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A forward looking art: education, creative exchange, & the rise of modern Native American artists

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A forward looking art: education, creative exchange, & the rise of modern Native American artists

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A Forward Looking Art: Education, Creative Exchange, & the Rise of Modern
Native American Artists

Elizabeth Prairie Belle Murphy

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE
USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ART HISTORY)
AUGUST 2017

i

For Alma

ii
Table of Contents

Dedication i

Abstract iii

Acknowledgments iv

List of Illustrations vii

Introduction 1

Chapter One 23
“Crafting Modern Indian Art: Lloyd Kiva New, Art Education, and Design, 1938-1962”

Chapter One Images 70

Chapter Two 88
“Acee Blue Eagle, Cultural Research, and the Making of the Bacone Style”

Chapter Two Images 141
Chapter Three 172
“’To Be Really Contemporary:’ The GI Bill and Native American Artists”

Chapter Three Images 218

Chapter Four 252
“Radical Institution: The Institute of American Indian Arts and Contemporary Native
American Art”

Chapter Four Images 296

Conclusion 316

Bibliography 321

iii

Abstract

In 1962 the Institute of American Indian Arts opened in Santa Fe. This school
sought to establish an academic and creative destination for aspiring Native American
artists. Often read as radical departure from earlier models of art education in Native
schools, IAIA actually brought to fruition experimentation that had been fomenting for
decades in classrooms and studios of Native American artists all dedicated to addressing
the role of Indian art in modern America. The individual histories and relationships that
helped guide the creation of IAIA as a site for relatively free-from artistic exploration
have long been left in background of the story of this institution, and more broadly, the
rise of modern Native artists throughout this period.
This dissertation traces key case studies of individual artists who throughout their
careers as students, teachers, artists, researchers, and culture-makers all struggled with
how to be “authentic.” For some, such as Acee Blue Eagle and Lloyd Kiva New this
meant the creation of a performative Native identity that was at times cosmopolitan and
at other times bordered on charlatanism. For others, including the Lolomas and Eva
Mirabal this meant a continuous shifting in and out of tribal communities that remain
even today deeply grounded in traditionalism and ceremony. Thus “authenticity” comes
to be a fluid term, shaped more by each individual than by the federal government, the art
market, or tribal affiliations. The complexities surrounding authenticity and modernism
are the dual prongs that drive this dissertation through the various iterations of art
education and production focused upon here, resulting in new narratives within American
art at large.
iv
Acknowledgments

There are many individuals without whom the completion of this dissertation
would not have been possible. Here, I would like to acknowledge and thank those who
made the process of studying, research, and writing a meaningful and productive
experience.
I am immensely grateful to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center for a
fellowship in American Modernism that allowed me to dedicate nine months to
significant research and writing in the most beautiful office in Santa Fe. Travel grants
from thee Department of Art History at the University of Southern California made in-
person archival research in Oklahoma, Washington, D.C., and across New Mexico
possible. Most importantly, I am indebted to the Department of Art History at the
University of Southern California for its continuing support of my studies.
USC uniquely fostered my development as a scholar, and I am lucky to have had
the continuing support of my dissertation committee members, as well as the faculty
there. Kate Flint, who enthusiastically took me on as an advisee saw me through to the
finish line and was a true champion throughout the process. Her knowledge of the period
and materials at hand has provided great inspiration and motivation. Peter Mancall
provided early guidance in my efforts to deepen my understanding of Native American
history in general. Suzanne Hudson was generous enough to come on-board late in the
development of this project. Coursework with Richard Meyer, Christopher Bennett, and
Vanessa Schwartz provided the intellectual fuel for this project. Lastly, I would like to
express my sincere gratitude to Barbara Elwood, Jeanne Herman, and Tracey Marshall
v
whom have all helped me along the way in so many significant ways.
I am fortunate to have returned to the incredible world of Santa Fe arts and
culture, both intellectually and professionally during the writing of this dissertation. I am
deeply grateful to have been supported by all at the Coe Foundation, who have supported
my work as assistant curator and as a struggling PhD candidate pushing to complete my
writing while working full-time. In particular, Bruce Bernstein has provided profound
guidance and support. His influence on my work will continue to ripple and expand
beyond these pages for the foreseeable future. Rachel Wixom’s kindness and enthusiasm
have made every working day a pleasure and adventure, here’s to years of incredible
growth for us and the Coe. In the larger creative community of Santa Fe, I have been
inspired by all at the O’Keeffe, especially Eumie Imm-Stroukoff and Carolyn Kastner,
Tony Chavarria at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, Jonathan Batkin at the
Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, and Carmen Vendelin, now at the Silver
City Museum.
Research support for this project was greatly supplemented by Ryan Flahive,
archivist at the Institute of American Indian Arts; Caitlin Haynes, reference archivist at
the Smithsonian Institution, National Anthropological Archives; the staff at the Center for
the Southwest at the University of New Mexico; Verna Mullen at Alfred University;
Becky Simmons, RIT Archivist at The Wallace Center at Rochester Institute of
Technology; and Matthew Law, archivist at The National Archives at Riverside
The support and camaraderie of my fellow students have truly made graduate
school an enjoyable and inspiring experience. First and foremost, I would like to thank
Katie Kerrigan my closest friend and greatest sounding board in the long-haul of graduate
vi
school. The support, laughter, food, and drinks shared with Ellen Dooley, Rika Hiro, and
Megan Mastroianni guided me through my years in Los Angeles. Deep and lasting
friendships beyond USC have guided me through the long and slow process of writing,
work, and motherhood. My deepest love to Katy Gross, Amanda Lechner, Manya Fox,
and Erin Froschle for all of their support and inspiration.
More than anything else, this dissertation was completed because of the incredible
guidance of my amazing family. My mother, Shelley Horton-Trippe was my first and
deepest inspiration. Her utter brilliance as an artist, and as a mother, brought me to where
I am today. My father, Tom Murphy, is my intellectual foundation and my greatest editor.
His unending kindness and compassion drive me to be a better person every single day.
My partner in life and love, Chris Chavez, has stood by me through thick and thin and the
throws of this dissertation. I love you more everyday. And finally, this dissertation is for
my amazing, beautiful, brilliant daughter, Alma Cecilia Belle. I did this all for you, kid.

vii
List of Illustrations

Fig.
1.1: Lloyd H. New, Untitled, 1941 70
1.2: Lloyd H. New, Untitled, 1941 71
1.3: Andrew Van Tsihnahjinnie, Navajo N’Da-a, 1938 72
1.4: Andrew Van Tsihnahjinnie, Trading at the Trading Post, c. 1940s 73
1.5: Charles Loloma, Houses Along the Plaza at Hotevilla, c. 1930-35 74
1.6: Charles Loloma, Buffalo Dance, c. 1940 74
1.7: Fred Kabotie, Hopi Buffalo Dance, c. 1921 75
1.8: Hoke Denetsosie, Lion and Deer, c. 1940 75
1.9: Andrew Van Tsihnahjinnie, from Who Wants to Be a Prairie Dog?, 1940 76
1.10: Hoke Denetsosie, “Firestarting” from Little Herder In Winter, 1940 76
1.11: Kiva Bags, ca. 1904s 77
1.12: 1946 article in the Arizona Republic 78
1.13: Lloyd Kiva with Kiva bag and gloves, Desert Magazine, 1948 79
1.14: Arizona Craftsmen Center, 1950 80
1.15: Women’s Wear Daily, 1951 81
1.16: Women’s Wear Daily, 1952 82
1.17: H. S. Poley, Corn Dance- Tabla, 1915. Example of Pueblo mantas. 82
1.18: Leslie and D.D. Tillett in New York 83
1.19: The World of D.D. and Leslie Tillett exhibition image from Museum of 83
the City of New York

1.20: Kiva Craft Center, in Craft Horizons, 1957 84
1.21: People and Places Nov. 1956 (Published by your De Soto-Plymouth 85
Dealer)

1.22: Lloyd Kiva silkscreen studio 86
1.23: Lloyd Kiva, Paolo Soleri, Fred Skaggs, Otellie Loloma From Craft 86
viii
Horizons, 1957

1.24: Lloyd Kiva designs in hand silkscreened fabric, with Tsihnahjinnie 87
pony pattern, 1950s

2.1: Ataloa Lodge, Bacone College, Muskogee, OK, pictured 2015. 141
2.2: Stephen Mopope, Eagle Dancer, Pochoir print, 1929 142
2.3: Jack Hokeah, Buffalo Dance, Pochoir print, 1929 143
2.4: Lois Smokey, Kiowa Family, Pochoir print, 1929 144
2.5: Acee Blue Eagle, Stickball, watercolor on paper, 1932 145
2.6: Spencer Asah, Stickball, mural, 1939 146
2.7: Acee Blue Eagle, Sacred Pipe Dance, watercolor on paper, 1932 146
2.8: Acee Blue Eagle, Creek Chief and Two Horses, watercolor on 147
paper, 1932

2.9: Acee Blue Eagle, Four Dakota (?) Warriors on Horseback, watercolor 148
on paper, 1932

