Brian ChilsonJust as Indigenous scholars like Ned Blackhawk (Western Shoshone) — author of the 2023 National Book Award-winning “The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History” — are reconfiguring American history “outside the tropes of discovery,” dominant, often Eurocentric narratives within art history are being rightfully challenged.
Take “Action/Abstraction Redefined: Modern Native Art, 1940s to 1970s,” for example, which opened at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts on Friday. Originating at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the exhibition “features Indigenous artists who made significant yet often overlooked contributions to both abstract expressionism and modern Native American art,” in the words of IAIA chief curator Manuela Well-Off-Man, who spoke to the Arkansas Times via email.
Spoiler alert: It wasn’t a bunch of white guys who invented abstraction, and modernism — an umbrella term for a period of artistic rule-breaking that occurred in the context of devastating and abrupt societal change between industrialization and the world wars — didn’t emerge in a cultural vacuum. Abstraction has a longstanding presence within the visual languages of Indigenous cultures, and many of the brilliant artistic innovations associated with the origins of modernism in Europe occurred within a rapidly increasing confluence of cultures, wherein European avant-garde artists like Édouard Manet and Pablo Picasso would have encountered and been respectively influenced by Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints and masks from the Dan region of Africa. The list goes on.
Closer to home, when the perceived capital of the art world was displaced from Paris to New York in the aftermath of the Second World War, the New York School and abstract expressionism became a focal point of innovation. “While New York School artists freely borrowed from Indigenous cultures for their abstract art, Native artists in ‘Action/Abstraction Redefined’ didn’t have to look far,” Well-Off-Man said. “They drew on their lived experiences and cultural traditions to create these powerful and often personal works.”
Brian Chilson“Action/Abstraction Redefined” features 36 artists and over 50 works of art from IAIA’s permanent collection across the movements of abstract expressionism, color field and hard-edge painting, showing how Native artists culled inspiration from traditional designs found on Indigenous pottery, petroglyphs, basketry, textiles and rawhide containers called parfleches while co-creating and responding to new waves of artistic expression.
An underlying current of the exhibition is the innovative pedagogy that took place at IAIA as a counterweight to the forced assimilation and cultural erasure many Native American students experienced elsewhere. Further context from Blackhawk’s “Rediscovery of America” provides jarring statistics: By the 1920s, 40 percent of Native American children had been forcibly removed from their families and relocated in government-sponsored boarding schools where they were instrumentally divorced from their native language and forms of cultural expression.
Brian ChilsonLinda Lomaheftawa (Dawavenka; Hopi/Choctaw) was one of the first students enrolled in IAIA, which opened its doors in 1962. In the first room of the “Action/Abstraction” exhibition, her atmospheric painting titled “The Quiet Land, the Warm Land” invites lingering contemplation on a spatially ambiguous field of smoky, warm tones with thick drips of light paint protruding from the surface of the canvas like relief sculpture.
“Trail of Tears,” a large monochrome painting by T.C. Cannon (Tommy Wayne; Caddo/Kiowa), is a striking confrontation with slashes of black and grey paint without visual respite or escape. During his studies at IAIA, Cannon was a student of Fritz Scholder (Luiseño) and became later known for a highly chromatic pop art-infused style that challenged stereotypes with a sophisticated scope of imagery. A quote by the artist marks the wall overhead: “I dream of a great breadth of Indian art that ranges through the whole region of our past, present, and future.”
Brian ChilsonScholder’s color field paintings “New Mexico #21” and “New Mexico #40” are also featured in the exhibition, and utilize powerful earthy reds that are often seen in the searing backgrounds of his later figurative work. Like Cannon, Scholder’s remarkable use of color and striking imagery broke stereotypes about the tropes of Native American art. Fascinatingly, the exhibition catalogue for “Action/Abstraction” notes that Mark Rothko, who has long been synonymous with color field painting, took his signature format from Native American art he observed in Santa Fe.
“White Environ VI,” an arrestingly bright painting by George Morrison (Wah Wah Teh Go Nay Ga Bo, Standing In the Northern Lights; Chippewa) incised with organic shapes and flecks of warm hues hangs next to “White Painting No. 1,” an impasto feast of color. Morrison exhibited with abstract expressionists Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning in the 1940s and 1950s, co-influencing both the New York School artists and the future trajectories of Native American art.
“As Native artists such as George Morrison gravitated toward New York, the exposure to avant-garde art gave them a new freedom of expression and liberated them from the expectations of the conservative Native art market and museums,” Well-Off-Man said. “Without these artists’ willingness to take risks and experiment with new art processes, the high level of diversity in contemporary Native art could not have happened.”
Brian ChilsonThe exhibition culminates with hard edge color, which is used directionally in Harvey Herman’s (Sioux) triptych “Geometric #4,” where brash bands of pigment angle toward — or from, depending on how you might see it — a single centered line, bringing to mind urgency, harmony and even a quickening of life force.
Catherine Walworth, the Jackye and Curtis Finch Jr. curator of drawings at AMFA, remarked that the exhibition offers a new way of understanding both the evolutions of Native American art and its place in conversations about modern art movements.
“The exhibition reminds us that, for those artists like Jackson Pollock who were drawing inspiration from Native American art, there has always been…a long history of abstract design. On the flip side, Native artists in ‘Action/Abstraction Redefined’ bring a totally unique visual and even conceptual perspective to postwar abstract art movements coming out of centers like New York. It’s a breath of fresh air to see these unique interpretations of familiar styles,” Walworth said. “Risk-takers at IAIA defied Native American art styles that, for some, had become stereotypical or static, and eventually new categories would be established at Indian art exhibitions to accommodate new trends.”
In organizing AMFA’s iteration of the exhibition, Walworth considered how featured works could be in conversation with the museum’s permanent collection.
“The painting styles the exhibition’s curators used to categorize works ‘Action/Abstraction Redefined’ may not be familiar to everyone, so we installed a large screenprint on Masonite by Richard Anuszkiewicz — ‘Triangulated Green #24’ — alongside Elaine de Kooning’s gestural ‘Standing Bull’ in one of our permanent collection galleries to give visitors a broader sense of both hard-edge and action painting,” Walworth said. “I also pulled out two small works on paper by the so-called Indian Space Painters Will Barnet and Steve Wheeler that illustrate their indebtedness to Native art. … And then we have contemporary examples that show the ongoing trajectory of Native American art, including Kay WalkingStick’s charcoal drawing ‘Blame the Mountains,’ Dawn Walden’s ‘What is the Point’ — woven from cedar bark, cedar roots, black ash and sweetgrass — and Raven Halfmoon’s ceramic sculpture ‘Do You Practice Your Culture?’”
Brian ChilsonIn “The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History,” Blackhawk notes the need for “multiracial histories,” stating “if the existing paradigms of U.S. history have been maintained by excluding Indigenous people, historicizing the agency of Indigenous peoples offers vital ways to remake those paradigms.” I recommend contemplating the paradigm shift in the company of a work by Lomeheftawa or Morrison. Meanwhile, I’ll be reflecting on how artistic expression that Western culture calls “avant-garde” — which roughly translates to “ahead of its time” — has been inspired by long-standing Indigenous modes of making.
“Action/Abstraction Redefined: Modern Native Art, 1940s to 1970s” is on display at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts until Sunday, May 26.
