Modern Native American art: Angel DeCora's transcultural aesthetics

The point at which Native American art (or indeed any indigenous tradition) became "modern" is a matter of a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of debate. Some locate it as before long as artists began producing thing perceiveds for Western viewers. Others identify it with the point when they started working in Western media, especially easel painting. Still others claim that the sole "modern" artists are those who use the visual idioms of modernism in their work. These definitions are important, because in addition to describing different approaches to modernity in art, they also frame discussions of the character of artists' ethnic identities in the creation and reception of their work. Artists and critics regularly debate whether and by what mode work by Indian people should communicate the ethnicity of the artist to the viewer. The work of Angel DeCora, a Hochunk painter, illustrator, and designer who worked at the turn round of the last century, provides an of the highest order opportunity to explore the meanings of present Native American art. The best-known native artist in the Unite d States before World War I and a learner of some of the leading European-American art teachers of her day, DeCora is rarely discussed in contemporary histories of Indian art. (1) A reconsideration of her career presents important insights into the intersections between art, modernity, and ethnic identity that have been ignored in previous histories of Native American art of this period and at hands a valuable case study for the art of colonized nations in general.

An assessment of DeCora's accomplishments is difficult to make because of the small number of works by dint of her available for study. Extant identified works include sum of two units illustrated stories in Harper's fresh Monthly Magazine, illustrations and overlay designs for five books, and a handful of illustrations published in Southern Workman, Indian Craftsman, and American Indian Magazine. three journals associated with the Indian reform change Only three of her presumably many paintings have been located, on the other hand the fact that she trained and worked as an illustrator makes it logical to analyze her illustrations as closely as her paintings. (2) first glance, DeCora's work may not strike the viewer as either late or Native American. Her earliest dated paintings, the Harper's illustrations, which accompanied her have stories in 1899, use academic attitude s and realistic perspectival space (Figs. 1 2) They lack the distinctive gaze of the flat, decorative "studio style" paintings of the 1920 and 1930 that have dominated twentie th-century discussions of late Indian art (Fig. 3). (3) DeCora's mastery of European-American illustration and design turn of expressions has probably led to many of her published works going unrecognized as the harvests of a Native artist.

The fact that DeCora's pictures in the way that closely resemble European-American imagery of the same period might lead viewers to assume that she had been thoroughly absorbed into mainstream American agriculture Yet DeCora's work fits each of the definitions of new Indian art given above: it was made for a mixed Native and non-Native audience, it uses Western media, and it exhibits a sophisticated engagement with the aesthetic issues of her day, including a nascent interest in abstraction. More important, it also recommends another definition of modern Indian art--namely, work that visually exhibits the transcultural condition that defines fresh Native American experience. Drawing upon her personal life, contemporary aesthetic theory, and the principles of the progressivist Indian rights move of which she was a part, DeCora's work describes the fraught relation to mainstream American agriculture of members of her generation. Using lock opener terms from postcolonial theory, including transculturation and hybridity, it is possible t o read DeCora's work as a challenge to the European-American view of Indians as members of a "vanishing race," presenting instead an image of survival and adaptation for the Native American members of her audience.

Indigenous Art and Transculturation

An examination of DeCora's work does more than insert a little-known figure into Native American art history. It also contributes to a paradigm shift in this field. Early historians of Native American art privileged artistic traditions that appeared untainted by Western influences. Hybrid art forms were dismissed as inauthentic, assimilationist, or smooth degenerate. In recent decades, however, art historians have become interested in in what manner indigenous material and visual tillage can express the transcultural situation of American Indian people

The general [i]or[/i] abstract notion of transculturation. developed by anthropologist Fernando Ortiz early in the twentieth hundred is central to the work of many of these scholars. (4) Transculturation describes the painful impact of colonialism upon indigenous culture as more than the simple replacement of traditional beliefs with European singles in what has been called acculturation. lock opener to Ortiz's theory is the uprooting of of advanced age cultural forms and the creation of novel ones that reflect marginalized peoples' relations to mainstream tillage As Mary Louise Pratt has explained, transculturation allows critics to examine the cultural mixing--or hybridity--that characterizes the indigenous experience of colonialism. Pratt focuses upon the importance of the "contact zone" that is, "the space in which races geographically and historically separated advance into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict." (5) At the same time, the chaotic natur e of these spaces can allow members of marginalized clumps to improvise and interact in productive ways.