2.10: Acee Blue Eagle, Two Indian Men Hunting Wild Turkeys with Bow 148
and Arrow, watercolor on paper, 1932

2.11: Acee Blue Eagle, Representation of Sand Painting of Kachina and 149
Animals, watercolor on paper, 1932

2.12: Dorothy Dunn instructional material 150
2.13: Acee Blue Eagle, Navajo Yei, silkscreen greeting card, 1950s 151
2.14: Quincy Tahoma, Riders Resting, Watercolor on paper, 1937 152
2.15: Andy (Andrew Van) Tsihnahjinnie, Herding Sheep, casein on board, nd 153
2.16: Harrison Begay, Painting of a Young Navajo Boy Tending his Sheep, 154
casein on board, nd

2.17: “Acee Blue Eagle,” Sooner Magazine, 1933 155
2.18: Acee Blue Eagle, Moving Camp, mural, 1934 156
2.19: Acee Blue Eagle Buffalo Dancers, mural, 1934 157
2.20: Acee Blue Eagle Drummer, mural, 1934 158
2.21: Acee Blue Eagle Indian Spear Dancer, mural, 1934 159
ix
2.22: Acee Blue Eagle Dancer with Headdress, mural, 1934 160
2.23: Acee Blue Eagle and unknown man aboard the Normandie, 1935 161
2.24: Acee Blue Eagle with Oxford mayor and mayoress in the Oxford Mail, 162
1935

2.25: Acee Blue Eagle and unknown art student at Bacone College, c. 1936 163
2.26: Acee Blue Eagle painting mural at Nettie Wheeler’s Thunderbird Tea 163
Room in Muskogee, OK, undated postcard

2.27: Knox Gasoline promotional brochure for Acee Blue Eagle “Famous 164
Oklahoma Indians” tumblers

2.28: Acee Blue Eagle, Untitled (Indian Man in Costume and Feathered 165
Headdress, Holding Feathers and Dancing), silkscreen, nd

2.29: Acee Blue Eagle, Indian Man and Buffalo, tempera on paper, nd 166
2.30: Trew Hocker, Dancers, silkscreen, nd 167
2.31: Acee Blue Eagle, Untitled (Boxer), ink on paper, nd 168
2.32: Acee Blue Eagle seated with book, nd 169
2.33: George Bellows, Stag at Sharkey’s, oil on canvas, 1909 170
2.34: Acee Blue Eagle, Haida Medicine Painting, tempera on paper, 1959 171
3.1: Charles Loloma’s Hopi Katsinas in the Pueblo room at the Golden Gate 218
International Exposition, San Francisco, 1939

3.2: Charles Loloma at work at the Golden Gate International Exposition, 218
San Francisco, 1939

3.3: Charles Loloma, illustrations for Little Hopi by Edward Kennard & 219
Albert Yava, 1948

3.4: School for American Craftsmen catalogue 1948-1949 220
3.5: Linn Phelan, Trumpet Shell Bowl, 1946 (left) and Umbria/Orvieto, 221
two-handled bowl, circa 1300 — 1425 (right)

3.6: Linn Phelan, Bowl, c. 1930s (left) and Hispano-Moresque Albarello, 221
Spain 15th century (right)

3.7: Charles and Otellie Loloma working at in School for American 222
Craftsmen ceramics studio, c. 1947
x

3.8: Linn Phelan instructing in kiln firing, c. 1940s 223
3.9: America House salesroom, Manhattan, c. 1940s 224
3.10: Peter Voulkos, Vase decorated with a “slip stencil” technique, 1957 225
3.11: Betty Woodman, Bowl, c. 1940s-1950s 226
3.12: Otellie Loloma, Untitled Pot w/ Lid, nd (left) and Charles Loloma, 226
Untitled Tumblers, 1953 (right)

3.13: Otellie Loloma, Bird Girl, 1969 227
3.14: Otellie Loloma, Pot with Handle, 1971 228
3.15: Linn Phelan, Folded Dish, 1950 229
3.16: Nampeyo, Jar/Olla, c. 1925 230
3.17: Otellie Loloma, Effigy Pot, 1972 231
3.18: Charles Loloma, student works, 1948 232
3.19: Unknown, Acoma Pot, early 20
th
century 233
3.20: Charles and Otellie Loloma at Kiva Craft Center shop, 1956 234
3.21: Eva Mirabal (Eah-Ha-Wa), Untitled mural at Santa Fe Indian School, 235
c. 1935-1939

3.22: Eva Mirabal (Eah-Ha-Wa), Buy War Bonds, 1942 235
3.23: Eva Mirabal (Eah-Ha-Wa), Untitled, 1942 236
3.24: Eva Mirabal, G.I. Gertie, c. 1944 237
3.25: Unknown photographer, portrait of Eva Mirabal, c. 1944 237
3.26: Unknown photographer, portrait of Eva Mirabal, c. 1944 238
3.27: Taos Valley Art School pamphlet, 1947 239
3.28: Edward Corbett, Untitled #7, 1945 239
3.29: Oli Sihvonen, The Canyon, c. 1950 240
3.30: Louis Ribak, East Side New York, c. 1935 241
3.31: Louis Ribak, Rock Quarry with Nudes, c. 1950 242
3.32: Beatrice Mandelman, White Pitcher, c. 1949 243
xi
3.33: Beatrice Mandelman, Morning Tide #7, c. late 1950s 243
3.34: Joseph Henry Sharp, The Stoic, 1914 244
3.35: E. Irving Couse, Taos Pueblo - Moonlight, 1914 245
3.36: “Fifty Years Ago Phillips Painted Taos Pueblo, Indians Now Return 246
Favor,” Taos Valley Star, 1948

3.37: “Red Man and White Man, … Louis Ribak conducts this class,” 247
National Geographic

3.38: Mandelman/Ribak scrapbook, 1950 248
3.39: Eva Mirabal (Eah-Ha-Wa), Untitled Still Life, c. 1950 249
3.40: Eva Mirabal (Eah-Ha-Wa), Wild Deer, c. 1950 250
3.41: Eva Mirabal (Eah-Ha-Wa), Prairie Fire, 1965 251
4.1: Example of the Santa Fe Studio School Style: Pablita Velarde, Rabbit 296
Dance, ca. 1940

4.2: IAIA painting students in studio, 1968 297
4.3: IAIA Silkscreen workshop, 1971 297
4.4: Audio-visual workshop, 1971 298
4.5: IAIA “ethnographic” exhibition, 1960s 299
4.6: Paolo Soleri theater, IAIA campus 300
4.7: Paolo Soleri with IAIA students and faculty, 1964 300
4.8: Paolo Soleri performance, 1965 301

4.9: T.C. Cannon, Fritz Scholder, and Earl Biss 1976 302

4.10: Fritz Scholder, Indian No. 16, 1967 303

4.11: T.C. Cannon, Collector #5 (or Osage with Van Gogh), 1975 304

4.12: Connie Red Star, Crow Parfleches, 1967 305
4.13: Uknown, Apsáalooke parfleche, 19
th
c. 306
4.14: Kevin Red Star, Crow Parfleche, 1966 307
4.15: Alfred Young Man, I’d Love My Mother if She Was Black, Brown, or 308
xii
White, 1968
4.16: Alice Loiselle, Untitled (Family Portrait), 1969 309
4.17: Peabody's Studio in Lyons, Nebraska, Unknown Family, c. 1890s-1910s 310
4.18: Angelo John, Deer and the Antelope, 1965 311
4.19: George Flett, Untitled, 1965 312
4.20: Traditional techniques classroom, c. 1966 313
4.21: Detail of exhibit at 1966 Edinburgh Festival. Upper right: Carl Tubby, 314
Nez Pierce, Lower Right: Ted Palmanteer, Parfleche No. 6, Left Case:
Nez Pierce corn husk bag, left; Yakima parfleche, right

4.22: Detail of exhibit at 1966 Edinburgh Festival, View of Ceramic and 315
Sculpture Area; Far left case: Pueblo bird effigy water jar, Pottery and
Sculpture left to right: Karita Coffey, Pot; Arden Hosetosavit, Stone Fish;
Johnny Romero, Bowl; Joyce Sisneros, Vase with handle; Christine
Nofehissey, Vase; John Vandall, Vase; Larry Bird, From the Earth and From the
Sun

1
Introduction
“The future of Indian art lies in the future, not the past – let’s stop looking backward for
our standards of Indian art production. We must admit that the heyday of Indian life is
past, or passing. Art has always been a manifestation of the lives of those people who
create it, reflecting the truth of the times. Therefore, if Indian culture is in a state of flux
then we must expect a corresponding change in art expression.”
1

In 1959 the Cherokee artist and educator Lloyd Kiva New addressed a conference
on the state of Indian arts and crafts at the University of Arizona. The quote above,
discussing the future of Indian art, expresses what might be seen as a radical shift in how
both Native and non-Native artists viewed what this art could and should be. Yet the path
of a future-looking Native art, an art that could be accurately labeled as “modern,” began
decades before and was fraught with conflicting versions and interests. This dissertation
focuses on how twentieth century Indian art was shaped by art educational experiences
and pedagogy at the federal, tribal, private, and individual levels. By examining select
figures and creative exchanges ranging from the late 1920s to the late 1960s, I argue for a
reconsideration of the nature of assimilation, appropriation, and artistic authenticity as
they pertain to the rise of the modern Native American artists.
2
To this end, this study

