Post by blackcrowheart on Nov 27, 2006 14:51:10 GMT -5
How Indian is Indian enough?
www.freenewmexican.com/news/51959.html
In 'Native Moderns: American Indian Painting, 1940-1960,' Bill Anthes
examines the period during which confining definitions of modernity and
Indianness formed.
In 1958 Yankton Sioux artist Oscar Howe submitted a watercolor painting
Umine Wacipe: War and Peace Dance to the annual juried show of Native
American art at the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Okla. The
painting, which verged on abstraction, was accepted for exhibition, but
excluded from awards eligibility because it was deemed "not Indian."
The former director of the Pierre Indian School and professor of art at
the University of South Dakota in Vermillion, Howe had received the
grand purchase prize at the Philbrook annual for another abstraction in
the same competition four years before.
Howe's work incorporated elements of European modernism, but he insisted
that the Native Americans of the Great Plains had made abstract art for
centuries. In addition to European art, Howe had studied Sioux painted
hides, tepees and clothing. "So much information of Sioux designs has
been lost," he wrote, "because, unlike the Indians of the Southwest, the
Sioux were nomadic. Their art was applied on clothing and implements.
When these were worn out, they were thrown away and the art was lost."
Howe faced a conundrum with which Native American artists still wrestle:
Indianness and modernity have been defined in ways that make it nearly
impossible for any artwork to fit easily into both categories -- yet
Native artists must function in a world that is Indian and modern.
Native Moderns: American Indian Painting, 1940-1960, written by Bill
Anthes and recently released by Duke University Press, examines the
period during which confining definitions of modernity and Indianness
formed. Antes looks at the lives of more than a half-dozen artists,
laying bare the consequences of the "termination" bills of the early
1950s, the mass relocations of Indians from their ancestral homes, and
the misguided romanticism of some American intellectuals.
The book's first two chapters describe a complex relationship that
involved anthropologists, the government policies that eroded the Indian
sense of community, and two Pueblo artists who, during the 1930s, made
paintings forbidden by tribal custom. Anthropologists were among the
first patrons of Indian art. They, like many collectors today, placed
the highest value on art that revealed aspects of Pueblo life usually
concealed from anyone outside of the tribe. During the 1930s such
transgressions could put an artist and his or her relatives under
suspicion of engaging in witchcraft.
The legal standing of entire tribes shifted radically between 1930
and 1970. John Collier, commissioner of Indian affairs from 1933 to
1945, was among a group of intellectuals who defended Indian culture yet
bent it to support their own views of the world. He strengthened Indian
sovereignty and instituted policies that encouraged tribes to
adopt secular governments in place of traditional councils. Critics
say the secular governments moved Native American culture closer to an
American mainstream, setting the stage for the next erosion of
sovereignty.
By the time of the anti-Communist witch hunts of the 1950s,
some conservatives, including Montana Sen. George Malone, were comparing
Indian tribes to socialist states, and U.S. government policies changed
-- money began to be directed away from development on reservations and
toward moving Native Americans into urban centers. By July 1956 more
than 12,000 Indians had been relocated, many to Chicago and Los Angeles.
Some lost tribal membership. A few tribes were subjected to
"termination" -- a U.S. government-sponsored dissolution that resulted
in members being scattered and stripped of their federal recognition as
Native Americans.
Anthes includes biographies of two of the first Pueblo painters to sell
their work to white patrons -- both artists needed cash and had lost
some standing within their tribes. They were motivated by more than
money; their work can be thought of the beginning of a Native American
desire for success in a world defined by whites. Byron Harvey, one of
the anthropologists who bought their work, wrote: "although the risk of
revealing secrets is great, not a few Pueblo individuals find the
interest of outsiders to be a provocative challenge. ... Although the
Pueblo artist is warned by his elders that he must not depict scenes or
ritual activity, a desire for recognition or praise of outsiders may
increase his desire to transgress the rules."
By the 1940s Native American art, especially Indian antiques, were being
by defined and appropriated by a generation of artists who rejected
regionalist art and wanted to create a new form of authentic American
expression. Anthes devotes a chapter to Barnett Newman, a member of the
New York School of painting, who curated a show of pre-Columbian stone
sculpture at the Wakefield Gallery in 1944 and a show of paintings by
Indians of the Pacific Northwest at Betty Parsons Gallery in 1946.
