A Brief Introduction to Southwest Indian Art

There are photographs from the R. C. Gorman program of the American Indian Artists series which show Gorman seated at the controls of a friend's plane, long hair flowing beneath a beaded headband, laughing and flying between late-twentieth-century America and the Navajo grazing lands of his ancestors. The incongruity of that image, the tensions it holds in balance, make it a fit metaphor for the world that the subjects of American Indian Artists move through. The artists featured on the series have successfully created their own dispensations from both tribal and Anglo artistic conventions. They have forged their own space while retaining rich and complex traditions to draw upon. This harmonic and productive tension is evident in their work, which looks like neither the art of their Indian forebears nor the art of their Anglo counterparts.

That American Indian artists work and see differently than non-Indian artists and audiences do would surprise few people, for virtually all of us, Anglo and Indian, have grown up with an idea of what Indian art “should” look like: decorative, heavily-outlined figures; flat perspective; soft, pleasing and subdued colors in multiple shades; cookie-cutter clouds; round, Disney-like mounds of trees and shrubbery; extraordinarily-muscled buffalo, deer and horses, their manes and tails finely articulated; yei and other pictographic elements filling the sky. Perhaps most important of all, popular feeling holds that Indian art “should” look distinctly different from non-Indian work: it should look Indian.

Other than ledger-book drawings by nineteenth-century Plains Indians and the petroglyphic/pictographic illustrations of pre-twentieth-century Southwestern tribes, however, there exists little evidence of what Indian art “should” or ever did look like. Pre-Conquest pottery and illustration served - and were governed - by religious and social rather than selfexpressive ends, so Indian artifacts were usually anonymous and highly conventional. There was little point in individual exploration within a medium when both the means and the end of craft-production were of a social-tribal nature. Thus, in the modern Western sense of art-making as a process of individual exploration and expression, pre-twentieth-century Indian art existed instead as a social exercise. This situation did not change appreciably with the arrival and quick dominance of non-Indians in Indian territory. Although Indian painting and jewelrymaking, for instance, had become highly The influence of the Mexican masters is evident in the Zunigalike execution of R. C. Gorman's classical suite of Navajo women.

popular and commercially-successful ventures of both Indian artists and Anglo patrons by the 1930s, the artifacts produced still existed primarily as utilitarian exercises for their creators. Indian artists substituted Anglo expectations, nonIndian social ends, for their own tribal ones. For instance, instead of religious pictographs intended for their own use, Indians painted fictive religious ceremonies for the non-Indian patron eager to explore Indian culture. In the sense that we define art as the visual expression of individual feeling and crafts as art subserving utility, most popular Indian artwork is and has been craftwork. Both the economic needs of its creators and the romantic needs of its consumers have been served at the expense of artistic self-expression.

The result has been an art whose direction has been determined largely by traders and patrons rather than by artists. So long as Indian artifacts remained within the province of curio shops and non-juried, non-judgmental Indian crafts shows, experimentation, competition and personal risk were foreign issues to Indian artists. Indian art stagnated, caught in a deadening round of repetitions. As Fritz Scholder puts it, “A young native American paints a simplified Persian miniature of a Plains warrior, hair flowing in meticulous casein strokes, bow drawn, ready to kill an oversized wooly magenta buffalo. Innocent of the fact that his style was created years ago by a non-Indian, he labors by kerosene light . . . With luck, the picture will bring him thirteen dollars. It has been a long era of brainwashing and patronage for the creative Indian person. Numerous small sales have been a tempting argument for continuing to produce what the non-Indian buyer liked.” Thus, by the mid-1950s, even partisans of Indian art were admitting that the work had become rigidly codified, incapable of significant change. Indian artists and their patrons were caught in a mutual bond of necessity, the one to produce a desirable object, even at the expense of self-expression, the other to ensure that the object was verifiably “authentic,” which is to say traditional and noninventive.

In 1959, the Rockefeller Foundation underwrote a conference of interested traders, artists, educators and administrators for the purpose of “exchanging ideas on the present status and the possible future of American Indian art” in an attempt to break the stalemate. Out of that meeting and its participants' dissatisfaction with the status of Indian artwork grew the Southwest Indian Art Project, also sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation and held during the summers of 1960-1962. Plans for the Institute of American Indian Arts (opened in 1962 on the site of the old Studio of the Santa Fe Indian School), began at the first Project also. Ironically, the Studio had become, by the 1950s, the embodiment of Indian academicism in art, producing a technically polished but emotionally sterile style of representational painting. By the time the Studio's twenty-nine-yearold program ended in 1962 to make way for the new Institute, it had become the focus for widespread criticism of conventional Indian art and its aesthetic dismissed as “the Bambi school” of nature painting.

The Institute of American Indian Arts assembled the largest and most varied Indian arts faculty ever gathered: Allan Houser, Charles Loloma, Fritz Scholder, Lloyd New. Its faculty opened Indian art to currents that were blowing through the art world beyond the reservation. Studio-style painting, weaving and silverwork were put into a wider perspective as one of the many modes of expression using these media.

Between the atmosphere of experimentation at the Institute and the establishment of two prestigious new juried shows the Heard Museum annuals (Phoenix, AZ) and the Scottsdale National Indian Arts Exhibition annuals (Scottsdale, AZ) Indian artists in the 1960s experienced a new atmosphere of adventure and sympathetic attention.

That atmosphere pervades American Indian Artists, a series of six programs produced by KAET-Phoenix, as it profiles the contemporary artists whose heritage is both Indian and eclectic. All have combined elements of native tradition and modern innovation in their explorations of media; all have found a sympathetic audience for expressive work among nonIndian patrons.

The programs will examine the personal background and work habits of each artist, exploring their integration of majority and Indian aesthetics with individual values and talents. The artists whose work and outlook will be featured are Charles Loloma, jeweler; Helen Hardin, painter; Allan Houser, sculptor; R. C. Gorman, painter; Grace Medicine Flower and Joseph Lonewolf, potters; Fritz Scholder, painter.

American Indian Artists will provide Americans who may never personally see the Southwest or its Indian artists a unique opportunity for viewing the delicate balance of cultural tradition, landscape, innovation and individual talent that characterize some of the finest contemporary Indian art.

American Indian Artists will air nationally over the Public Broadcasting Service affiliate stations this summer, beginning Tuesday, August 3, 8:30 PM EDT. Please check with your local public television station for the day and the time American Indian Artists will be seen in your area.