1
Lloyd Kiva, “Directions in Indian Art, The Report of A Conference Held at the University of Arizona on
March Twentieth and Twenty First, Nineteen Hundred and Fifty Nine.” (Tucson: University of Arizona
Press, 1959), pg 28.
2
My use of the term “modern” in relation to twentieth century Native American art draws upon both
contemporaneous and retrospective labels. The earliest work addressed here, that of the Kiowa Five, was
referred to as “modern” in contemporary publications - for example, Jeanne D’Ucel, “Geronimo’s
Grandson Sets Key for Modern Indian Art,” The Oklahoman, April 23, 1939: 118. In this sense I take
“modern” to suggest primarily new art, in a new medium, representing new subjects. Retrospectively, the
art of the Kiowa Five and their counterparts from Dorothy Dunn’s Studio at the Santa Fe Indian School has
come to be categorized as “Traditional Indian Painting,” with specific chronological and aesthetic
limitations. For more on this development see Margaret Archuleta and Rennard Strickland, Shared Visions:
Native American Painters and Sculptors in the Twentieth Century (Phoenix: The Heard Museum, 1991).
The art of the following generation, that of the Lolomas, Kiva New, Mirabal, and Blue Eagle, can be seen
as fitting more clearly into the American canonical definition of modern art through the use of increasing
abstraction and direct responses to the radical changes that modernity brought to Native American lifeways.
2
traces key shifts that began with the Meriam Report (1928), the New Deal and related
changes in how the Bureau of Indian Affairs approached Indian art and education, and
that continued through World War II and the subsequent creation and employment of the
GI Bill and the expansion of educational opportunities for young Native artists
thereafter.
3

Many artists and events in this project are familiar to scholars of twentieth century
Native American art, but have received considerably less attention in the broader field of
American modern art.
4
The case studies that I have selected stand out not simply because
they have been understudied, but because of the particular experiences and relationships
of the artists that link them to the canonical narrative of modern American art.
Specifically, the artists in these case studies were exposed to theories, practices, and at
times, artists, of American modernism directly through their educational experiences,
while simultaneously living and creating within, or out of, their individual tribal
traditions.
5
The result of these particular dynamics suggests the existence of a multiplicity

While much of this art does not fit squarely into a Greenbergian sense of media purity and absolute
abstraction, it is more closely aligned with mid-century American abstraction. For more on this shift toward
a modernist ethos in Native American painting see Bill Anthes, "A fine painting . . . but not Indian": Oscar
Howe, Dick West, and Native American Modernism,” 142-170.
3
The Meriam Report (1928), officially titled The Problem of Indian Administration, was commissioned by
the Institute for Government Research to report to the Department of the Interior on the health, education,
and economic conditions of American Indians across the United States. Broadly, the Meriam Report
concluded that the federal government had failed to protect American Indians at essentially every level.
The Report led to sweeping reform of Indian Policy, most notably through the Indian Reorganization Act of
1934. The Indian Reorganization Act, also known as the Indian New Deal, intended to reduce federal
control of Indian affairs by reversing land allotment, expanding tribal self-governance, improving
conditions at educational institutions, and expanding support for cultural traditions. For an
4
For an overview of modern Native American art history see W. Jackson Rushing, ed. Native American Art
in the Twentieth Century: Makers, Meanings, Histories (London: Routledge, 1999) and Janet Catherine
Berlo and Ruth Pillips Native North American Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
5
This very broad frame of American modernism, an already problematic and vague term, is by no means
meant to overshadow or dislodge the frame of Native American social and cultural history. Rather the use
of modern and modernism in America is intended here as expansive, even as it is drawn from the histories
traced by scholars such as Erika Doss in Benton, Pollock, And The Politics Of Modernism: From
3
of modernisms. As Bill Anthes argued in Native Moderns: American Indian Painting,
1940-1960, “The transformative work of Native American artists should be recognized as
one of many modernisms in a multicultural America.”
6
The possibility of plural
modernisms that could reflect this particular melding of the common and the individual is
crucial to my project. It reveals a framework that attempts to merge regionalism and
cosmopolitanism as they are reflected directly in the works and experiences of the
selected artists.
The notion of cosmopolitanism as it pertains to modernism applies across the case
studies of this dissertation and relates directly to the narratives of cross-cultural exchange
that were the result of the educational experiences of both Native and Anglo students and
art educators.
7
While my case studies share the Southwest (including here primarily
Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona) as a point of origin, I will argue that the
negotiations between artists and institutions that allow one to speak of Indian modernism
were not isolated to this region. Even as the Southwest is central to my study because of
how, as a region, it was strategically marketed as a site of “pure” Indian cultures, I will
suggest that the artists considered here went beyond the regional, both physically and
creatively, through their educations and artistic endeavors.
8

Regionalism To Abstract Expressionism (1995), Wanda Corn in The Great American Thing (2001),
Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive (1997), and Michael Leja, Looking Askance: Skepticism and
American Art from Eakins to Duchamp (2004), among many others.
6
Bill Anthes, Native Moderns: American Indian Painting, 1940-1960, pp xiii
7
I employ the term “Anglo” throughout this dissertation as a conscious foil to the equally generic terms
“Indian,” “Native,” “Native American,” etc. It is not used as a direct reference to relation to England, the
English people, or the English language. This usage, as a referent for non-Native or non-Hispanic whites is
prevalent in both parlance and academic work in the Southwest, the broad region focused on here, see for
example Sherry Smith, Reimagining Indians (2000).
8
The marketing of the Southwest as an essentially “Indian” destination has been addressed in: Chris
Wilson, The Myth of Santa Fe: Creating a Modern Regional Tradition, (Albuquerque: University of New
4
Many of the non-Native educators in these studies were themselves originally
from Europe or educated in the European fine art tradition, and brought their Euro-
American art practices with them in the formation of their own pedagogical approaches.
Additionally, many of the Native artists traveled to major art capitals of the world either
to continue their studies, as in the case of Lloyd Kiva New at the Chicago Art Institute or
Charles and Otellie Loloma at the School for American Craftsmen, or for the production
or exhibition of their work, as we see with Acee Blue Eagle’s lecture engagement at
Oxford University in 1935. The reception of these artists through their travels and
exhibitions, the press, and collectors will serve as a site of further investigation as this
movement from the local out to the national, and even global, led to the expansive
modernism that is my subject.
Over time many of the artists and styles in this study have come to be viewed as
assimilationist.
9
While there is certainly some truth to this view, it is my hope that by
reconsidering the creative dynamics between artists, their mentors, and their audience, a
degree of artistic (and at times political) agency will be recovered. In doing so key terms
will have to be carefully assessed and analyzed. “Traditional,” “authentic,” and “modern”
are all particularly loaded words when considering this history, as has been pointed out
by numerous scholars in and out of art history. How these terms relate to notions of
cultural assimilation, appropriation, and exchange serve as the framework for my project.

Mexico Press, 1997) Marta Weigle, The Great Southwest of the Fred Harvey Company and the Santa Fe
Railway (Phoenix: Heard Museum, 1996) Leah Dilworth, Imagining Indians in the Southwest (Washington,
D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 1996).
9
The use of the term “assimilationist” here suggests the negative impact of politically, socially, and
culturally enforced adoption of the colonizer’s culture. See for example Margaret Szasz, Education And
The American Indian (1999). Brody succinctly summarizes this view, suggesting, “Easel painting was a
White art medium; it was given to the Indians, and the result for fifty years was meek acceptance.” Brody,
205.
5
Of particular relevance are the dual terms of “tradition” and “authenticity”. These
concepts, as applied to Native American art in the twentieth century in particular,
function as double-edged swords. For Native artists to be accepted into the Anglo-driven
art market of the early to mid-twentieth century they were expected to satisfy Anglo
expectations that they as individuals were true and authentic Indians, a concept not
necessarily driven by actual tribal affiliation or blood quantum as was demanded by the
federal government, but rather based upon their embodiment of certain stereotypical
notions of the Indian as primitive with close ties to nature and ceremony and possessing
innate artistic vision. Philip Deloria’s work on this cultural structure, in both Playing
Indian (1999) and Indians in Unexpected Places (2004), explores the white American use
of Indianness in the construction of an anti-modern source of American authenticity, the
cultural needs for stereotypical Indian identities to satisfy this vision, and the indigenous
responses to these outside forces.
Drawing upon this complex cultural history, this dissertation traces key case
studies of individual artists who throughout their careers as students, teachers, artists,
researchers, and culture-makers all struggled with how to be “authentic.” For some, such
as Acee Blue Eagle and Lloyd Kiva New this meant the creation of a performative Native
identity that was at times cosmopolitan and at other times bordered on charlatanism. For
others, including the Lolomas and Eva Mirabal this meant a continuous shifting in and
out of tribal communities that remain even today deeply grounded in traditionalism and
ceremony. Thus “authenticity” comes to be a fluid term, shaped more by each individual
than by the federal government, the art market, or tribal affiliations. Similarly,
“traditional” as a concept is exposed as equally transient. While the term “Traditional
6
Indian Painting” is used throughout, the very fact that this painting style, which
influenced the artists in this dissertation, either as a style to embrace or react against, was
neither “traditional” in the sense that it was a centuries-old Native style nor purely Indian
in origin, belies the ambiguity of such terminology. The legacy of primitivism in
modernism has often been treated as a one-sided exchange. But the work of the Native
artists considered here belies a more dynamic confluence of cultural perspectives. The
history of the personal and creative relationships that these artists formed provides the
basis of my study. This dissertation aims to unravel some of these complexities by
showing that Native artists were part of an active dialogue in the making of modern
American art.
In approaching this task, I have embraced the concept of “multiple modernisms,”
particularly in framing the artists considered here in the larger image of American art in
the twentieth century.
10
This conceptual model serves to resituate the unilateral treatment
of “primitive” art, positioning indigenous art making as central to an active dialogue in
art making. As explained by Ruth B. Phillips in her pivotal article “"Aesthetic
Primitivism Revisited: The Global Diaspora of 'Primitive Art' and the Rise of Indigenous
Modernisms,” modern art and primitive art were integrally tied in a deeply global sense,
engaging artists from Paris to Egypt to Mexico and back.
11
She further asserts, “the
engagements of Indigenous, settler and displaced European modernists forced into the

