Modern Native American art: Angel DeCora's transcultural aesthetics

DeCora's understanding of Indian identity and Native aesthetics was not without its problems. Like others of her generation, she accepted, at least superficially, the ideology of racialism. This made her prone to seek universal "racial" qualities that transcended historical and regional differences. She also tended to see her own successes and goals as available and desirable to Indian people who had not had the same extraordinary opportunities. Indeed, her assumption that an interest in European-American art systems and the advance of national artistic culture was the goal of other Native American artists demonstrates the degree to which she had embraced a Western attitude toward art. Though DeCora was blinded to the ways in which she reproduced many of the contradictions embedded in the progressive, middle-class values with which she had been educated, her work nonetheless merits attention. It allows us to see that "modern" Indian art is more than a set of objects or progression of styles, that it is a site of exploring what it means to be a "modern Indian." By engaging non-Indian aesthetics, DeCora was not abdicating her identity but reflecting on the fact that her experiences made her identity a very complex, shifting thing. By way of conclusion, it is useful to recall the words of Laura Cornelius, one of DeCora's colleagues in founding the Society of American Indians, who, in reflecting on this subject, wrote, "I am not the new Indian, I am the old Indian adjusted to new conditions." (50)

Notes

The research for this article was produced with the support of a predoctoral fellowship from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM). Aspects of this piece were presented as talks at SAAM in May 1997 and at the Native American Art Studies Association conference in Victoria, British Columbia, in October 1999. I would like to thank the following people for their assistance: Wanda Corn, Alex Nemerov, Leigh Culver, Mary Louise Hultgren, Anna Romero, Sarah McAnulty Quilter, Joyce Szabo, Kathleen Ash-Milby. Janet Berlo, Rob Frankel, and the readers and editors of the Art Bulletin. I am also grateful to the Gilder Fund of Barnard College for its support in obtaining illustrations and permissions.

(1.) "Hochunk" is tise preferreti term used by the Great Lakes people commonly known to European-Americans as the Winnebago. They were moved west from their Wisconsin homelands by the United States government several times in the 19th century and today have reservations in Nebraska and Wisconsin. For an overview of debates about the definition of modern Indian art, see Janet C. Berlo and Ruth B. Phillips, Native Nortlt American Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 209-10. DeCora is absent from this book, as well as from Roger Matuz, ed., St. James Guide to Native North American Artists (Detroit: St. James Press, 1998). Those writers who mention her in passing often get even the most basic facts wrong; for example, J. J. Brody claims that she studied art at the Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, although her affiliation with this institution did not begin until 1905 (Brody, Pueblo Indian Painting: Tradition and Modernism in New Mexico, 1900-1930 [Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1997], 55); in addition to giving incomplete information about her career, Patrick Lester lists her by her husband's name, though she continued to work under her maiden name throughout her career (Lester, The Biographical Directory of Native American Painters [Tulsa: SIR Publications; Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995], 152).