Politics of representation

A Strange Mixture: The Art and Politics of Painting Pueblo Indians by Sascha T. Scott

Sascha T. Scott can read a painting the way other scholars might read a book. A professor of American art at Syracuse University, she combines deep knowledge with insight in her recent publication, A Strange Mixture: The Art and Politics of Painting Pueblo Indians. Despite the specificity of her focus — “The dialogue between early twentieth-century paintings depicting Pueblo Indians and federal Indian politics” — the book is not reserved for an academic audience alone. The oversize hardcover is brimming with large color images of the many paintings that Scott dissects. Some are familiar works holding an established place in the development of modernism in New Mexico art, and others are ones that, Scott argues, deserve to join this catalog. In all cases, the scholar points out how these artworks reveal changing aesthetics as well as changing attitudes toward the Pueblo communities they represent.

A Strange Mixture is fraught with matters of cultural sensitivity. As such, the author acknowledges that her own task is imperiled by the pitfalls some of her subjects sought to avoid (with various degrees of success). Namely, how can a Western art historian speak authoritatively on Pueblo viewpoints? Other issues include reproducing images that may contain sacred or private significance — such as ceremonial objects or dress that are not meant to be visually recorded — and taking an outsider’s stance on the assimilation, integration, and preservation of indigenous groups and their cultures. In all cases, Scott strives to live up to her own standards of being respectful without being exploitative. (Whether she has succeeded can only be determined by the Pueblo communities in question.)

In five chapters and an epilogue, Scott focuses on five artists: Ernest L. Blumenschein, Marsden Hartley, John Sloan, Awa Tsireh, and Georgia O’Keeffe. More particularly, each chapter is devoted to a primary work by one of these artists, which is then used as a foil to discuss the political and cultural climate within which it and other works were created. Her academic approach can best be described as a furthering of other postcolonial discourses focusing on the region, which, in her words, “present New Mexico as a desert Disneyland and argue that Anglo paintings of Pueblo Indians facilitated ethnic tourism through which Pueblo culture was packaged for the entertainment and consumption of white audiences.” However, A

Strange Mixture has added nuance, promoting the view that regional artists were formidable agents who furthered Pueblo causes, even if they may have paradoxically participated in the exploitation of the very people they attempted to champion.

The book’s analysis begins with Blumenschein’s A Strange Mixture of Barbarism and Christianity — The Celebration of San Geronimo’s Day Among the Pueblo Indian. The illustration, which lends the book its title, comes from an article that appeared in the Dec. 1898 issue of and it is considered in the light of the General Allotment Act of 1887. Also called the Dawes Act, this early attempt to assimilate Native populations was not repealed until 1934, by which point “American Indians had lost an estimated twothirds of their tribal lands.” Scott explores this early work as an example of the artist as tour guide. Her argument stresses that many of the artists under discussion were not passive visual recorders of the region, but prime shapers in the developing relationship between indigenous groups and Americans — particularly tourists.

Hartley, who traveled to Taos in 1918, is the focus of Chapter 2. Scott finds in Hartley’s work a cultural shift in representations of Pueblo communities: “Although rife with paradox and ethnocentricity, Hartley’s New Mexico production was part of a growing antiassimila-tionist movement that ultimately resulted in a change in federal Indian policy from one that demanded assimilation to one that promoted cultural preservation.” The author relies primarily on Hartley’s vivid

landscape paintings to make her point, arguing they “can be read as vitalistic abstractions of the dancing Indian body moving in step with the pulse of nature.” This analysis is reinforced with direct quotes taken from essays the artist wrote on the cultural importance of Pueblo ritual dance, then under attack.

A set of salacious and sensationalized documents from 1921 called the Secret Dance Files catalyzed groups like the Young Women’s Christian Association to pressure officials to forcefully restrict Native American dance ceremonies. Hartley and other painters were effective and vocal partners in helping the Pueblos defend their practices, Scott argues. But, as in most cases considered, she also astutely breaks down Hartley’s own biases and shortcomings. “To be sure, his representations of Indians continued to be laced with primitivist tropes. Passages from Hartley’s New Mexico essays are riddled with typical markers of primitivism — Indians as childlike, intuitive artists, natural and connected to nature, and anti-modern.”

