Shonto Begay (Navajo, born 1954)
Over the course of the past century, artists of Native descent in the United States and Canada have produced dramatically varied, vibrant, and groundbreaking bodies of work, often in the face of tremendous institutional and societal adversity. Yet despite a century-long engagement with the currents of modernism and postmodernism, art by Native peoples has been historically ignored by established cultural institutions including galleries, universities, and fine art museums. In its mission to broaden the canon of American art, the Horseman Foundation strives to ensure that the growing number of works by modern and contemporary Native American artists from the collection of John and Susan Horseman are available for the public. Toward that purpose, this project presents essays on artworks by Indigenous artists in the collection in an effort to expand open access to critical writing on these works. The paintings and sculptures gathered in this digital exhibition are grouped loosely by themes which reflect aesthetic and critical issues Indigenous artists are confronting and engaging with through their work, including the dual forces of tradition and modernity; reactions to settler colonial encroachment on Native culture; present day experiences of urban and reservation life; and visions of the future in the face of political instability and climate change.
There are over five hundred Native tribes in the United States and six hundred in Canada that collectively speak nearly two hundred different languages and maintain distinct cultural traditions. Any broad generalization about Native art today is not only prone to missing critical subtleties, but also to perpetuating harmful stereotypes that Indigenous people have actively sought to dismantle. Given Native artists’ multiplicity of experiences, knowledge systems, and ways of knowing—and working—a grouping of artworks such as the one presented here is, by necessity, a sampling (rather than a comprehensive survey) of the extensive scope of work produced during past seventy years. Despite these challenges, Native American art history is informed by the research of Indigenous scholars has agreed on a series of key developments throughout the twentieth century that continue to resonate in the artwork and intellectual climate of modern day.
During the early twentieth century, the Southwest region of the United States served as a critical site for many of these developments. There, in the late 1910s, a group of residential school children in Santa Fe, New Mexico, including Alfonso Roybal (Awa Tsireh) (San Ildefonso), Fred Kabotie (Hopi), and Tonita Pena (San Ildefonso), were encouraged to produce drawings of their tribal ceremonies by an Anglo-American school teacher. This development coincided with support from Santa Fe’s artist colony and ongoing efforts to record the supposedly “dying” Native culture. The patrons and teachers who fostered the creation of watercolor paintings by this group of students—now known as the San Ildefonso self-taught group—feared that Native cultures were in danger of vanishing as a result of the cultural genocide inflicted on Indigenous communities throughout the United States and Canada. These artists, many of them teenagers, created works with a prescribed set of parameters which were considered “appropriate” for “authentic” (that is, ahistorical and devoid of references to modernity) representations of Native experiences. A similar development occurred in Oklahoma, where a group of young artists became known as the Kiowa Six. Their work, influenced in part by Plains Native American ledger drawing traditions, was also encouraged by Anglo-American patrons and depicted tribal ceremonies. Stylistically, these paintings featured flatly rendered figures with neither backgrounds nor use of linear perspective. Students were discouraged from producing oil on canvas paintings in the academic Western style, which was considered an unsuitable form of expression for Native people. In Santa Fe, the source motifs used in these images were drawn from designs found on utilitarian objects used by Pueblo peoples, such as textiles and pottery, as well as the Ancestral Pueblo pottery being excavated in nearby digs led by archeologist Edgar Lee Hewett.[1] The stylistic developments of the San Ildefonso Self Taught Group and the Kiowa Six were later adapted as the basis for the Santa Fe Studio School, founded in 1932 and led by Anglo-American instructor Dorothy Dunn.[2] Dunn also introduced her students to international influences through slide presentations of artworks from China, Greece, and, notably, Persia.[3] Like the San Ildefonso group before them, artists working in the Studio School style—including Harrison Begay (Navajo), Oscar Howe (Yanktonai Dakota), Joe Herrera (Cochiti Pueblo), and Gerald Nailor (Navajo)—displayed exceptional talents for draftsmanship and produced a new type of painting that holds a singular place in the history of twentieth American art. It speaks to the success of their talents and of Dunn’s efforts at publicizing their work that these paintings were exhibited in dozens of shows nationally and abroad during the 1930s.