10
Bill Anthes employs the concept “alternative modernism” to describe Native American painting at
midcentury in Native Moderns, xxi. See also Ruth B. Phillips’ virtual project sponsored by the Clark
Institute, “Multiple Modernisms:
Twentieth-Century Artistic Modernisms in Global Perspective,” including symposia and publications
focusing on indigenous modernisms from Africa, North America, Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific
Islands: http://multiplemodernisms.org/.
11
Phillips, Ruth B. "Aesthetic Primitivism Revisited: The Global Diaspora of 'Primitive Art' and the Rise of
Indigenous Modernisms." Journal of Art Historiography no. 12 (2015)
7
open certain key contradictions embedded in European aesthetic primitivism, and
ultimately led both to the recognition of the co-modernity of the world's peoples and to
the emergence of modernist Indigenous arts.”
12
Central to this argument is the profound
assertion that modernisms reached different locales at different moments, driven largely
by access and privilege. This opens the possibility that a new approach to form, material,
or perspective that emerged in Oklahoma or New Mexico significantly later than one
from Paris or New York should be viewed as equally innovative and avant-garde and
individualistic.
13

This project considers the relationship between individual art making and
institutional art instruction as it pertains to the rise of twentieth century American Indian
art. Both Indian education and modern Indian art have separately received considerable
attention in scholarly literature, but little work has been done to examine the correlation
between changes in educational practice and policy, and shifts in both the creation and
reception of modern Native American art. I draw upon the existing art historical literature
to create a more complete picture of how influential educational exchange was to the
dramatic transformation of artistic practice.

12
Ibid, 2.
13
While Phillips asks for a reconsideration of the productive power of primitivism, earlier literature acutely
points to the problems and challenges of this cultural model. See See Clifford, The Predicament of Culture,
Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1988; Sally Price, Primitive Art in Civilized Places Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1991; Mariana Torgovnik, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991; Hal Foster, 'The “Primitive” Unconscious of Modern Art, or
White Skin Black Masks', in Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics, Seattle WA: Bay Press, 1985;
and Annie E. Coombes, Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination in Late
Victorian and Edwardian England, New Haven CN: Yale University Press, 1997. In addition to these
seminal texts see the following for additional perspectives on primitivism and modernism: Kobena Mercer
ed., Cosmopolitan Modernisms, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2005, Shelly Errington, The death of authentic
primitive art and other tales of progress, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Susan Stanford
Friedman, ‘Periodizing Modernism: Postcolonial Modernities and the Space/Time Borders of Modernist
Studies,’ Modernism/modernity 13 (3), 2006.

8
In 1968 Dorothy Dunn published American Indian Painting of the Southwest and
Plains Areas, a work that helped to codify the popular reception of Native American
painting as art in the western art historical sense, as opposed to craft or artifact. The
structure and analyses of Dunn’s text owed much to a handful of earlier works, such as
Introduction to American Indian Art: To Accompany the First Exhibition of American
Indian Art Selected Entirely with Consideration of Esthetic Value edited by Frederick
Webb Hodge, Herbert J. Spinden, and Oliver LaFarge, published in 1931 to accompany
The Exposition of Indian Tribal Arts, and the catalog for the Museum of Modern Art’s
1941 exhibition Indian Art of the United States by René d’Harnoncourt and Frederic H.
Douglas.
Like these earlier texts, American Indian Painting of the Southwest and Plains
Areas traced earlier art forms, such as pottery and mural painting in the Southwest and
hide painting in the Plains regions, in order to suggest a direct and natural lineage
between these practices and the painting style of heavily outlined flat fields of color, in
the illustrative depictions of tribally-specific scenes of ceremonies and daily life, painted
primarily in opaque watercolors, that she supported at the Studio of the Santa Fe Indian
School. Dunn explained in the introduction: “This art [the modern painting of the
Southwest and Plains areas] directly inherits native motifs and projects them through
acquired media into the present era where they have a surprising appropriateness.”
14
In
time the naturalness of this evolution was questioned as the influence of Anglo

14
Dorothy Dunn, American Indian Painting of the Southwest and Plains Areas, (Albuquerque: The
University of New Mexico Press, 1968) xvii.
9
instructors and collectors on the production of the work was increasingly
acknowledged.
15

The final section of Dunn’s work, titled “Recent Developments,” is equally
revealing of Dunn’s own perspective on the progression of contemporary Indian painting,
if not particularly informative about the actual artistic developments that took place after
the end of the Studio. Dunn essentially denounces the shifts towards increasing
abstraction that many artists embraced in the postwar period, proclaiming “Since World
War II, with the exception of one brief resurgence, there has been an overall decline in
painting quality with nothing so far to indicate the approach of a fluorescence such as
occurred in the 1920s and 1930s.”
16
This statement, along with the absence of any
meaningful discussion of the significant role of the early years of the Institute of
American Indian Arts, belie a clear pedagogical and aesthetic rift within Native American
art education and production that can be traced to the division between those who
embraced the earlier Studio style and those who rejected it.
J.J. Brody’s Indian Painters and White Patrons published in 1971, only a few
short years after Dunn’s American Indian Painting of the Southwest and Plains Areas,
falls quite clearly in the latter camp. Indian Painters and White Patrons is one of the first
art historical texts to offer a critical analysis of the role of Anglo patronage in the
development of modern Indian art prior to the 1960s. He goes to lengths to demystify the
romantic view espoused by Dunn and others that Indian painting was a natural revival of

