Where do the fetish carvings go?

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Lately, we have had a few people order items off the Web that we have had to notify the items have been previously sold. This is one of the more disappointing aspects of our business. We hate to "lose" sales or disappoint customers.

Here's how it happens:

We have both a physical gallery and Web sites. We serve the Web from our home office. When something is sold in the physical gallery, it can take up to five days before the Web sites are updated and items removed if they have been sold. Therefore, when an order comes in from the Web, our first task is to check the physical inventory to be sure we still have the item. We then notify the potential buyer one way or the other.

We are constantly refreshing the inventory with orders from artists, carvers, estates and other sources. These come in when they come in. Time is not of the essence in most native cultures. We encourage you to visit the Web site http://www.ZuniLink.com regularly to see what is new. (You could bookmark it B>) In the last wo weeks, we have added wolves, mountain lions and corn maidens, the latter just this weekend.

We do the same thing with our other Web sites, which we established because not everyone is interested in everything tribal. We determined that fetish carving buyers may not want to wade through African or Australian tribal art to find the Zuni or Navajo carvings they seek. So we launched ZuniLink.

We figured that would be a good idea for jewelry and pottery too, so we set up new sites for each of those genres. If you are looking for absolutely smashing, authentic, guaranteed Native American jewelry, we encourage you to visit http://www.Native-JewelryLink.com Some of these pieces are just plain gorgeous. All of them we would be perfectly happy to keep. In fact, that is one our major criteria when buying. If we wouldn't be happy living with it ourselves, we simply do not buy it, even though we think someone else might like it.

If you are a fan of pueblo pottery and pottery from other Native American peoples, check out http://www.Native-PotteryLink.com There are splendid pieces ranging from small Acoma seed pots to major masterpieces by Preston Duywenie, Wayne Snowbird, Russell Sanchez and Rachel Nampeyo, to name a few. Also some excellent work by Navajo potters, Samuel Manymules, Alice Cling, Suzie Crank and Michelle Williams.

And we shouldn't ignore our "Mother Ship", http://www.tribalworks.com . This site continues to offer African and Australian tribal art along with Arctic art.

Other news in the art world was provided through the pages of the New Mexican newspaper. The other day they featured the work of Richard Guzman of Truchas, NM. He has painted a mural called, "Los Pereginos" (the hawks) on the wall of a building next to the famous Sanctuario de Chimayo. You can read more about him and his work, along with other news from Santa Fe at freenewmexican.com.

Until manana, may your days be sunny, your jokes funny and your life about more than money.
William and Susanne.

Incidentally, we welcome subscriptions to Tribal Artery, the newsblog of Aboriginals: Art of the First Person. We try to offer items of news interest while offering bits about all the cultures we deal in. If we have not covered a subject of interest to you in this issue, check us out next time.