A Review of Native Moderns by Bill Anthes

In assessing the state of the field of contemporary American Indian art, the most astounding discovery I have made thus far is that it is not a “field” as far as “TheArt Bulletin” is concerned. There are four “Art Bulletin” categories into which contemporary American Indian art might fall: Art of the United States, Contemporary Art, Art of the Twentieth Century, and Native American Art. However, the only category that Art Bulletin seems comfortable placing contemporary American Indian art is Native American Art, even though the span of Native American art in total can be tens of thousands of years. This might lead one to assume that contemporary American Indian art is not a legitimate category that deserves its own space at all, but I will put forth that it is indeed, and one to which more than a dozen academics have been contributing solid material for over a decade. One possible reason for the ambiguity of this subject may be as simple as the broader field of art history not having created a space for it yet, and there are probably many reasons for not settling on a single category yet, which could possibly lie in our discomfort with where to place American Indians as persons. Nevertheless, I leave it to actual art historians to sort out the reasons for the omission. However, this difficulty is one that rests solely within the field of art history, and not with the authors who have been writing about the Native Americans who have been making contemporary art for quite some time now. It is my hope that this paper will not only assist in establishing a solid and clearly defined space in the field of art history for contemporary American Indian art, but will also provide a thorough overview as to the scholarship contained within the field.

In 2014, The Heard Museum, The Philbrook Museum, and numerous newspapers celebrated the 100-year anniversary of the birth of Allan Houser. In 2015, The Wheelwright Museum expanded their gallery and debuted their Center for the Study of Southwestern Jewelry, which featured the work of Charles Loloma. In 2016 the Institute of American Indian Arts, the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture and the New Mexico Museum of Fine Arts celebrated the 100-year anniversary of the birth of Lloyd Kiva New. Finally, in 2016 the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park, Kansas debuted the opening of “Super Indian: Fritz Scholder 1967-1980.” This paper examines how these four artists influenced and ushered in a new era of Native American artwork. It also explores how the Institute of American Indian Arts facilitated opposition to established artistic canons serving as an incubator to develop breakaway artistic concepts. More importantly, this research questions the importance of the relationship between these artists and the Institute of American Indian Arts. Without the Institute would these artists have been as successful as they were, and without these four particular artists would the Institute have been as influential as it was? This research examines the contribution of each of these four individuals and the effect their work had on the success of the Institute of American Indian Arts.

The Blackwell Companion to American Art , 2015

[Excerpt] The year 1932: contemporary American Indian paintings traveled coast to coast in the Exposition of Indian Tribal Arts, the largest touring exhibition of Native American art in US history until 1976. The American Pavilion of the Venice Biennale featured Pueblo painters without formal arts training alongside George Bellows, John Sloan, Arthur B. Davies, and other well-known American artists. The Whitney Museum of American Art purchased a painting by Pueblo artist Tonita Peña for a record sum of $225. In France, publisher C. Szwedzicki released a lavish portfolio of prints titled Pueblo Indian Painting. On the eve of the New Deal, when the country’s economy and morale were at an all-time low, a New York Times critic assessed contemporary Native art as “American art, and of the most important kind.” As we write in 2014, most surveys of American art do not even mention that in the 1920s and 1930s a small but influential Pueblo and Kiowa painting movement sparked imaginations on both sides of the Atlantic. The envelope enclosing narratives of American art history expands and contracts with the cultural politics of a given present. Today, as scholars across disciplines are recovering a broad range of “global modernisms,” we return with a critical eye to a moment when Native art impacted understandings of American art in an international framework. Rather than push at the seams of an inherited envelope, we demonstrate that incorporating the first Native painting movement of the twentieth century back into American art history entails fundamentally altering its shape.

First American Art Magazine, 2015

Mostly limited to ceramics, naturalistic portraiture was rare in the Americas prior to European and African contact. Despite widespread access to Western painting techniques today, figurative naturalism remains rare in Native American art. While use of historical photographs in Native painting is commonplace, only a small group of American Indians painters pursue mimesis as their goal. Studying technique on their own or through college, apprenticeships, and ateliers, these artists paint historical and living portrait subjects. This paper examines the diverse motivations of these contemporary Native American painters who knowingly defy expectations of both the Native and mainstream art worlds in pursuing naturalistic portraiture.

