Evolving perceptions of Native art

Art for a New Understanding

1935, at the age of twenty, Yanktonai Dakota artist Oscar Howe enrolled in famed art educator Dorothy Dunn’s Studio School program at the Santa Fe Indian School. Dunn encouraged students to explore their artistic tribal heritage. In her courses, she promoted the flat, narrative styles on themes of Native culture that became known as the “Studio Style.” Dunn, who had refrained from teaching color theory and perspective, prompted her students to create imagery that recalled the Pueblo painting traditions, which she regarded as a more authentic Indian art.

While Dunn taught students to take pride in their heritage, her emphasis on the Studio Style could be limiting. That was the experience of Howe, who was later influenced by European modernist work he encountered during his World War II deployment overseas. According to Jessica L. Horton, assistant professor of modern and contemporary art at the University of Delaware, Howe particularly admired the work of Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky. And in Art for a New Understanding: Native Voices, 1950s to Now, the accompanying catalogue to a traveling exhibition organized by the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Horton draws a parallel between Kandinsky’s evocation of sound and motion and Howe’s circa-1954 watercolor

Howe’s seminal painting is one of the earliest currently on view at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Art, where Art for a New Understanding is on view through July 19. “The main idea for the show is a journey through the evolution of modern and contemporary Native American art,” said IAIA chief curator Manuela Well-Off-Man, who co-curated the exhibition with independent curator Candice Hopkins and Crystal Bridges curator Mindy N. Besaw. “We start with works from the 1950s like Oscar Howe’s and then move into the 1960s, and so on.”