Simultaneously during this time, exhibitions throughout the United States were introducing new audiences to Native American art. Touring shows such as the 1932 Exhibition of Indian Tribal Arts, organized by painter John Sloan and wealthy socialite Amelia Elizabeth White, sought to reposition Native arts as aesthetic rather than ethnographic material bound for the likes of the American Museum of Natural History.[4] A decade later in 1941, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), under director Rene d’Harnoncourt, mounted Indian Art of the United States, a wildly popular exhibition that drew further attention to the artistic production of Native peoples. Though deeply problematic by contemporary standards, these exhibitions were a watershed in the general public’s interest in and appreciation of Native American art.[5] Concurrently, the tremendous focus on what was deemed to be “authentic” Native art stymied the careers and aspirations of many artists who were either uninterested in making work in the Studio School style or sought to move beyond its restrictive parameters, such as painter Oscar Howe and sculptor Allan Houser (Chiricahua Apache).[6] And in New York, artists such as George Morrison (Ojibwe) and Leon Polk Smith (Cherokee) were producing abstract paintings with few overt nods to their Native heritage. As scholar Richard Hill (Tuscarora) points out, these painters’ embrace of modernism was seen as a “mark of assimilation” which negated their Indigeneity.[7] Nevertheless, many critics continued to search for the “Indian essence” in their work.[8] As has been the case with many artists from that period who were not white men, scholars and critics have only recently revisited these artists’ work for its innovative contributions to the language of American abstraction.
Despite the talents of painters working in the Studio School style, Indigenous artists and supporters of Native art were keenly aware of fact that the institution taught artists to produce work in a mode imposed by Anglo-Americans and heavily associated with tourist markets. Dissatisfaction with the pedagogy of the Studio School led to its dissolution and, in 1962, to the creation of the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in its stead—and on its old grounds. Using funding provided by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the school was founded by Cherokee artist and scholar Lloyd Kiva New with the help of d’Harnoncourt and drew Native students from throughout the United States. The IAIA embraced a philosophy of celebrating cultural difference and harnessing traditional Native artforms toward modernist ends. Its establishment changed the course of Native American art and precipitated a period of remarkable creativity in new forms of artistic media, yet its goals were, from the outset, also aligned with the integration of its student body to the dominant, Anglo-American culture. As Joy L. Gritton has pointed out, though the school projected an image of stalwart pluralism and encouragement of diversity, its pedagogy strongly favored Western modernist aesthetics that were centered on individual achievement, as well as monetary success in the mainstream commercial art market.[9] These goals were a distinct deviation from the community-centered tribal philosophies which informed many of the students lives outside of the IAIA. Like work by Studio School pupils before them, students’ work was exhibited nationally and internationally, this time under the pretense that its creators had never encountered modern art. Publicity surrounding these exhibitions suggested that the artists’ impulses toward abstraction were a spontaneous product of their cultural upbringing, when, in fact, instructors used slides of modern artworks provided by MoMA and texts by authors such as Susan Sontag.[10] As such, the legacy of presenting Native artists as anachronistic and out of touch with contemporary developments continued to hold sway. In reality, many students and their teachers, including painter Fritz Scholder (Luiseño), were knowingly contending with the dualities of their cultural experiences and the mainstream artistic and intellectual landscape of the mid-twentieth century.
Expectations that Native artists produced work that satisfied audiences’ race-based expectations prompted some artists—including George Morrison, Leon Polk Smith, and Fritz Scholder—to disavow themselves of being considered “Indian artists.” With this stance, artists sought to distance themselves from the work typically associated with Indian markets and tribal craft traditions—as well as from the regional styles—and to position themselves as active participants in an artworld that fetishized internationalism and “universality” as its highest standards. Today, scholars note the profound inequity of the binary between Native art and mid-century modernism during this time. For instance, Hill observes that Native artists working during this period were trapped in a vicious catch-22: if they created objects in traditional mediums, their work was considered outside the sphere of fine art, and if they produced art in line with the expectations of post-war modernism, critics took note of how much they had integrated with the dominant culture.[11] By the 1980s, Native artists and curators challenged these artificial divisions through exhibitions that sought to expand the narrow definitions of what could and could not be considered “Native” and “modern.” The early 1980s exhibitions New Work by a New Generation in Regina, Canada and Contemporary Native American Art in Stillwater, Oklahoma paved the way for a wider understanding that traditional art, cultural specificity, and modernity could not only be reconciled, but synthesized into new forms. Critically, these exhibitions and the published texts that accompanied them insisted on the fact that an artist’s references to their Native background in no way excluded their work from the contemporary artistic discourse. A few years later and with the growing influence of the Women’s Movement, Women of Sweetgrass, Cedar, and Sage, a 1985 exhibition organized by artists Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation) and Harmony Hammond, further expanded on these ideas by focusing specifically on Native women as a vital players within larger artistic landscape of the United States.[12] Firmly postmodern in their outlook, the impacts of these ideas contributed to the shape of emerging artistic sensibilities of the late twentieth century and continue to resonate in the mainstream contemporary art world today.[13]
In 1992, celebrations of the five-hundred-year anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in North America prompted a number of Native-led exhibitions that simultaneously called attention to the genocide of Indigenous people and further enlarged the audiences for contemporary Native art. Perhaps the most direct rebuke came in the form of the Submuloc exhibition, organized by Quick-to-See Smith, which showcased work by contemporary Native artists including Kay WalkingStick (Cherokee), Duane Slick (Meskwaki), Jean LaMarr (Northern Paiute/Achomawi), James Luna (Luiseño), and others at twelve venues over the course of two years. The innovations taking place within the Native artistic community throughout the past decades was, at that point, not lost on the mainstream academics. That fall, Art Journal, released an issue solely devoted to critical essays on contemporary Native art in the United States and Canada, which included essays by WalkingStick and Luna, as well as scholars of Native American art. Simultaneously in Canada, Land Spirit Power: First Nations at the National Gallery of Canada and Gerald McMaster’s (Siksika Nation) exhibition Indigena: Contemporary Native Perspectives in Canadian Art at the Canadian Museum of Civilization were among the first exhibitions that placed this material within major institutional frameworks.
