Essay - Native American Art Post-war Native American Art to Evaluate the...

Native American Art

Post-War Native American Art

***** evaluate the impact that Native ***** art has had on ***** evolution of late Modernism - and vice versa ***** is not an easy task. It was only in the 1930s ***** art critics and historians began paying attention to Native American art and that it began ***** be exhib*****ed in respectable galleries, and it was ***** until the 1960s that trained art historians began teaching Native ***** art in American universities. Yet, despite its historical slander*****g by the art ***** canon, ***** ***** played a vit*****l role in documenting the Native American experience. While art inarguably has served different purposes for various ***** American tribes over time, in the 20th century, many Native *****ists working in a v*****riety of mediums began to appropriate ***** language of Modernism - the "master narrative" of ***** colonizers - towards their own ends. This represented a particularly subversive move on the part of ***** artists, as ***** ***** traditionally built on the heels ***** white European artists who looked towards the "exotic" other for inspiration (the most obvious example being Picasso's interest in African art.)

This brief essay will look at the work of a select group of ***** Americ*****n artists ***** in the post*****war era who managed to adapt a Modernist language in their own work, while simultaneously subverting that language in filter*****g it through ***** own personal *****s as Native *****. While some of the artists discussed here are still active, we ***** lim***** our focus on ***** period immediately after World War II and up to the 1980s.

Allan Houser is perhaps the most famous example of an artist ***** m*****aged ***** combine the unique problems posed by Native American existence in the 20th century with the language of abstract Modernism through his pa*****terly ***** sculptural output. His first major *****, Comrade in M*****ning (Figure 1), was completed in **********. Although Houser would later come to be known primarily for his s*****ne sculptures, this was his first ***** work in stone, the result of a commission ***** ***** Haskell Institute in Lawrence, Kansas. The work was meant to be a tribute ***** the students of H*****skell who had died fighting ***** the United States in ***** Second World *****. ***** work is a large-scale monumental piece *****, though fairly straightforward in its execution, gives us ***** insight into the more ***** style that Houser would ***** develop in the course of his prolific c*****er. The figure depicted, clearly a Native ***** Indian male, wears a somber expression on his face. He is staring forward, clearly struck by the immense tragedy of a situ*****ti***** he is barely able to comprehend. He is wrapped in a bl*****nket in an effort ***** protect himself from the cold harshness of the external world. The sculpture is neither real*****tic in a monumental sense nor rooted in the traditions of Apache Indian artwork; ***** ***** is all *****'s own. ***** overall shape ***** the ***** is round and