Within these shows, Newman didn't group Native American art according to
geographical region or include explanatory texts. At Wakefield, Anthes
writes, "Newman's exhibition as well his catalogue isolated objects
against spare, white backgrounds to emphasize contour and sculptural
form and to encourage aesthetic rather than scientific contemplation; as
Newman noted, they were 'removed from their ethnological background in
true art-gallery style.'"
As Europe's modernists had found power in
"primitive" African art that they claimed gave their work authenticity,
Newman found similarly malleable material in ancient Native American
art. Anthes writes, "The power of the Primitive for Newman lay in the
very fact that it was in some sense irretrievably lost. Its alienness
and inscrutability made it an ideal projection screen for Newman's own
politics and aesthetic ambitions. While the ideal of an indigenous art
was central to Newman's idea of a transformed culture and
'inter-American consciousness,' living Native people were effectively
erased. Vanished and known only through ruins and redeemed artifacts,
Native Americans were for Newman a usable past, but were ultimately
usable only as a past." The same year that Newman's exhibit opened at
Betty Parsons Gallery, Ojibwe artist Patrick Robert DesJarlait made a
series of watercolors that depicted tribal members working communally to
harvest fish, wild rice, and maple syrup.
Anthes includes detailed biographies of a handful of artists whose life
experiences give insights into the experience of being an outsider in
one's own country. DesJarlait, for instance, was forbidden to speak his
native language at St. Mary's Catholic boarding school in Redby, Minn.,
and he had to relocate from his home in Red Lake, Minn. to St. Paul to
find work that would support him and his family. He also organized an
arts program for Japanese internees at the Colorado River Relocation
Center in Poston, Ariz., in 1942. "I had great sympathy for the
Japanese," he wrote, "because they had been placed in a situation
similar to that of my own people."
The Indians in DesJarlait's paintings use iron pots and an aluminum pail
to produce food and craft items that will probably be sold outside of
their community. DesJarlait painted Ojibwe culture as it was practiced
in the mid-20th century. He told an interviewer, "If more artists paint
what they see today perhaps it will help promote the status of the
Indian in his present day environment."
Ojibwe artist George Morrison moved to New York City and aligned himself
with the Abstract Expressionist movement. Morrison studied at the Art
Students League and exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art and
the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, but when he submitted work to
Philbrook he was rejected, like Howe, for not being Indian enough. "I
never played the role of being an Indian artist," Morrison wrote. "I
wasn't exploiting the idea of being Indian at all, or using Indian
themes."
By contrast Yeffe Kimball, who had no Indian blood, managed to develop a
successful career as a modernist Native American artist. During the
1940s, while living in New York City, Kimball recast herself as a Native
woman. Her first submission to Philbrook was treated with suspicion, but
in later annuals her work received major awards.
"Indianness enabled Kimball to transcend the limitations of her
opportunities as a woman painter much as the Primitive universal had
allowed Barnett Newman and the predominantly ethnic and immigrant
artists of the New York School to simultaneously claim adherence to a
universal, transcendent culture and claim the mantle of American art at
midcentury," Anthes writes.
Artists of the New York School had used Native American art to give
legitimacy to color-field and Abstract Expressionist paintings and to
cast their work as transcendent in ways that were distinctly American.
"However," Anthes writes, "the artists who were best able to recast
themselves as transcendent, universal individuals were those who
possessed the qualities of whiteness and maleness that were seen as
universal. While adherence to the principles of abstraction and
modernism might have suggested that anyone could transcend the
limitations of identity to become a universal individual, in the social
circles of the art world (as in Orwell's barnyard) some artists were
cast as inherently more universal than others."
Anthes ends Native Moderns with the groundbreaking paintings of Fritz
Scholder and the debates among Native American artists in 1959 as the
Institute of American Indian Arts was about to be established in Santa
Fe.
"Convinced that popular images of Indians were completely at odds with
the experience of modern (often urban) Native Americans, Scholder's
paintings of Indians mediated the gap between romantic stereotypes that
had been foisted upon Indian artists and the realities of modern, urban
Native life," Anthes writes.
