Description
One of the most ancient and revered of Hopi traditions is the snake dance, an intense and magical ritual performed at the close of a sixteen-day community celebration. During the rite, priests dance with snakes in their teeth, after which the snakes are released back into nature as messengers of Hopi harmony with the spiritual and natural worlds. In the 1960s, the young New York–based artist Joan Jonas was deeply influenced by the snake dance and other Hopi rituals she saw during a journey to Arizona. In her mesmerizing multimedia installation The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things, Jonas revisits these deeply embedded memories of the American Southwest through yet another influence—an essay she had recently read by the German art historian Aby Warburg (1866–1929), whose own nineteenth-century visit to the American Southwest shaped his influential view of Western art.
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