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American Indian Art Magazine, 2009

Sinice the ptublicatioIn of J J-Brody's 197 1 Ihdidln Paitnrs and 1lYtde Patrvon.s. a pioneering study on1 the rise of tw'entieth-centunr Native Amnerican)painting. critical perspectives on the originis of this mnm vement have focused almiiost exclusively on evaluating the primitivist beliefs of its patrons and their inmpact. otn works created in the Studio or Traditional style. With soime important exceptions discussed Ielow. elemnets of the subjectivity that the voun g Nativ e Amer icani artists who oricrinated this movement brought to thleir conii-positions remnain. beyond the breadth of these disculssions, acknowledged principallv throuigh scattered oibservations. While the literature that has followed Brodvys work has provided this area of stdx'v with an increasingly satis-fRinig level of theoretical and contextual richniess, an irmmer-sion in its discourses leaves the reader conIsciouis o' a greŽtt unspoken }divide that sela-rates those elenments of causation ancd ;ntentionalitv that theY do and do not address. Aspects of the content, st.ie. andt even the medciumii of the watercolor paintings produceci by Native painters in New Mlexico and Oklahomia during the early twsentiethi century are rarely addi-essed with regard to the incngenotis perspectives of the artists themselves. Instead, withinl a varicty of analytical framenworks thev are viewed as responses to their engagelment ith an assortment of well-intended but controlling patrons andl promoters. inclucdinig Inidian-Service teachers, anthropologists, and the prominlenlt artistic and literary figuLes of the Taos and Santa Fe art colonies. NVhile approaches that emphasize the importance of this relation offer valid paradigmiis for interpretation. the r-esultinig picttire is one-sided, imzplicitl y suggesting that the characteristics of this art were solelv determinedc by the nature of those interactiolls. Conspicuously missinig is an exploration of reflexivity as it Elizabeth A. Ne-sone is assistant professor of art hiistonr theory and criticism at the 1;nlversitx of California. San Diego.

Katsi George left her reservation to go to university when she was eighteen. She decided to study art because she had always had a passion for making things. As a teenager she had worked with her grandmother and uncles gathering and preparing basket materials so that her grandmother could supplement the family income by making baskets. She also worked with one of her grandmother's sisters learning to bead the edges of leggings and skirts worn for ceremonies in the longhouse. While she was still in high school, because it was clear that she had the interest and patience, she began to work making husk dolls in traditional dress and then gajesa or Husk Faces for use in the longhouse. She loved making things that were used to keep the cultural life of the people alive. She also loved to draw and paint pictures that made references to traditional stories handed down for generations. Her interest in making things made art seem like the perfect choice for a major in college. As a freshman student, Katsi was advised to take a 3 credit course called Introductory Design for Art Majors and another called Introduction to the History of Western Art along with three other courses to satisfy her general education requirements. She found these classes interesting, but it was clear that none of her courses related to her cultural life or the values she had learned on the reservation. In her Introductory Design course, all of her assignments, while they taught her skills in a variety of art media, did not allow her space to use the media she had learned growing up at home. Indeed, she was told for the first time in her life that basket making and beadworking were considered crafts and were valued less than painting and sculpture. She was given an assignment to draw a paper bag, and several to do various types of figure drawing. She did twenty, five-minute, ink paintings of a towering still life set up on a table, and a detailed, forty minute pencil drawing of a surreal still life built in a box and lit so that objects cast strong dramatic shadows. Other assignments taught her to design a series of small abstract sculptures out of paper, cardboard, and various odd blocks of wood. She was instructed to glue the blocks to one another and to a base and to paint her composition in a single color. She also learned about perspective, and did a drawing of a hall in the art building that used a vanishing point. Finally, she did a series of abstract color studies. She did not find the assignments difficult, and generally got A's on her assignments and praise from her professors. There was, however, no space to produce works that thematically related to her culture, and she really missed the connections she had experienced between her artwork and her culture when she was living with her family. 1 Gail Tremblay is a Member of the Faculty at The Evergreen State College and a member of the Onadoga tribe. Copyright held by The Evergreen State College. Please use appropriate attribution when using and quoting this cases. Cases are available at the Enduring Legacies Native Cases website at: www.evergreen.edu/tribal/cases. All images are used with permission of the artists.

Museum Anthropology, 1993

This preliminary evaluation of depictions of the human face among North American Plains Indians elicits questions regarding non-Western approaches to portraiture at the interface between visual regimes and experiential approaches to reality. It shows how the appearance of mimetic naturalism in this regional art reflects more profound changes in perceptions of reality and personhood engendered by the colonial encounter. In so doing, the essay aims at reframing the questions we ask about Native American arts by incorporating indigenous approaches to experience and vision that may help us reformulate how we talk about arts outside the Western canon.