15
See chapter four for discussion of this progression. J.J. Brody was the first scholar to address the role of
Anglo patronage in the development of this work. See also Bernstein and Rushing and Scott for further
analysis.
16
Dunn, 333.
10
prehistoric expressive forms. Much as Dunn did before him, Brody uses the first section
of his book to examine Indian painting before the twentieth century. It is in the
subsequent chapters that he begins to differentiate his analysis from hers by including a
detailed discussion of the political, social, and economic history of Indian-White
relations.
While Brody proceeds to trace the chronology of modern Indian painting, he
immediately differentiates his study from earlier works by critically deconstructing the
application of the term “traditional” to modern Indian painting styles. He argues that this
history has been oversimplified and treated as a natural continuation of earlier pictorial
forms, rather than a response to economic and social pressures applied by the dominant
Anglo culture. His assessment of institutional painting prior to 1962 offers considerable
insight into the influence of Anglo collectors and instructors on the development of this
style that is a marked advance from the earlier romanticization of a presumed innate
creative practice. Unfortunately, Brody’s emphasis on the commodification of Indian
painting at times precludes any acknowledgement of individual artistic agency until what
he refers to as the “The New Indian Painting” in the early 1960s. While this is true to a
certain extent, his study leaves room to complicate the dynamic of exchange between
Indian artists and their instructors, particularly in an expanded analysis of the art courses
at the University of Oklahoma and Bacone College. Brody’s final pages opened up the
possibility for future scholars to address what he calls New Indian Painting, exemplified
by the works emerging in large part from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Unlike
Dunn, who saw the demise of Indian art in such paintings that drew upon Euro-American
11
contemporary art, Brody laid out a future for Indian painting that fitted perfectly in the
expanded views of racial and ethnic identity that began to emerge in the early 1960s.
Taken together, Dunn and Brody provide much of the chronological framework
for my own study. Since the publication of these works, the field of American Indian art
history has expanded to include a more critical analysis of the social historical issues first
introduced by Brody. Key works in this area address the nature of the relationship
between American modernism and native North American art traditions.
Perhaps most influential of these works is W. Jackson Rushing’s Native American
Art and the New York Avant Garde: A History of Cultural Primitivism, published in 1995.
Rushing argued for a reassessment of the roots of a specifically American form of
modernism, one influenced not as much by the indigenous arts of Africa and Oceania, but
rather one that drew directly upon Native American visual language and forms. Rushing,
in examining not only the art production of seminal American modernists such as
Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman, but also the collecting and display of Native
American art as art, introduces a nationalist modernism that was to a certain degree in
dialogue with indigenous American art.
Elizabeth Hutchinson’s The Indian Craze: Primitivism, Modernism, and
Transculturation in American Art, 1890–1915 (2009), Bill Anthes’ Native Moderns:
American Indian Painting, 1940-1960 (2006), and Sascha Scott’s A Strange
Mixture: The Art and Politics of Painting Pueblo Indians (2015) all serve as instructive
models for a critical analysis of the place of Native American art within American
modernism. In Native Moderns, Bill Anthes traces the period from the Indian New Deal
12
and the creation of the Indian Arts and Crafts Board in 1934, when Native Americans
came to be seen as participants in a new American pluralism, through the postwar
movement for termination and detribalization, when Native Americans were pushed
toward mainstream integration.
17
This period was fraught with group and individual
alienation and a deep tension between “traditional” and “modern” ways of life. Anthes
argues that this social and political climate is precisely what led to the rise of Native
modernism. Anthes’ integration of the history of Indian policy is particularly instructive
when considering the role of education in American Indian art history, even if this is not
a topic of particular focus in his study. Perhaps most important in each of these studies is
the admittance of individual artistic agency in a history that has long been viewed as
primarily passive and assimilationist. Both Anthes and Hutchinson provide a theoretical
model upon which an expansive view of American modern art can be constructed. This
perspective acknowledges the often paternalistic nature of both preservationists and
policymakers, but does not deny the possibility that Native artists were independent
actors who engaged consciously with their Anglo counterparts both for economic and
creative gain.
Anthes’ inclusion of federal Indian policy in his analyses of artistic production is
furthered in Jennifer McLerran’s A New Deal for Native Art: Indian Arts and Federal

17
House Concurrent Resolution 108 (the “Termination Bill”) was passed in 1953 and formalized the
popular view that Native Americans would be more successful if they were integrated into mainstream
America by ending the relationship between individual tribes and the federal government. The purported
goals of termination included freeing the Indians from the mismanagement of the Bureau of Indian Affairs,
repealing laws that discriminated against Indians, and ending federal supervision and support of Indians.
The termination bill officially terminated a number of tribes across the country, which resulted in the
immediate withdrawal of all federal aid, services, and protection for tribes and individual members, as well
as the end of reservations. Public Law 280, also passed in 1953, gave State governments the power to
assume jurisdiction over Indian reservations. At the same time the federal government proposed the
relocation of Native Americans from tribal lands to large cities. As Anthes suggests these policies were
“nothing more than the return of bygone assimilation policies” (25).
13
Policy, 1933-1943 (2009). McLerran’s work falls in the period between those studied by
Hutchinson and Anthes, focusing on the significant Indian New Deal and the projects
developed under then Commissioner of Indian Affairs, John Collier. While Hutchinson
and Anthes employ details of federal policy to illuminate further their studies of art
making and collecting, McLerran provides limited analysis of specific artistic production,
which she generally concludes was generally tradition-bound and lacking in modernist
expression. In discussing the Department of Interior Building Section of Fine Arts Mural
Project, McLerran states “The character of the work of the native artists chosen for
inclusion in the DOI building, which conformed to a style that by then had become
readily recognizable as reflecting centuries-old traditions of representation, formed a
significant contrast to the building’s moderne style.”
18

McLerran argues that John Collier, along with René d’Harnoncourt - who was
selected to head the Indian Arts and Crafts Board - embraced a romantic primitivism that
worked to “deny the American Indian artist a position as modern subject in the 1930s and
early 1940s [and] coexisted with a desire to develop a more lucrative market in native
arts and crafts.”
19
This perspective at times returns to Brody’s earlier assertions that
Indian art was an art made solely under the forces of colonial oppression, while eliding a
perhaps more complicated view of modernity and artistic agency. Nonetheless,
McClerran provides a detailed accounting of the significant role that Indian policy under
the New Deal played in how Native art was created and consumed during this critical
period. In a similar manner, Joy Gritton’s The Institute of American Indian Arts:

18
McLerran, 172.
19
Jennifer McLerran, 2.
14
Modernism and U.S. Indian Policy (2000) also focuses primarily on policy as opposed to
art production and the specifics of pedagogical practice. Gritton saw the Institute of
American Indian Arts as primarily an institution of assimilation, inimical to tribal
interests and art forms. Gritton argued that the IAIA’s curriculum “favored a Western,
modern aesthetic dominated by individualism . . . over indigenous aesthetics
distinguished by concern for communal welfare.”
20
Gritton does not leave room for the
possibility of Native students being simultaneously modern and connected to their tribal
heritage. Gritton does provide, however, one of the only detailed studies of how IAIA
was created.
**
This dissertation traces key figures and institutions through often overlapping
paths. Chapter one discusses the early career of Lloyd (Kiva) New, who, as a graduate of
the Art Institute of Chicago, became the first art teacher at the Phoenix Indian School. A
Cherokee in the desert of Arizona, New leveraged his experience as an educator and artist
into a thriving post-war career as a fashion designer and entrepreneur in the resort town
of Scottsdale. New left teaching to take part in the war effort and upon his return stateside
decided to shift his focus to his own creative practice – as he explained, “because I
thought what needed to be done, educationally, in Indian Art, was to work on the problem
of what is happening to Indian Art.”
21
These two aspects of New’s early career
introduced the educator/artist to other driving forces in the broad world of mid-century

20
Joy Gritton, 2.
21
Living Treasures. (1994). New, Lloyd Kiva (1916-). Interview by Barbara Conroy and JoAnne Rynmus.
Santa Fe, NM. Museum of New Mexico, The Palace of the Governors Fray Angelico Chavez History
Library. August 5, 1994.
15
American art and design and the rapidly expanding market of American Indian art. From
students and colleagues including Charles and Otellie Loloma, Andrew Van Tsinajinnie,
Dick West, and others, to exchanges with Frank Lloyd Wright and René d’Harnoncourt,
the cosmopolitan world of Lloyd Kiva New in the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s propelled his
creative and pedagogical approach to art and education that would reach fruition at the
Institute of American Indian Arts.
The second chapter highlights the career of Acee Blue Eagle (Creek/Pawnee),
another artist and educator who sought to shape the direction of Indian art through these
two intersecting paths. Acee Blue Eagle studied under Oscar B. Jacobson at the
University of Oklahoma shortly after the Kiowa Six and continued to paint in a similar
style throughout his career.
22
In addition to international success as a painter, Blue Eagle
was the first art director at Bacone College in the 1930s. Significantly, and in stark
distinction to other art programs for Native students at the time, the Bacone program was
from the beginning directed and staffed by Indian artists. Blue Eagle actively embraced
research and employed ethnographic collections in his own work. In training his students
to lead successful and profitable art careers, Blue Eagle required them to invest in
research in their own individual tribal heritage. Blue Eagle’s investment in the portrayal
of a well-informed image of tribal history, supported by Bacone College as an institution,