The breadth of mainstream and scholarly attention paid to contemporary Native artists during the early nineties and the comparative dearth of it in the years that followed must serve as a lesson for our time. Renewed awareness of the artistic contributions of Black, Indigenous, Asian, and Pacific-Islander artists over the past decade have been a much-needed corrective to historical understandings and canon of American art. Yet, it is key for future academic and popular understandings of American art history that work by Native and Indigenous people be understood as an integral aspect of the evolution of modernism and postmodernism. Scholar Janet Berlo has pointed out that, as late as 2015, museum curators omitted modern and contemporary Native American art from American art galleries as standard practice, and works by artists such as Jaune Quick-to-See Smith hung next to archeological objects, rather than with contemporaneously made works of art.[14] The larger fabric of American art history is woefully incomplete without the contribution of Native artists’ work within its narratives. “At every moment in our young nation’s history,” Berlo writes, “Native art was part of a cosmopolitan conversation, one that stretched beyond reservations, regions, and nations.”[15] The works presented in this project exemplify that cosmopolitanism and worldliness as it has evolved over the past seventy years. Representing over twenty-seven artists from nineteen tribal backgrounds working in mediums as diverse as painting, ceramic, bronze, wood, and textile, Living Traditions, Unfolding Futures offers a glimpse at the vision and innovativeness of Native artists across the United States and Canada.
[1] For an extensive discussion of this period of Native modernism, see J.J. Brody, Pueblo Indian Painting: Tradition and Modernism in New Mexico, 1900-1930, (New Mexico: School of Advanced Research Press, 1997). The Anglo-American patrons such as Hewett and Kenneth Chapman also encouraged the decoration, commercialization, and sale of Pueblo pottery, in particular, to the burgeoning tourist market flourishing in Santa Fe.
[2] Bruce Bernstein and Jackson Rushing, Modern by Tradition: American Indian Painting in the Studio Style, (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 27.
[3] Bernstein and Rushing, Modern by Tradition, 40-41.
[4] On White and Sloan, see Gregor Stark and E. Catherine Rayne, El Delirio: The Santa Fe World of Elizabeth White, (New Mexico: School of Advanced Research, 1998).
[5] On this exhibition, see Paul Chaat Smith’s critical analysis in “Indian Art for Modern Living” in Mindy Besaw, et al, Art for a New Understanding: Native Voices, 1950 to Now, (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2017), 96-99.
[6] Native Moderns, 158-170
[7] Richard Hill, “I Am an Artist Who Happens to Be an Indian: Working through Modernism in the 1970s and Early 1980s” in Mindy Besaw, et al, Art for a New Understanding: Native Voices, 1950 to Now, (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2017), 52.
[8] Bill Anthes, Native Moderns: American Indian Painting, 1940–1960, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 144.
[9] Joy Gritton, “Cross-Cultural Education vs. Modernist Imperialism: The Institute of American Indian
Arts” in Art Journal 51, no. 3 (Autumn, 1992), 28. See also Gritton’s monograph-length study on the IAIA, Joy Gritton, The Institute of American Indian Arts: Modernism and U.S. Indian Policy, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000).
[10] Ibid, 29.
[11] Richard Hill, “I Am an Artist Who Happens to Be an Indian,” 54.
[12] Jaune Quick-to-See Smith and Harmony Hammond, Women of Sweetgrass, Cedar, and Sage, (New York: Gallery of the American Indian Community House, 1985).
[13] Hill, “I Am an Artist Who Happens to Be Indian,” 58.
[14] Janet Berlo, “The Art of Indigenous Americans and American Art History: A Century of Exhibitions,” in Perspective 2 (December 7 2015), DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/perspective.6004, 5
[15] Ibid, 6.