"The art of Scholder and the IAIA artists was modern, to be sure,
and the IAIA is often cited as the beginning of modern Native American
art. ... But, as we have seen, Native American artists were already
moderns." <25C0>
Native Moderns: American Indian Painting, 1940-1960 is published by Duke
University Press, www.dukeupress
www.freenewmexican.com/news/51959.html
In 'Native Moderns: American Indian Painting, 1940-1960,' Bill Anthes
examines the period during which confining definitions of modernity and
Indianness formed.
In 1958 Yankton Sioux artist Oscar Howe submitted a watercolor painting
Umine Wacipe: War and Peace Dance to the annual juried show of Native
American art at the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Okla. The
painting, which verged on abstraction, was accepted for exhibition, but
excluded from awards eligibility because it was deemed "not Indian."
The former director of the Pierre Indian School and professor of art at
the University of South Dakota in Vermillion, Howe had received the
grand purchase prize at the Philbrook annual for another abstraction in
the same competition four years before.
Howe's work incorporated elements of European modernism, but he insisted
that the Native Americans of the Great Plains had made abstract art for
centuries. In addition to European art, Howe had studied Sioux painted
hides, tepees and clothing. "So much information of Sioux designs has
been lost," he wrote, "because, unlike the Indians of the Southwest, the
Sioux were nomadic. Their art was applied on clothing and implements.
When these were worn out, they were thrown away and the art was lost."
Howe faced a conundrum with which Native American artists still wrestle:
Indianness and modernity have been defined in ways that make it nearly
impossible for any artwork to fit easily into both categories -- yet
Native artists must function in a world that is Indian and modern.
Native Moderns: American Indian Painting, 1940-1960, written by Bill
Anthes and recently released by Duke University Press, examines the
period during which confining definitions of modernity and Indianness
formed. Antes looks at the lives of more than a half-dozen artists,
laying bare the consequences of the "termination" bills of the early
1950s, the mass relocations of Indians from their ancestral homes, and
the misguided romanticism of some American intellectuals.
The book's first two chapters describe a complex relationship that
involved anthropologists, the government policies that eroded the Indian
sense of community, and two Pueblo artists who, during the 1930s, made
paintings forbidden by tribal custom. Anthropologists were among the
first patrons of Indian art. They, like many collectors today, placed
the highest value on art that revealed aspects of Pueblo life usually
concealed from anyone outside of the tribe. During the 1930s such
transgressions could put an artist and his or her relatives under
suspicion of engaging in witchcraft.
The legal standing of entire tribes shifted radically between 1930
and 1970. John Collier, commissioner of Indian affairs from 1933 to
1945, was among a group of intellectuals who defended Indian culture yet
bent it to support their own views of the world. He strengthened Indian
sovereignty and instituted policies that encouraged tribes to
adopt secular governments in place of traditional councils. Critics
say the secular governments moved Native American culture closer to an
American mainstream, setting the stage for the next erosion of
sovereignty.
By the time of the anti-Communist witch hunts of the 1950s,
some conservatives, including Montana Sen. George Malone, were comparing
Indian tribes to socialist states, and U.S. government policies changed
-- money began to be directed away from development on reservations and
toward moving Native Americans into urban centers. By July 1956 more
than 12,000 Indians had been relocated, many to Chicago and Los Angeles.
Some lost tribal membership. A few tribes were subjected to
"termination" -- a U.S. government-sponsored dissolution that resulted
in members being scattered and stripped of their federal recognition as
Native Americans.
Anthes includes biographies of two of the first Pueblo painters to sell
their work to white patrons -- both artists needed cash and had lost
some standing within their tribes. They were motivated by more than
money; their work can be thought of the beginning of a Native American
desire for success in a world defined by whites. Byron Harvey, one of
the anthropologists who bought their work, wrote: "although the risk of
revealing secrets is great, not a few Pueblo individuals find the
interest of outsiders to be a provocative challenge. ... Although the
Pueblo artist is warned by his elders that he must not depict scenes or
ritual activity, a desire for recognition or praise of outsiders may
increase his desire to transgress the rules."
By the 1940s Native American art, especially Indian antiques, were being
by defined and appropriated by a generation of artists who rejected
regionalist art and wanted to create a new form of authentic American
expression. Anthes devotes a chapter to Barnett Newman, a member of the
New York School of painting, who curated a show of pre-Columbian stone
sculpture at the Wakefield Gallery in 1944 and a show of paintings by
Indians of the Pacific Northwest at Betty Parsons Gallery in 1946.