22
The Kiowa Six, as discussed in greater detail in Chapter Two, included the painters James Auchiah
(1906-1974), Spencer Asah (1905/ 1910-1954), Jack Hokeah (1902-1969), Stephen Mopope (1898-1974),
and Monroe Tsatoke (1904-1937) and Lois (Bougetah) Smoky (1907-1981). These young artists were
handpicked by their school matron to receive additional guidance in painting, eventually resulting in
selective coursework at the University of Oklahoma in Norman under the tutelage of Edith Mahler and
Oscar B. Jacobson. Their resulting paintings were widely popular and resulted in the canonization of their
own flat style of painting which in many ways paralleled that of the painters out of Dunn’s Studio. For
more information see J. J. Brody and Oscar Brousse Jacobson, Kiowa & Pueblo Art: Watercolor Paintings
by Native American Artists, (Mineola, N.Y: Dover Publications, 2009) and Janet C. Berlo, The Szwedzicki
Portfolios: Native American Fine Art and American Visual Culture, 1917-1952 (Cambridge, Mass:
Harvard University, Tozzer Library, 2010).
16
not only reflects a response to patronage, but also a certain pan-tribalism that had
emerged at the turn of the twentieth century in response to the decimating forces of
reservation life, forced assimilation, and cultural oppression. This pan-tribalism, as
evidenced in the art produced by Blue Eagle, in and out of Bacone College, can be seen
as a site of cultural resistance, even as his works themselves satisfied the desires of Anglo
collectors and educators. This chapter addresses the tension between early developments
in an Indian-centered art education practice that was nonetheless driven by an Anglo
dominated creative authority and art market.
Following the fluorescence of Indian painting in the 1920s and 1930s, World War
II dramatically shifted the careers of numerous emerging artists. While many promising
young artists left their artistic endeavors behind as they joined the war effort, others were
able to continue with their practice and further their educations during and after the war.
Two prominent examples of Native American artists whose careers expanded throughout
the war are Charles and Ottelie Loloma (Hopi) and Eva Mirabal (Taos). In chapter three’s
two case studies I examine the role of World War II and the G.I. Bill in the careers of
these pioneering American Indian artists. After the war the married Lolomas enrolled in
the School for American Craftsmen at Alfred University to study ceramics. During this
time they studied under Linn Phelan and alongside artists such as Betty Woodman, the
ceramist and mother of photographer Francesca Woodman. The pottery created by both
of the Lolomas during this period was primarily functional, drawing upon both the long
legacy of Hopi pottery and the “form meets function” principles of the American arts and
17
crafts movement.
23
It was during this period in their careers that both Lolomas began to
experiment with modernist design idioms and enter into a cosmopolitan art world, which
would carry over as Charles and Otellie gained increasing success as independent artists
and as educators - also at the Institute of American Indian Arts.
Unlike Charles Loloma, Eva Mirabal’s artistic career remains relatively unknown.
As a young painter from the highly traditional Taos Pueblo, Eva Mirabal created
paintings of tribal scenes in the Studio style.
24
She worked on murals through New Deal
programs, which served her well when she enlisted in the army. During her years in the
Women’s Army Corp she painted a number of large-scale murals at various stateside
military stations. Even more significantly, Mirabal was assigned to create a cartoon for
WAC publications. Her comic, “G.I. Gertie,” was one of the first widely distributed
comics by a woman and most likely the first comic by a Native American. After the war
Mirabal returned to Taos and, through the G.I. Bill, studied at the Taos Valley Art School
under the modernist painters Louis Ribak and Beatrice Mandelman. The Taos Valley Art
School, founded by Ribak and Mandelman in 1947 and was a modernist haven in the
mountains of northern New Mexico. This educational experience could very well have
propelled Mirabal’s style toward Euro-American modernism. Certainly Loloma’s similar

23
For more on the origins of the American arts and crafts movement see Nancy E. Green and Jessie J.
Poesch, Wesley Dow and American Arts & Crafts, (New York: American Federation of Arts in association
with H.N. Abrams, 2000), Kevin W. Tucker, Gustav Stickley and the American Arts & Crafts Movement,
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). For specific analysis and history of twentieth century craft see
Jeannine J. Falino, Jennifer Scanlan, and Glenn Adamson, Crafting Modernism: Midcentury American Art
and Design, (New York: Abrams :In association with MAD/Museum of Arts and Design, 2011)
24
While Taos Pueblo is by far the most traditional of the Eight Northern Pueblos, Mirabal’s early exposure
to Euro-American art traditions was likely as her father was a model for Anglo painters Nicolai Fechin,
Joseph Imhoff, and Walter Ufer. The extent to which this influenced Mirabal’s career is unclear, but it is
my hope to investigate this in the collection that Mirabal’s son is developing in Taos. For an excellent
discussion of Walter Ufer’s relationship with his Pueblo models and the racial complexities of his work see
John Ott, “Reform in Redface: The Taos Society of Artists Plays Indian,” American Art, Vol. 23, No. 2
(Summer 2009), pp. 80-107.
18
path radically shifted his practice away from what was seen as pure traditionalism and
toward an increasing incorporation of Western (and Eastern) styles and media. Yet
Mirabal’s painting, unlike her cartoons, remained solidly grounded in the Studio style in
which she was first instructed. The differences between the careers of the Lolomas and
Mirabal reflect how gender and tribal identity still strongly informed Native American
artists even under the assimilating forces of military service and mainstream educational
opportunities.
The final chapter of this dissertation reconsiders the early years of the Institute of
American Indian Arts in the light of previous case studies. As a source of artistic practice,
IAIA represents the formal rejection of the institutionalized standards of Traditional
Indian Painting. However, as a Bureau of Indian Affairs high school and post-secondary
certificate program in its first years, IAIA also satisfied federal policy and market-driven
expectations of Anglo collectors, thus simultaneously challenging and adopting cultural
structures and standards which have since been seen as assimilationist. Despite, or
perhaps due to this institutional identity crises, IAIA remains the site of a certain
flourishing of artistic experimentation. At a moment when questions of equality and
identity were being negotiated across the nation, IAIA opened its doors to the possibility
that its young students and faculty could possess a range of types of individual and group
agency. While it is possible to see this embrace of Western art forms as either explicit or
implicit assimilation, it is critical to attempt to view these shifts from the perspective of
IAIA’s Native American population. The conscious employment of what were seen as
Euro-American art practices, particularly the use of abstraction, minimalism, or Pop Art
idioms, by artists such as Fritz Scholder and T.C. Cannon, marks a moment when Native
19
American artists chose to participate as modern artists within the larger American art
world, rather than passively accepting a secondary or outsider position. The work
undertaken by both the faculty and students during the early years of the school reveals a
new agency and politicization of Indian art that represents a radical repositioning of the
relationship between Native Americans and modern art. In examining the curriculum,
public programming, and key members of the student and faculty population, I address
the complex nature of the relationship between IAIA and the broader modern art world.
The case studies that I have selected represent central figures in the expansion of
Indian art education in the twentieth century. While arguments could be made that the
Kiowa or Studio painters, who have already been acknowledged as “modern” artists,
were just as integral to this growth, it is my belief that the artists in my study embraced
and enacted increasingly different relationships to their educations and their art making
than the earlier generation of painters.
25
Lloyd (Kiva) New, Acee Blue Eagle, the
Lolomas, and Eva Mirabal all actively sought cosmopolitan experiences and relationships
that led to their artistic and educational innovations, propelling their work into the realm
of active agency. While agency is undeniably present in the lives and work of the earlier
artists, this group engaged with popular culture, major institutions such as universities
and the military, and Anglo artists in dialogue and exchange to an even greater degree.
While other artists who were their contemporaries worked in various parallels these
specific artists represent a particular amalgamation of these fronts that resulted in the

25
See Bernstein and Rushing; Scott; Jessica Horton, "A Cloudburst in Venice: Fred Kabotie and the U.S.
Pavilion of 1932." American Art, vol. 29, no. 1, 2015, pp. 54-81; and Claire Voon, “The Modernist-
Inspired Watercolors of a Pioneering Pueblo Painter,” Hyperallergic, Jan. 6, 2016.
(https://hyperallergic.com/256845/the-modernist-inspired-watercolors-of-a-pioneering-pueblo-
painter/) for more on the “modernism” of early Traditional Indian Painters.
20
dramatic changes that came to direct fruition at the Institute of American Indian Arts in
the 1960s.
The research for this dissertation has been conducted on numerous fronts. Not
only am I in dialogue with those who have published accounts of Indian art and art
education during this period, but I have also invested significant research in various
archives and collections. The accessioning and processing of key archival collections
within recent years has made this dissertation possible. Both the Lloyd H. New papers at
the Institute of American Indian Arts and the Beatrice Mandelman and Louis Ribak
papers at the University of New Mexico were opened to study as I began this dissertation.
Additional archival sources included the Oscar B. Jacobson Papers at the University of
Oklahoma, Norman, OK and the Oklahoma Historical Society; the Charles Loloma
papers at the Heard Museum, Phoenix, AZ; the Bacone College archives, Muskogee, OK;
and the Acee Blue Eagle papers at the National Anthropological Archives at the
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., as well as other supplemental archival
sources. The artworks of Acee Blue Eagle are largely held at the Smithsonian Institution
in the National Anthropological Archives, alongside his papers. Significantly, this
material was not accessioned into the National Museum of the American Indian, nor was
it ever in the American art collection. This designation of his art as “anthropological”
only further illustrates his status as still on the periphery of the accepted canon of either
field. The early works of Lloyd New, particularly his fashion designs, are primarily held
in private collections, while his early paintings are in his archival materials at the
archives of the Institute of American Indian Arts. Similarly, the early works of the
Lolomas are primarily in private collections and their works created while at IAIA are
21
either in private collections or at IAIA’s Museum of Contemporary Native Arts as are all
student works discussed here. Eva Mirabal’s works are largely still held by her family,
while a small selection of her pieces are held in national museums such as the Philbrook,
the Gilcrease, and the Blue Eagle collection at the National Anthropological Archives.
That these artists are not widely recognized or collected by institutions without a
dedicated interest in Native American art is certainly evidence of how the narrative of
American art in the twentieth century is still in the process of expanding to incorporate a
greater range of voices, media, and styles.
The story of American modernism has been told and retold. This dissertation
opens up an additional narrative that will expand further our growing notion of who made
modern American art and where it happened. By suggesting new sites of artistic
development and a new cadre of artistic experimenters, this dissertation aims to move
away from a one-sided model of the role of primitivism and regionalism in modern art.
By focusing on the role of education and creative exchange this project will be able to
examine more closely specific relationships and how they relate to the larger history of
American art. The questions this dissertation will address include: How did Native design
and art cross-pollinate with the broader mainstream art world? Can assimilation and
appropriation be reassessed in a productive manner in order to locate new sites of
agency? How specifically did art education serve as point of departure for the rise of
independent American Indian modern artists? The case studies in this dissertation will
provide the answers to these and other questions. For the relationship of Indian art and
American modernism should not just be seen as one-sided, with so-called “primitivism”
lending subject-matter and style to Anglo works – as illustrated so clearly by Jackson
22
Pollock’s sources in Hopi sandpainting or Georgia O’Keeffe’s adaptations of katsinas
and other sacred Native artifacts. Rather, we see how Indian art came to be influenced by,
and to critically borrow from, cultural production beyond Indian Country.

