Bonhams Sees Strong Demand for American Indian Art

The Maine Antiques Digest has a nice write up of Bonhams’s $2.25m June sale of Native American art that seems to suggest a revival of the market, including this totem pipe that sold for more than four times the high estimate:

Specialist Jim Haas told M.A.D. that he was “quite pleased with the results. It was one of our strongest sales in recent years. Of course, it was one of our biggest”—more than 500 lots. “Some might say it was too big, but it got a lot of people bidding. We sold eighty percent of the lots. The market seems to be attempting to reawaken. I don’t know if people will pay the prices of seven or eight years ago, but they are out buying. Dealers were buying for inventory. We printed an extra hundred catalogs, but they sold out for the first time in years.”