Corn Palaces and Butter Queens: A History of Crop Art and Dairy Sculpture

7. An Ongoing Tradition

161 7 An Ongoing Tradition Like grandma and her bobbed hair, [the Mitchell Corn Palace] has become modern, and still holds a wide place in the life of the community. —“The Corn Palace as a Pioneer,” Mitchell Gazette, 1933 This study primarily focuses on the period between 1870 and 1930, but the traditions of cereal architecture, crop art, and butter sculpture persisted into the second half of the twentieth century. Oscar Howe made important contributions to the iconography of the origins of corn at the Mitchell Corn Palace, and a range of professional and amateur artists continued to practice modern versions of crop art and butter sculpture at the Minnesota and Iowa State Fairs. To explore this legacy, the story first goes back to Mitchell to consider the role that the modern palace played in helping to shape new identities for its community. Oscar Howe’s Corn Murals Oscar Howe (Figure 7.1), a Dakota Indian of the Yanktonais tribe, designed the Mitchell Corn Palace murals from 1948 to 1971.1 Born in 1915 on the Crow Creek Indian Reservation in eastern South Dakota, Howe grew up experiencing what was typical of government assimilation policy of the time. At age seven, he was forced to leave his family to go to the Indian school in Pierre, where he was denied his language and culture and beaten for any infraction or lapse. He bore the scars of some of those beatings for the rest of his life. A reprieve came when, at the age of ten, he developed a terrible skin disease that was further complicated by a severe eye infection. School officials, thinking he might go blind, or even die, sent him home. Howe later claimed that the following year was one of the most important in his life. His grandmother took care of him and used that time to teach him about his culture and to share with him traditional stories and images. A year later, recovered from AN ON GOING T RADITION 162 the disease and infection, he went back to the Indian school with a strengthened sense of himself and his potential as an artist. Nearly everyone who saw his work recognized his talent, and in 1935 he was selected to be one of the students sent to Santa Fe to study at Dorothy Dunn’s Studio School. Dunn believed in using historical American Indian art as the basis for developing a distinctive Native American modern art practice. The result was the “Studio style,” with flattened space, clear outlines, and solid fields of color. In subject matter, it celebrated Native historical traditions, especially ceremonies, dance rituals, and mythologies. Howe did very well in the program and earned his high school degree, graduating as the salutatorian of his class in 1938.2 The country was still in the midst of the Great Depression and jobs were scarce in 1938, so Howe taught art at the Pierre Indian School for a year before he joined the WPA South Dakota Artist Project. As part of that program, he was commissioned to paint the dome Figure 7.1. Oscar Howe stands in front of the 1958 Mitchell Corn Palace. He was its decorator from 1948 to 1971. Courtesy of Archives and Special Collections, University Libraries, University of South Dakota. 163 Figure 7.2. In 1940, as part of the WPA South Dakota Artist Project, Oscar Howe created a mural for the dome of the Carnegie Library, Mitchell, South Dakota. Courtesy of the Mitchell Area Historical Society. AN ON GOING T RADITION 164 for the Mitchell Carnegie Library in 1940 (Figure 7.2). The design, reflecting not only the Studio style but also Dakota skin-painting traditions, depicted four Thunderbeings, stylized birds considered sacred messengers of prayers and the bringers of rain. Between the figures, clouds let loose lightning and rain on the hills. The mural expressed a hope for an end to drought and for a better future for South Dakota.3 Drafted into the army in 1942, Howe served in North Africa and Europe, and met his future wife in Germany. Returning to South Dakota at the end of the war, he settled in Mitchell and worked out an arrangement with the local college, Dakota Wesleyan, to both pursue an undergraduate degree and be paid as artist-in-residence with some teaching duties. Thus, Howe was already a recognized local artist when the Corn Palace Committee asked him...