Three Views of Contemporary Native North American Art

The books reviewed here offer Great Plains Quarterly readers splendid opportunities to acquaint themselves with the rich and varied world of contemporary American Indian art. Native American Modernism: Art from North America offers a scholarly approach to the intriguing background story of Indian modernism by way of the Berlin Ethnological Museum’s collection of contemporary American Indian art. Contemporary Native American Artists presents a selection of wildly talented artists who have come to prominence through the world-renowned Santa Fe American Indian Art Market and largely represent an approach to art-making grounded in traditional modes and imagery. George Littlechild: The Spirit Giggles Within, a survey of over 150 artworks with accompanying explanatory text by Littlechild, offers readers a fascinating development and view into the evolution of a single artist working out themes and formal issues over three decades. Each book is carefully organized and beautifully illustrated.

Native American Modernism: Art from North America provides a valuable introduction to Native American artists working in the modern era, their artistic origins, and their regional and pan-Indian styles. Produced by Berlin’s Ethnological Museum, this smartly organized volume focuses on the museum’s well-curated collection of some 160 contemporary Native American artworks featured in a 2012 exhibition.

Museum collections are guided by a wide range of missions. The Berlin Ethnological Museum’s mission has assembled a collection of over 500,000 preindustrial objects, many “gathered” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries during Germany’s explorations and forays into colonization. The museum’s origins date back to the “Wunderkammer” or “Cabinets of Curiosities” of the late seventeenth century. These “wonder rooms,” consisting of hard-to-categorize objects from natural history, ethnography, and archaeology, along with historical relics, were built by European princes to impress visitors with their grandeur and to exhibit, symbolically, a princely control over the material world. Today’s Ethnological Museum, of course, employs a scientific, educational, and respectful approach to exhibiting and collecting ethnographic objects.

Over the years, the Ethnological Museum has collected over 30,000 Native American artifacts documenting traditional ways of life. Native American Modernism focuses on its small but growing collection of contemporary American Indian artworks honoring the centuries-long Native American struggle for self-determination and opposition to assimilation. Dating back to Native American midcentury modernist artists such as Allan Houser and George Morrison, the establishment of Santa Fe’s Institute of American Indian Art in 1962, and the Red Power rebellions of the sixties and seventies, a paradigm shift forced the larger Indian art community to define its work in relation to the major international art movements of the twentieth century. Though still largely guided by an ethnological collecting approach, and lacking the luxury of a fine art museum’s purely aesthetic and art historical concerns, the Ethnological Museum’s contemporary collection demonstrates how successfully and ingeniously Indian artists have intertwined ethnography and aesthetics. Many of the works display traditional ceremonies and imagery, but using nontraditional mediums such as screen printing, easel painting, and glass. Several of the works move into contemporary political commentary, creating surrealist spaces while borrowing from and suggesting traditional forms and imagery. The collection overwhelmingly consists of painting and printmaking, lacking at this point contemporary textiles, sculptural works, video, performance, and other mediums. The good news, of course, is the museum’s endless opportunity to continue fleshing out its collection. The beautiful basket forms constructed of film stock by Gail Tremblay, an artist referenced in the book, would make worthy additions.

A defining moment for the contemporary American Indian art movement was the 1959 Directions in Indian Art...