Leon Polk Smith developed a unique style of hard-edge geometric abstraction during the heyday of the New York non-representational art movement of the 1940s and 50s. His geometric forms on shaped canvases were a personal development; however, his influence was often credited to more familiar names such as Piet Mondrian, Ellsworth Kelly, Constantine Brancusi, and Hans Arp, all non-Native artists of Euro-Western training. Like Smith, Native artists in New York were a small group whose works and stories remain to be uncovered. In the Heard Museum’s 2021 exhibition Leon Polk Smith: Hiding in Plain Sight, Smith’s art was recontextualized alongside stellar examples from the museum's collection of regional Native objects that would have been familiar to his social and cultural upbringing in rural Oklahoma. The exhibit’s curators sought to broaden understanding of Smith’s work in context with the Native influences of his youth and early adulthood.¹ Although revealed to the public late in his career, Smith’s public self-identification with his Cherokee lineage was unquestioned. However, it remains a contentious point in discussions of political identities by later generations of Native artists.²

      Neither of Smith’s parents were enrolled with the Cherokee Nation, although both were half Cherokee. Smith’s personal attitude was that his blood quantum was insufficient for tribal membership, however it is important to note that his rejection of Native identity coincided with a period when the classification of arts by Indians was deemed as “lesser” due to its non-Western roots, untrained appearances, and intuitive production. Smith believed association with Indigenous lineage could lead to his work labeled as “primitive,” a pejorative but popular stylistic classification for art produced by Natives, and possibly detrimental to the advancement of his growing painting career.³

      Smith was born in the Oklahoma Indian Territory in 1906. Smith and his parents were Cherokee language speakers, and he was raised amid the Native communities of tribal exiles whose relocation from their lands of origin was forced by the U. S. Government as a solution to the “Indian Problem.” While his youth was informed by the Native communities around his parent’s farming endeavors, his educational goal aimed at teaching. After the Great Depression and a short time working in the Southwest, Smith moved to New York to study and received a degree from Columbia University Teachers College in 1939.⁴ As an educator, Smith taught in segregated schools in Delaware and Georgia until he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1945, which allowed him to paint and travel to Santa Fe, NM, New York, Mexico, and Cuba. During this period, he continued to teach at various colleges.

      Smith’s early experimentation leaned heavily toward abstraction and included anthropomorphic and zoomorphic forms. Critical discussion of the roots of abstraction in his work suggest that his Indigenous upbringing and exposure to the forms, color, space in Native-made objects, as well as the Oklahoma landscape, strongly informed his work.

I spent forty years of my life in Oklahoma and it has a warm place in my heart and it is everywhere in [my] paintings. . . I give all the credit to Oklahoma.⁵

      With the recontextualization of Smith to Indian Country and the arts of generations of tribal artists, the hard-edge abstract painting style he championed is both unique and far from the links to any association with the “primitive” label he sought to avoid.

      Pahuska is one of several compositions that Smith titled for tribal regions, towns, and communities in Oklahoma, reflecting a source of memory and inspiration which informed his art. An oil on canvas that uses a compositional cube-on-edge alignment, Smith presents a study in three bold yet nuanced hues. Black dominates the central space, drawing the eye to each oppositional corner of red and mauve. Although parallel boundaries appear to enhance the verticality of the negative space, Smith adds subtle curved direction to encase each of the offset colors. Space recedes and advances to manipulate motion in a complex yet seemingly static arrangement of color and form. Corner to corner, side to side, Pauhuska reveals how the concept of hard-edge abstraction is the pinnacle of control in the development of non-figural composition which the New York School dominated, and for which Leon Polk Smith should be further recognized.⁶

¹ Joe Baker, co-curator of the Heard Museum exhibition of Leon Polk Smith’s work, in Joe Baker, “Leon Polk Smith: Hiding in Plain Sight,” Earthsong, (Winter 2021), 8. In Leon Polk Smith artist file, Heard Museum Library, Phoenix, AZ.

² See archival correspondence of Kay WalkingStick, October, 2000. In Leon Polk Smith artist file, Heard Museum Library, Phoenix, AZ.

³ As William Rubin effectively argues in the landmark exhibition, “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art,” since the 19th century and well into the 20th century, the pejorative association of such labeling was sufficient to convey the notion that non-European arts by tribal peoples was “considered the untutored extravagances of barbarians.” William Rubin, “Primitivism” in Twentieth Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern vol. 1, (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984) 6.

⁴ Chronology of Smith’s early career from Leon Polk Smith: American Original, (Norman, OK: Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, 2006), 9-20.

⁵ As cited in exhibition catalog, Leon Polk Smith: Hiding in Plain Sight, (Phoenix, AZ: Heard Museum, 2021).

⁶ Kirk Varnedoe, “Abstract Expressionism,” in “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art, (1984) vol. II, 615-653 provides a succinct and expansive treatment of the influences of European and American thought towards the artistic appropriation of Indigenous based art expression which excludes the contemporary modernists of Native ancestry working among the New York School in the 1940-50s. Such exclusions by significant art historians and scholars of the contributions of the resident Native population spurred on the political efforts to correct the history and canon of American Art by artists of Native American ancestry which dominates the contemporary Indigenous arts today.