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Modern native american art: Angel decora's transcultural aesthetics
Abstract
Angel DeCora was the best-known Native American artist of her generation but she is generally omitted from histories of “modern” Native American art. Working at a time when United States Indian policy was dedicated to eradicating Native identity, DeCora fought for the participation of Native Americans in modern American cultural and political life. This essay demonstrates the formal and conceptual modernity of DeCora's work. It explores her sophisticated engagement with contemporary social and aesthetic theory and argues that her paintings, illustrations, and designs draw on these ideas to represent the transcultural condition that defines modern Native American experience.
Now, special attention is paid to a problem of increase in level of national culture for realization of strategy for inclusion of kazakhstan among the world’s developed and competitive countries. An article is taken up questions of formation of esthetic culture at teenagers by means of their involvement to creative activity on the basis of folk traditional art. An important factor of esthetic development for the personality, its aspiration to universal ideals and also participation in creation of cultural and historical achievements is folk art, in particular, decorative and applied arts.
Colonized through Art explores how the federal government used art education for American Indian children as an instrument for the "colonization of consciousness," hoping to instill the values and ideals of Western society while simultaneously maintaining a political, social, economic, and racial hierarchy. Focusing on the Albuquerque Indian School in New Mexico, the Sherman Institute in Riverside, California, and the world's fairs and local community exhibitions, Marinella Lentis examines how the U.S. government's solution to the "Indian problem" at the end of the nineteenth century emphasized education and assimilation. Educational theories at the time viewed art as the foundation of morality and as a way to promote virtues and personal improvement. These theories made the subject of art a natural tool for policy makers and educators to use in achieving their assimilationist goals of turning student "savages" into civilized men and women. Despite such educational regimes for students, however, indigenous ideas about art oftentimes emerged "from below," particularly from well-known art teachers such as Arizona Swayney and Angel DeCora. Colonized through Art explores how American Indian schools taught children to abandon their cultural heritage and produce artificially "native" crafts that were exhibited at local and international fairs. The purchase of these crafts by the general public turned students' work into commodities and schools into factories. © 2017 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. All rights reserved.
Laura E. Smith unravels the compelling life story of Kiowa photographer Horace Poolaw (1906-84), one of the first professional Native American photographers. Born on the Kiowa reservation in Anadarko, Oklahoma, Poolaw bought his first camera at the age of fifteen and began taking photos of family, friends, and noted leaders in the Kiowa community, also capturing successive years of powwows and pageants at various fairs, expositions, and other events. Though Poolaw earned some income as a professional photographer, he farmed, raised livestock, and took other jobs to help fund his passion for documenting his community. Smith examines the cultural and artistic significance of Poolaw’s life in professional photography from 1925 to 1945 in light of European and modernist discourses on photography, portraiture, the function of art, Native American identity, and American Indian religious and political activism. Rather than through the lens of Native peoples’ inevitable extinction or within a discourse of artistic modernism, Smith evaluates Poolaw’s photography within art history and Native American history, simultaneously questioning the category of "fine artist" in relation to the creative lives of Native peoples. A tour de force of art and cultural history, Horace Poolaw, Photographer of American Indian Modernity illuminates the life of one of Native America's most gifted, organic artists and documentarians and challenges readers to reevaluate the seamlessness between the creative arts and everyday life through its depiction of one man's lifelong dedication to art and community.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Indian Territory, which would eventually become the state of Oklahoma, was a multicultural space in which various Native tribes, European Americans, and African Americans were equally engaged in struggles to carve out meaningful lives in a harsh landscape. John Milton Oskison, born in the territory to a Cherokee mother and an immigrant English father, was brought up engaging in his Cherokee heritage, including its oral traditions, and appreciating the utilitarian value of an American education. Oskison left Indian Territory to attend college and went on to have a long career in New York City journalism, working for the New YorkEvening Post and Collier's Magazine. He also wrote short stories and essays for newspapers and magazines, most of which were about contemporary life in Indian Territory and depicted a complex multicultural landscape of cowboys, farmers, outlaws, and families dealing with the consequences of multiple interacting cultures. Though Oskison was a well-known and prolific Cherokee writer, journalist, and activist, few of his works are known today. This first comprehensive collection of Oskison's unpublished autobiography, short stories, autobiographical essays, and essays about life in Indian Territory at the turn of the twentieth century fills a significant void in the literature and thought of a critical time and place in the history of the United States. © 2012 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. All rights reserved.
This article proposes multiple and sometimes contradictory iconographical analyses of a 1924 portrait photograph by Harlem photographer James VanDerZee in order to demonstrate how VanDerZee and his sitters engaged in what Henry Louis Gates calls Signifyin(g). This layered and polyvocal photograph communicates a rich sense of African American identity between the two World Wars: simultaneously modern, modernist, Africanizing, and participating in the creation of a so-called "usable past" for black people in the United States.
