Modern Native American art: Angel DeCora's transcultural aesthetics

The cover for Old Indian Legends borrowed less from European imagery than from DeCora's previous works, but it still grew out of contemporary aesthetic ideas. Gone were the subtle tonalities of Tryon and the historical stage sets of Pyle. What remained was the importance of art as a site of individual and racial development. Much like the European-American supporters of Native Indian art, DeCora was excited about what Indian art could offer both artists and the American public. By stressing the application of racial talents, including her own, to everyday objects, she endorsed the idea of improving American society through the dissemination of good design. The identification of geometry and conventionalized forms as the heart of Indian design reinforced her thesis that Indian aesthetics was distinct from European-American aesthetics and therefore had something unique to contribute. (41)

DeCora's exploration of graphic design reflects the emphasis given to design in late nineteenth-century American art training. Art programs included courses on the history of art that surveyed styles of ornament including classical and medieval works as well as objects from Celtic, Moorish, and Far Eastern cultures. A knowledge of ancient and non-European art provided a foundation of knowledge for the modern artist. It also established a repertoire of imagery to draw on that contributed to a composition's decorativeness, an attribute that was increasingly important to painters and designers alike. Art and design instructors relied on textbooks such as Owen Jones's Grammar of Ornament (1854), which collected examples of a wide variety of national and historic styles, and anthropological studies such as A. C. Haddon's Evolution in Art: As Illustrated by the Life-Histories of Designs (1895). (42) Book design was strongly influenced by this development. One critic praised the contemporary use of "the work of past ages and all lands" as unprecedented:

From the Greek vase and the Egyptian papyrus to the Indian lotus and the bamboo of Japan, from the symbols of human passion to those of heavenly light and fire, there is hardly a decorative convention that has not been borrowed, adapted, degraded, and restored again in succeeding generations till neither the individual nor the age, if even the nation, can claim them as its own. (43)

Though Native American art does not appear in the best-known books on historic ornament, nationalist-minded American artists and theorists, including George Wharton James and Arthur Wesley Dow, found the traditions of their own region as valuable as Celtic or Gothic motifs." (44)

The insertion of Native American art into the study of design would have been particularly apt in Boston, as indigenous material culture was prominently featured in local museum collections and temporary exhibitions. The Peabody Museum's collection had been largely assembled by DeCora's friend Alice Fletcher. The Boston-based Indian Industries League, a branch of the Woman's National Indian Association, held regular exhibitions and sales of contemporary Indian handicrafts from the time of its establishment in 1893. Indian laces were exhibited by the Society of Arts and Crafts, Boston, and later sold through the society's shop. Other Arts and Crafts communities in the area displayed Indian handicrafts alongside their own at exhibitions that were covered in the Boston papers. In 1901, James spoke on Indian handicrafts at a society meeting. Given the interconnected circle of artists, reformers, and ethnographers that DeCora traveled in, it is likely that she was aware of these events.