Modern Native American art: Angel DeCora's transcultural aesthetics

(2.) The magazine illustrations that have been identified are: Angel DeCora, "Gray Wolf's Daughter," Harper's New Monthly Magazine 99 (1899): 860-62; idem, "The Sick Child," Harper's New Monthly Magazine 98 (1899): 446-48; Red Man (Carlisle Indian School Magazine), Sept. 1913, cover; and Charles A. Eastman, "On the Trail: The American Eagle and Indian Symbol," American Indian Magazine 7 (1919): 89-91. In addition, reproductions of her work appeared in Natalie Curtis, "The Perpetuating of Indian Art," Outlook, Nov. 22, 1913, 625-26; and idem, "An American Indian Artist," Outlook, Jan. 14, 1920, 64-66. DeCora provided illustrations and, where indicated, cover designs for the following books: Francis LaFlesche, The Middle Five: Indian Boys at School (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1900), frontispiece and cover design; Mary Catherine Judd, Wigwam Stories as Told by the North American Indians (Boston: Ginn, 1901), illustrations and cover design; Zitkala-Sa, Old Indian Legends (Boston: Ginn, 1901), illustrations and cover design; Natalie Curtis, ed., The Indians' Book (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1907), tide pages and cover design; Elaine Goodale Eastman, Yellow Star: A Story of East and West (Boston: Little, Brown, 1911); and Ruth Everett Beck, The Little Buffalo Robe (New York: H. Holt, 1914). DeCora made illustrations for the last two in collaboration with her husband, William "Lone Star" Dietz. The extant paintings include an undated watercolor sketch, the original painting for the frontispiece for The Middle Five, and a fragment of Firelight (made before 1913). The first is at the Hampton University Museum in Virginia and the other two are in private collections. Efforts on the part of the author, Sarah McAnulty, and Anna Romero to follow tip on loads to other works have failed to turn any up, although it is possible that they have been preserved.

(3.) On the "studio style," see Dorothy Dunn, American Indian Painting of the Southwest and Plains Areas (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1968); and Brody (as in n.1).

(4.) Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, trans. Harriet de Onis (Durham, NC.: Duke University Press, 1947), 97-103.

(5.) Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 6.

(6.) Ruth B. Phillips, Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast, 1700-1900 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998), 16-17 and passim; David W. Penney and Lisa Roberts, "America's Pueblo Artists: Encounters in the Borderlands," in Native American Art in the Twentieth century, ed. W. Jackson Rushing (New York: Routledge, 1999), 21. See also several of the essays in Gerald McMaster, ed., Reservation X: The Power of Place in Aboriginal Contemporary Art (Seattle: University of Washington Press; Canadian Museum of Civilization, Hull, Quebec, 1998). It should be noted that scholars of other non-Western arts are contributing to this shift; see, for example, Nicholas Mirzoeff, "Transculture: From Kongo to the Congo," in An Introduction to Visual Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999), 129-61.