Many 20th century Native American artists engaged with contemporary art movements of the day while drawing on a deep tradition of abstract art made in Indigenous communities.
Artists began congregating at the Institute for American Indian Artists in Santa Fe, New Mexico, after its 1962 founding. Teachers encouraged students to experiment, including finding ways to meld longstanding Native American art practices with increasingly influential movements like abstract expressionism.
Dozens of artists working in many disciplines are represented in “Action/Abstraction Redefined: Modern Native Art, 1940s-1970s,” St. Louis Art Museum’s first exhibition of work by modern and contemporary Native American artists. It runs through Sept. 3.
The core of the exhibition originated at the IAIA’s Museum of Contemporary Native Arts and has toured various museums in recent years. Curators at St. Louis Art Museum expanded the show, nearly doubling the number of items with additional loans and selections from the museum collection.
St. Louis Public Radio’s Jeremy D. Goodwin spoke to Alex Marr, the museum's associate curator for Native American art, about the exhibition — and how artists in the show responded to 20th century art movements while forging their own, unique voices.
Jeremy D. Goodwin: Early in the exhibition we see a selection of textile works by Lloyd Kiva New and his students and apprentices, from the AIAI and his commercial workshop that preceded it. Why is New so important to the growth of contemporary Native American artists in the mid-20th century and onward?
Alex Marr: What Kiva New did that was so important was develop an approach to teaching that he described as using cultural difference as the basis for creative expression. So at his atelier, which was very collaborative and included a number of native apprentices and artists specializing in things like silverwork that would be integrated into his clothing, there was an emphasis on studying past forms of native art — and not simply replicating the designs, but using the aesthetic systems as the basis for artistic innovation.
And that approach really sparked an outpouring of innovation across multiple contexts, in Scottsdale and then of course at IAIA in Santa Fe, and opened the door to what we’re now seeing thrive, which is the contemporary Native American fine arts movement.
Goodwin: How does “Action/Abstraction Redefined” show an artistic conversation going on, among artists of different cultures?
Marr: As these artists were engaging with mainstream art discourses and styles, they were bringing a history of Indigenous abstraction to the discourses and styles. We sometimes think of abstract art as being a 20th century phenomenon. Most Native artists will tell you that there’s a very long history of abstraction in Native North American art.
Goodwin: One of those artists is Neil Parsons, a Blackfoot artist from Montana who was an early teacher at AIAI. In the exhibition audio guide, there’s a clip of him talking about how his environment while growing up affected his perspective as an artist.
“I've always been horizontally inspired. And I think that horizontal inspiration comes from being brought up on the Plains,” Parsons said. “The Plains are horizontal. There always has been abstraction in Plains Indian art.”
Marr: There are two paintings by Parsons in a series where he’s creating what would have been called at the time Color Field paintings. He has large blocks of undifferentiated tone abutting each other, and he sets those fields of color apart with small fields of gestural brushstrokes.
These gestural brushstrokes create a sense of depth to what is otherwise a very flat painting, and a sense of monumentality across the canvas that Parsons clearly would have seen in the architecture of Sante Fe, which is pueblo forms.
That type of place-based understanding of abstraction came into dialogue with other notions of abstraction from all across Native North America at IAIA.
Goodwin: A prominent artist in the exhibition who is not affiliated with the AIAI is the Cherokee painter Kay WalkingStick, who has three pieces in the show. In the audio guide she talks about her mindset while making art in the 1970s.
“I was searching for meaning in 1975,” WalkingStick said, “searching for a way to address my thoughts and feelings about being an Indian, and about being a woman in a male-dominated art world. I was also looking for a way to paint that was uniquely mine yet still alluding to the contemporary art scene. I was trying to bring everything together.”
Marr: The piece she’s talking about in the audio clip is “Personal Icon,” which features an ink-stained canvas with a gridded encaustic — or pigmented wax — layer on top of it. So she’s beginning to explore a tension between the organic, on the one hand — through the ink-stained canvas, which is very visceral and beautiful in a natural way — and the encaustic. That was a very loaded material in New York, where WalkingStick was active in the 1970s, because of its relationship to revolutionary figures like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.
She was taking all these sources and thinking about her own identity in a new way as well.
Goodwin: One thing this exhibition reminds us is that there's no such thing as one-way cultural influence. It’s always moving in multiple directions at once. For one thing, Jackson Pollock was heavily influenced by Navajo sand painting.
Marr: Absolutely, and for those who don’t know, sand painting is a ceremonial practice, and it is created by dropping bits of sand onto the ground. And so there are artists in the exhibition, especially in the audio guide, who speak about Pollock and his debt to Diné sand painting.
More broadly though, western — as in European and American — abstract modernism owes quite a bit to indigenous art from around the world. And that’s something that the artists in this exhibition acknowledge.
Goodwin: I love that there’s a moment in the exhibition when an artist, Mike Medicine Horse Zillioux, responds to Pollock with a piece called “The Day Jackson Pollock Became a Christian.” At first glance, it looks like Zillioux used a drip technique, but he explains in the audio guide that he painted it carefully by hand and included small “shadow people” in the image — plus a Bible made from buckskin that he says he included “for Native Americans.”
Marr: They were using art of the past as the basis for expanding what was possible.