23
Chapter One

Crafting Modern Indian Art: Lloyd Kiva New, Art Education, and Design, 1938-1962

In March 1946 Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in her syndicated newspaper column
“My Day,” of a visit to Phoenix, Arizona. Having heard of a burgeoning arts and crafts
scene, she ventured to the neighboring community of Scottsdale, which at the time had
only one paved road. She visited a number of shops in the newly opened Arizona
Craftsmen Center, which were owned and operated by local craftspeople including
ceramists, woodcarvers, and painters. Mrs. Roosevelt was particularly struck by the shop
of Lloyd Kiva, commenting not only on his products as “beautiful specimens of leather
work -- bags and belts and purses and beanies decorated with Indian silver work. Very
expensive, but they would long outlast the average expensive factory-made leather
goods,” but on the producer himself, as well.
26
Unlike the other artisans in the Craftsmen
Center, Kiva (born Lloyd Henri New) seemed to interest Mrs. Roosevelt on a personal
level, leading her to comment on his ethnicity, “a Cherokee Indian;” his education, “a
degree from the Arts Institute in Chicago, he also has studied at the University of
Chicago, the University of New Mexico and the Oklahoma A. and M. College, and he
has taught at the Indian School near here;” and his reason for opening a retail craft shop,
“now that he is back from his service in the war, he has decided to create an outlet for the
young workers who have been trained in the various arts and crafts during their school
years.”
27
Mrs. Roosevelt clearly found something remarkable in Lloyd (Kiva) New, not
just because his products were well crafted and desirable but, even more so, because he

26
Eleanor Roosevelt, “My Day,” Nationally syndicated column, March 21, 1946.
27
Ibid.
24
himself was a highly educated Native American with a vision for expansive post-war
success for young Native artisans.
New’s identity as a designer, craftsperson, and entrepreneur presents a model for
mid-century success. That his customers embraced New as indigenous is central to this
identity and was driven by his adaptation to their desire for simultaneously authentic and
assimilated, thus easily consumable, Indian culture.
28
The products produced by New,
including leather handbags, silkscreened sportswear and high-fashion gowns, all reflect
the designer’s conscious inclusion of Native markers, such as tufa-cast buttons and
clasps, a “southwestern” palette of vibrant reds, yellows, and blues, and appropriated
imagery from surrounding tribes, including abstracted katsina figures and symbolic
patterns. While it could be argued that New left behind this complex relationship with the
production and consumption of Indian identity when he transitioned away from retail
craft production when he arrived at the Institute for American Indian Arts in 1962, the
current running through his work as educator, designer, and educator again are in fact
reflective of a continuous line of productive and theoretical expressions of New’s
approach to Native arts in general.
Lloyd New’s path to success in the mid-century American fashion world stands
out in his own biography largely because so much of the rest of his long career was
devoted to art education in Indian schools. Much of the research to date on New tends to
isolate his work as a fashion designer and retailer from his work as an internationally

28
See Deloria (1994 & 2004) on the consumption of Indian culture. For more on authenticity in Native arts
see Anthes, Native Moderns; Monthan, Art and Indian Individualists; and McFadden and Taubman,
Changing Hands: Art Without Reservation 1 & 2, especially Bruce Bernstein “A Story of Creation:
Tradition and Authenticity at Santa Fe’s Indian Market” and “It’s Art: ‘Keep talking while we keep
working, but hold it down so I can myself think,’” and David Roche, “Native Art at Auction: The Role of
the Commercial Marketplace in Developing Contemporary Native Art.”
25
respected educator who played an integral role in the development of the Institute of
American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, NM.
29
I argue that Lloyd New’s time as an active
craftsperson with extensive marketing capabilities is, in fact, not a break in his work as an
educator but rather is central to his pedagogical approach. He had begun to develop this
years earlier as the art teacher at the Phoenix Indian School and it reached its apex at the
IAIA. Nor was New alone in this development, as his relationship with his own students,
was a critical element in New’s approach to art education. This is particularly true of his
connection to Charles Loloma who studied under him in Phoenix and later followed him
to the retail center of Scottsdale, then on to IAIA before attaining international acclaim as
a groundbreaking jeweler in his own right. For Lloyd New, his particular position as a
well-educated artist and educator, who was also half Cherokee, permitted him a point of
access that served his own creative career, as well as providing the origin for his own
pedagogical approach. While most of his students in the early stages of his career came
from far less assimilated backgrounds, New was nonetheless able to approach his work as
a Native educator rather than an educator of Native students. This was a perspective that
he carried on with great success in his retail craft career and his concurrent transition
from Lloyd Henri New to Lloyd Kiva.
Lloyd Henri New (1916-2002) was half Cherokee, half Scots-Irish and grew up in
eastern Oklahoma. He spent his early childhood on his mother’s allotment on the family
farm, but attended public school in a small community outside Tulsa. New’s early
childhood was central to his later path as both an artist and educator. He grew up in

29
See for example Winona Garmhausen, History of Indian Arts Education in Santa Fe: The Institute of
American Indian Arts With Historical Background, 1890 to 1962 (1988), Joy Gritton, The Institute of
American Indian Arts: Modernism and U. S. Indian Policy (2000), Jessica RheAnn Metcalfe, Native
Designers of High Fashion: Expressing Identity, Creativity, and Tradition in Contemporary Customary
Clothing Design (Diss, 2010).
26
relative isolation on a rural farm far from his mother’s Cherokee community. When he
moved to live with his married older sister in Jenks, OK, a wealthy suburb of the oil-
boom city of Tulsa, in order to attend the local public elementary school, he was further
detached from any sense of Native identity. In this setting New was part of one of only
two Indian families in the community. New recalled of his childhood, “The only thing I
knew about Indian culture was what came from my family, what I observed. And, of
course, that was a deteriorated form because in the church most of the traditional
costumes and ceremonies and things were gone. And we lived isolated so we didn’t have
much to do with that.”
30
Yet the educational opportunity that his environment provided,
particularly after his move to Jenks, was different from that of most Native students at the
time. New was exposed to classical music, was able to work on the school newspaper,
and eventually graduated as valedictorian of his high school class.
31

After attending one year at Oklahoma A & M, New left the school out of
frustration over a course load that limited his art classes to only two over the year.
32
New
had ventured to Chicago a few years earlier, jumping a train to attend the 1933 Chicago
World’s Fair: A Century of Progress, where he would have been able to visit the “Indian
Village” to see recreations of Pueblo-style villages, Plains tipis, Northwest Coast totem
poles, and live performances of various tribal dances and crafts, as well as examples of
modern architecture, art, and technology.
33
This brief experience of Chicago made it
familiar enough as a destination so that when New eventually concluded that he wanted
to attend an art school, the Chicago Art Institute seemed like an obvious choice. He then

30
Lloyd Kiva New Living Treasure Oral History, August 1994
31
Ibid
32
New York Times Oral History, 1975, pg 2
33
Cheryl R. Ganz, The 1933 Chicago World's Fair: A Century of Progress (Chicago: University of Illinois
Press, 2012).
27
managed to receive a tuition grant and education loan from the BIA to attend the Chicago
Art Institute despite the local BIA superintendent’s belief that funding Indian students to
attend college was fruitless, having a “success rate of zero.”
34
New’s decision to attend
college in the first place stands out historically in this period. The 1932 “Advanced
Education Survey” conducted by Ruth Muskrat Bronson, then Guidance Officer for the
Education Division of Bureau of Indian Affairs, concluded that “there were only 385
Indian students enrolled in college in 1932; that she could locate definite records for only
52 Indian college graduates; and that Indian scholarships were being offered at only five
colleges and universities.”
35
When New graduated from the Chicago Art Institute in 1938
he was the first Native American to receive a degree in art education from that institution.
New took classes across the school including both traditional fine art courses,
such as figure drawing and still life painting, and courses in commercial art, such as
advertising design and lettering and layout, eventually settling on Art Education as his
major.
36
Throughout this time he traveled to New Mexico and took courses at the
University of New Mexico including History of Education in America, Shakespeare, and
Western Civilizations; he also took education courses at the University of Chicago and
was a student teacher in the Chicago public schools.
37
For New, his investment in his
own personal indigenous identity really began to blossom only once he arrived in
Chicago and was exposed to “volumes and volumes of slides and materials on the
classical arts of the Indians of North and South America…Mayan, Aztec, gold, silver,
textiles! The contemporary Indian situation was not much to be proud of, and here I was,