Stephanie Lewthwaite is a lecturer in the School of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham, United Kingdom.
1. I follow Tey Marianna Nunn in using the term Hispano to refer to Spanish-speaking artists from New Mexico during the 1930s. See Nunn, Sin Nombre: Hispana and Hispano Artists of the New Deal Era (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001). However, I do so from a historical perspective that reflects the term's evolution from a distinctive form of regional identity politics. According to Charles Montgomery and John Nieto-Phillips, Hispano became the preferred “public identity” within the Spanish-speaking community between the 1890s and 1920s over (and in opposition to) the racialized term Mexican. The Spanish-language press and the rico elite adopted the label in a bid to palliate racism, reclaim cultural ground on the basis of a shared regional ethnic identity, and assert their right to American citizenship and statehood. They did so by invoking a Spanish colonial identity in politics and culture through the terms Hispanoamericano or Spanish American, terms that also denied Anglos the right to appropriate the label American (and thus citizenship) solely for themselves. See Charles Montgomery, The Spanish Redemption: Heritage, Power, and Loss on New Mexico's Upper Rio Grande (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 14; and John M. Nieto-Phillips, The Language of Blood: The Making of Spanish-American Identity in New Mexico, 1880s–1930s (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004), 81–82. The term Hispano was also used by elite-born contemporaries such as Hispana educator, government official, writer, and folklorist Aurora Lucero-White, who used it to “denote a culture” and “persons of Spanish speech.” See Aurora Lucero-White, Los Hispanos (Denver: Sage Books, 1947), 3.
2. See William Wroth, “The Hispanic Craft Revival in New Mexico,” in Janet Kardon, ed., Revivals! Diverse Traditions: The History of Twentieth-Century American Craft, 1920–1945 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), 84–93; Charles L. Briggs, The Wood Carvers of Córdova, New Mexico: Social Dimensions of an Artistic Revival (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1980), and “The Role of Mexicano Artists and the Anglo Elite in the Emergence of a Contemporary Folk Art,” in J. Vlach and S. Bonner, eds., Folk Art and Folk Worlds (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1992), 195–224; Edward Gonzales and David L. Witt, Spirit Ascendant: The Art and Life of Patrociño Barela (Santa Fe: Red Crane Books, 1996); Laurie Kalb, Crafting Devotions: Tradition in Contemporary New Mexico Santos (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994); and Nunn, Sin Nombre.
3. Nunn, Sin Nombre, xi, 33–34.
4. For the use of this term in relation to Barela, see “List of Taos Artists,” quoted in Nunn, Sin Nombre, 23.
5. Nunn, Gonzales and Witt, and Kalb have considered Barela's ambiguous position as a “folk,” “primitive,” and “modern” artist, and his impact on contemporary santeros. However, this debate has not yet been amplified into a full consideration of the variety of modernisms at work during this period, and Barela's reception is framed in terms of European modernism and America's interest in the “Primitive.” See Gonzales and Witt, Spirit Ascendant, xxv, 1, 140, 145; Nunn, Sin Nombre, 146–47, and Kalb, “Primitivism, Modernism, and Patrocinio Barela,” in Crafting Devotions, 89–119.
6. I apply the terms used by Elizabeth Hutchinson, “Modern Native American Art: Angel DeCora's Transcultural Aesthetics,” Art Bulletin 83, no. 4 (2001), 740–56; and Bill Anthes, Native Moderns: American Indian Painting, 1940–1960 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).
7. Kalb, Crafting Devotions, 96. For the anthropological “discovery” of New Mexico's ethnic cultures, see Desley Deacon, Elsie Clews Parsons: Inventing Modern Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
8. On the “crisis of modernity” see Robert Dorman, Revolt of the Provinces: The Regionalist Movement in America, 1920–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993).
9. Wroth, “Hispanic Craft Revival,” 84; Julie Schimmel, “The Hispanic Southwest,” in Charles Eldredge, Julie Schimmel, and William Truettner, eds, Art in New Mexico, 1900–1945: Paths to Taos and Santa Fe (New York: Abbeville Press, 1987), 101–2.
10. Wroth, “Hispanic Craft Revival...
Pueblo Indian painter Awa Tsireh developed an art of subtle resistance in the 1920s, when Pueblo culture was being persecuted by the Office of Indian Affairs and exploited by tourists and anthropologists. Awa Tsireh's visual language is representative of the tactics Pueblo artists used to represent their culture while controlling the flow of information. By deploying evasive visual strategies—including silences, misdirection, coding, and masking—Awa Tsireh celebrated his culture at a time when it was under attack, helped to develop a market that benefited himself and his community, and did so while attempting to protect Pueblo knowledge.
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