their original ceremonial and material contexts onto canvas.
The book
Published in 1977 by A. S. Barnes and Company; a large-format hardcover of roughly 150 to 200 pages with a short history of the Southeastern tribes, instruction in the stitches, and the designs themselves in full color with full-size patterns.
How to read it
As a document of the 1970s revival of interest both in Native American design and in needlework as serious craft — useful to a stitcher, but also a record of how Indigenous visual traditions were being popularized (and inevitably simplified) for a mainstream hobbyist audience. It is still cited in needlework circles, including by the Embroiderers' Guild of America.
For more context
The broader literature on Southeastern Woodlands art, and on the mid-century American needlework and craft revival.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Anne Cheek Landsman
- Publisher
- Barnes
- Place of publication
- New York
- Year
- 1977
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Art
- Location
- Maine