Scott returns to Blumenschein in Chapter 3 to illustrate an evolution in the artist’s and the region’s attitudes by the early 1920s. Focusing on the strangeness of his oil painting The Gift (1922), she proposes that the work intentionally skewers a common mode of contemporaneous art that objectified Native peoples. While most scholars assume the gift referenced in the title is either the pipe bag held by the Pueblo man in the center of the work or the pot near his feet, Scott argues, “The figure’s gestures and demeanor — rigid posture, crossed arms, stern facial expression — are not those accompanying an amicable exchange. . . . In an alternative interpretation of the work, one that takes into account the preservationist movement, the central gift can be seen as the Pueblo man himself, who acts as a metonym for the Pueblos and their culture.”

Blumenschein was probably responding to works like Walter Ufer’s Taos Girls (1916), Scott writes. She describes that painting, which features three blackshawled women in the foreground and three in the background, as follows: “In posing the women facing front, right, left, and back, Ufer invites the viewer to reconstruct the whole Pueblo female body, a process that mimics the act of looking at an object on display. This objectifying gaze is also encouraged by the three ollas placed at the feet of the Pueblo women in the foreground; through visual rhyme, the beautiful black ollas become analogues for the women’s bodies.” In comparing the undertones of Blumenschein’s and Ufer’s different methods of representation, A Strange Mixture enriches its overall argument by revealing a division present between area artists at the time.

This divide is further explored in the following chapter, which turns to Sloan. Best known for his depictions of New York, the artist often applied a satirical lens to his artistic considerations of the cultural dynamics defining 1920s and ’30s New Mexico. One of his works, Grotesques at Santo Domingo (1923), depicts Koshare dancers (sometimes called “clowns”). Due to inflammatory and false perceptions of these dancers and their rituals, the Koshare were frequent targets of those who insisted on the assimilation, rather than preservation, of Pueblo culture and practices.

Sloan’s own target in the painting, however, was not the dancers. He wrote: “I think I am in a position to inform the reader that the grotesques in the picture are in the immediate foreground. The word could not be well applied to the Koshare whose actions and chant and dress make them more humanly natural.” The figures he references in the foreground are a row of tourists in colorful garb. However, Scott identifies a contradiction in Sloan’s words, arguing the artist believed “the best way to preserve Indian culture was to segregate it from Anglo influences. But would not the implied viewer of his paintings be Anglo? How does Sloan justify his own presence at these events?” By leaving such rhetorical questions unanswered, the author again reinforces the entangled nature of the relationship between the painters and the Pueblos without attempting to oversimplify it.

The final chapter considers Awa Tsireh (also known as Alfonso Roybal) of San Ildefonso Pueblo. Scott says that he served as a diplomat between the two communities. “As the creator of an intercultural art, he acted as an ambassador: he conveyed aspects of his worldview to those beyond his Pueblo’s borders while also guarding those borders.” According to her analysis, the artist employed visual strategies in his paintings, such as misdirection and coding, to protect Pueblo knowledge while simultaneously celebrating it. A painting from around 1918, referred to as Untitled

sets four dancers in ceremonial dress against a completely blank background. “Many Pueblo people believe that it is inappropriate to record certain ritual objects, altars, sanctuaries, and the sacred sites and shrines that mark the boundaries of the Pueblo world. Awa Tsireh’s ceremonial paintings typically omit these elements even though they are of central importance to Pueblo ritual,” Scott explains. “This formal convention serves to detach the paintings’ subjects — whether animals or ceremonial dancers — from the particularity of their location, even though location, earth, and ground are integral to Pueblo ritual practices.”

Subsequently, Scott takes great care to explain her own methods for ensuring that the images printed in the book are unlikely to cause offense — her general approach was to consult the communities depicted, rather than just securing the legal rights to reproduce the works. As elsewhere in the text, she brings the ambiguities of the situation to the forefront without trying to force them into unnatural resolution. This proves to be the greatest strength of this compelling book, and one that is reaffirmed in its closing. A Strange Mixture’s epilogue turns to the O’Keeffe painting At the Rodeo (1929), a colorful, swirling abstraction of Pueblo ceremonial dancers in which no human figures are evident. While O’Keeffe’s overall representation of New Mexico is often considered alluring “because it is simplified and purified,” Scott concludes that At the Rodeo is compelling for opposite reasons: “It is both enthralling and strange, like New Mexico itself and its fraught history.”