Within these shows, Newman didn't group Native American art according to
geographical region or include explanatory texts. At Wakefield, Anthes
writes, "Newman's exhibition as well his catalogue isolated objects
against spare, white backgrounds to emphasize contour and sculptural
form and to encourage aesthetic rather than scientific contemplation; as
Newman noted, they were 'removed from their ethnological background in
true art-gallery style.'"
As Europe's modernists had found power in
"primitive" African art that they claimed gave their work authenticity,
Newman found similarly malleable material in ancient Native American
art. Anthes writes, "The power of the Primitive for Newman lay in the
very fact that it was in some sense irretrievably lost. Its alienness
and inscrutability made it an ideal projection screen for Newman's own
politics and aesthetic ambitions. While the ideal of an indigenous art
was central to Newman's idea of a transformed culture and
'inter-American consciousness,' living Native people were effectively
erased. Vanished and known only through ruins and redeemed artifacts,
Native Americans were for Newman a usable past, but were ultimately
usable only as a past." The same year that Newman's exhibit opened at
Betty Parsons Gallery, Ojibwe artist Patrick Robert DesJarlait made a
series of watercolors that depicted tribal members working communally to
harvest fish, wild rice, and maple syrup.
Anthes includes detailed biographies of a handful of artists whose life
experiences give insights into the experience of being an outsider in
one's own country. DesJarlait, for instance, was forbidden to speak his
native language at St. Mary's Catholic boarding school in Redby, Minn.,
and he had to relocate from his home in Red Lake, Minn. to St. Paul to
find work that would support him and his family. He also organized an
arts program for Japanese internees at the Colorado River Relocation
Center in Poston, Ariz., in 1942. "I had great sympathy for the
Japanese," he wrote, "because they had been placed in a situation
similar to that of my own people."
The Indians in DesJarlait's paintings use iron pots and an aluminum pail
to produce food and craft items that will probably be sold outside of
their community. DesJarlait painted Ojibwe culture as it was practiced
in the mid-20th century. He told an interviewer, "If more artists paint
what they see today perhaps it will help promote the status of the
Indian in his present day environment."
Ojibwe artist George Morrison moved to New York City and aligned himself
with the Abstract Expressionist movement. Morrison studied at the Art
Students League and exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art and
the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, but when he submitted work to
Philbrook he was rejected, like Howe, for not being Indian enough. "I
never played the role of being an Indian artist," Morrison wrote. "I
wasn't exploiting the idea of being Indian at all, or using Indian
themes."
By contrast Yeffe Kimball, who had no Indian blood, managed to develop a
successful career as a modernist Native American artist. During the
1940s, while living in New York City, Kimball recast herself as a Native
woman. Her first submission to Philbrook was treated with suspicion, but
in later annuals her work received major awards.
"Indianness enabled Kimball to transcend the limitations of her
opportunities as a woman painter much as the Primitive universal had
allowed Barnett Newman and the predominantly ethnic and immigrant
artists of the New York School to simultaneously claim adherence to a
universal, transcendent culture and claim the mantle of American art at
midcentury," Anthes writes.
Artists of the New York School had used Native American art to give
legitimacy to color-field and Abstract Expressionist paintings and to
cast their work as transcendent in ways that were distinctly American.
"However," Anthes writes, "the artists who were best able to recast
themselves as transcendent, universal individuals were those who
possessed the qualities of whiteness and maleness that were seen as
universal. While adherence to the principles of abstraction and
modernism might have suggested that anyone could transcend the
limitations of identity to become a universal individual, in the social
circles of the art world (as in Orwell's barnyard) some artists were
cast as inherently more universal than others."
Anthes ends Native Moderns with the groundbreaking paintings of Fritz
Scholder and the debates among Native American artists in 1959 as the
Institute of American Indian Arts was about to be established in Santa
Fe.
"Convinced that popular images of Indians were completely at odds with
the experience of modern (often urban) Native Americans, Scholder's
paintings of Indians mediated the gap between romantic stereotypes that
had been foisted upon Indian artists and the realities of modern, urban
Native life," Anthes writes.
"The art of Scholder and the IAIA artists was modern, to be sure,
and the IAIA is often cited as the beginning of modern Native American
art. ... But, as we have seen, Native American artists were already
moderns." <25C0>
Native Moderns: American Indian Painting, 1940-1960 is published by Duke
University Press, www.dukeupress