34
Lloyd Kiva New Living Treasure Oral History, August 1994
35
Margaret Connell Szasz, Education and the American Indian: The Road to Self-Determination Since
1928 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1974/1999), 135.
36
Lloyd Henri New transcript from the School of The Art Institute of Chicago.
37
Lloyd Henri New transcript of transferred credits from the School of The Art Institute of Chicago
28
seeing Indian art elevated to the same level as Greek or French art.”
38
New invested
himself in in-depth research in the Native arts of the Americas, seeing in this material
“something that I had been looking for to justify myself as an Indian person.”
39
During
this period New began to teach lectures on Indian culture in the Chicago public schools.
40

The possibilities for individual growth and experimentation that are strongholds of the
college experience were amplified for New who at this point began to formulate a
productive Native identity. He later explained, “The sense of pride of identity was
essential [sic] understanding of why I became an Indian educator. I had a feeling that I
had discovered some things through my own experiences that I could translate, transfer to
other educational situations for Indian people.”
41
The romance that New imparted onto
his educational experiences in these retrospective quotes exposes the degree to which this
early exposure to an idealized and artifact-based conception of a pan-national Indian
identity drove his own pedagogical project forward. That his own self-pride originated
not at home in Oklahoma, but rather in the halls of an ethnographic collection is
illustrative of how he began to construct an indigenous persona more from research than
lived cultural experience.
After graduating, New chose to take a position as an apprentice art instructor at
the Phoenix Indian School. According to New, he turned down a prestigious and well
paid position in Maryland, where he would have earned around $300 monthly, because
he “had become involved in the fuller depth of the Indian world out West in a different
dimension than one experiences it in Oklahoma – and somehow or other felt the

38
School of the Art Institute of Chicago Alumni News Vol. 11, No. 2 Spring, 2000.
39
Living Treasure: 12.
40
Ibid.
41
Ibid, 13.
29
compulsion to become involved in Indian education.”
42
New’s comment on his sense that
the experience of the Indian world could be deeper than that of his early life is significant
as his own youth was relatively assimilated, even as he often generally felt like an
outsider in his own early educational experiences.
43
The sacrifices that New made to take
a position with the Indian Service extended beyond the financial. New had developed a
supportive relationship with Ruth Muskrat Bronson who was at the time was Guidance
Officer for the Education Division of the BIA, but even this relationship could not
overcome the systemic prejudice of the era.
The period of the Indian New Deal was a moment of significant shifts within
federal policy toward Indian education. Under Willard Walcott Beatty, Director of Indian
Education from 1936 to 1952, there was drive to improve the terrible conditions of Indian
education and to embrace cross-cultural education and a new respect for Native cultures.
Yet, this new level of support for Indian education did not alter the fact that few Native
educators were employed at Indian Service schools, and those who were so employed
typically were not given positions beyond that of assistant, primarily in the arts and
crafts.
44
While a broad cultural enthusiasm for Indian arts and crafts, in and out of Indian
Service schools, did bode well for New’s career he was still hired as an “Indian
Assistant” at a pay rate of $720 per year for the first year, and $1,200 per year for the
second year despite the fact that he would be solely in charge of teaching art classes at all
levels and reinstating the art department at the Phoenix Indian School, which served on

42
NYT Oral History, pg, 5.
43
Ibid.
44
Szasz, 72.
30
average four hundred students a year from tribes across Arizona throughout the 1930s
and 1940s.
45

Despite these conditions New seized upon the opportunity to further invest
himself in Native American art education. As part of his contract New was to be “detailed
over to Santa Fe sometime during the year to work under Mr. Chapman and Dr. McKeel
of the Laboratory of Anthropology and with Jeronima [sic] Cruz and Miss Ward at the
Santa Fe school, as well as to other places in Indian country which might offer the kind of
training you need.”
46
The Bureau of Indian Affairs, under the leadership of John Collier,
saw both education and Indian arts and crafts as central to the improvement of the Native
American’s plight. Incorporating an anthropological approach to pedagogical discourse
was central to the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ attempt to shift from what was know as the
Uniform Course of Study, which strictly imposed a curriculum of cultural assimilation, to
a program of Progressive, cross-cultural education. According to Margaret Connell Szasz
in Education and the American Indian: The Road to Self-Determination since 1928,
through the influence of anthropology and Progressive Education “Indian Service
teachers were taught to be sensitive to Indian cultures and to consider teaching methods
adapted to the unique characteristics and needs of Indian children.”
47
The Laboratory of
Anthropology and the Studio at the Santa Fe Indian School were highly influential in this
new approach as both were engaged with preserving traditional Indian arts through
anthropological study and contemporary art production. The Studio at Santa Fe, in

45
Correspondence from Ruth M. Bronson to Lloyd New, June 11, 1938, Record Group 75, Records of the
Bureau of Indian Affairs, Phoenix Indian School, Records of the Regional Supervisor of Education, 1933-
1952, Folder 161 New, Lloyd [1942-1943], Box 11, National Archives and Records Administration at
Riverside. Statistics from From Arizona High School Enrollment Figures (1912-2005)
http://aiaonline.org/schools/enrollment
46
Ibid.
47
Szasz, 59.
31
particular, served as an example of how art education could benefit young Indians both
culturally, through an investment in their own heritage, and economically, through the
sale of the students’ widely admired paintings. Evidently the BIA saw the possibility of
expanding upon the success of the Studio at the Santa Fe Indian School and sought to
instill in New both the anthropological approach and artistic style of these Santa Fe
exemplars.
48

Lloyd New had, in fact, already encountered Dorothy Dunn, the Santa Fe Indian
School teacher who created the Studio program there, during his summer studies in New
Mexico for his bachelor’s degree. While New never spoke directly of this early meeting,
Dorothy Dunn did briefly comment on their exchange in her personal correspondence. In
a 1937 letter in response to an inquiry regarding Lloyd New, Dunn initially wrote that “he
had several opportunities to come up to Santa Fe to visit the studio and whatever
questions he wished, but he failed to come.”
49
In a handwritten note in the margin of this
letter Dunn wrote a note to herself reading, “I don’t know why I wrote this! I remember
clearly and have carried the image for years of L. New wandering into the studio that
summer…His face was broken out and he looked sallow, morose and arrogant. I
recommended Phoenix to him.”
50
Whether or not it was Dorothy Dunn who inspired New
to apply to teach at Phoenix, this commentary implies that New was already directing his
own studies toward a career in Indian art education. It is also possible that the presumably

48
The Studio at the Santa Fe Indian School was founded in 1932 by Dorothy Dunn who was an early
proponent for elevating Indian crafts to the level of fine art and avidly advocated for the expansion of art
programs within Indian Service schools. The Studio style that emerged from this program quickly became
emblematic of Indian art in the mid-twentieth century. For an in-depth discussion of the Studio style see
Bruce Bernstein and W. Jackson Rushing, III, Modern by Tradition: Native American Painting in the
Studio Style (Santa Fe: Museum o f New Mexico Press, 1995).
49
Personal correspondence Dorothy Dunn to Mrs. Hadley, Oct. 5, 1937, Dorothy Dunn Kramer Papers,
Archives of the Laboratory of Anthropology, 93DDK.164.
50
Ibid.
32
cool reception that New apparently received from Dunn, who saw so little to praise in
either New’s appearance or attitude, proved influential in New’s subsequent reaction to
the Studio approach to art production. Even if this initial interaction between New and
Dunn was not especially remarkable for the young New, it does suggest, particularly as
Dunn’s handwritten note was clearly written in retrospect some years later, that New was
already seen as a challenge by one of the most influential figures of Indian art education
at the time.
Despite this, New did bring to the Phoenix Indian School his awareness of the
work coming out of the Studio in Santa Fe, and agreed in large measure with the view
that exposure to art education would be beneficial to his new students. According to the
school’s paper, The Phoenix Redskin, in Lloyd New’s newly reinstated art department
“Indian art will be stressed to the students of the elective group by going into art seriously
as a means of earning money. However, the many other phases of art are not forbidden. A
beautifully blended sunset on desert mountains is difficult to express in design or flat
pattern.”
51
The message here though is rather more complicated than merely putting
across the influence of the Studio at Santa Fe or the BIA agenda. While New clearly was
advocating for the economic sustainability of Indian art, he also sought to expose his
students to the full breadth of fine art that he had experienced through his own education
at the Chicago Art Institute. The significance of “other phases of art” being taught in
order to best express a landscape that could not be accurately captured in “design or flat
pattern” reveals that New was already positioning his pedagogical approach away from
that of the Studio, which proposed flat pattern and simplified forms as the superlative

51
“Reinstates Art Course” The Phoenix Redskin Vol. XXXVIII, No.2, October 15, 1938.
33
style for Indian painting. J.J. Brody in Indian Painters and White Patrons, suggested that,
“New stimulated his students to develop in more expressive and socially responsible
directions than Studio formalism.”
52
New brought to his instruction at Phoenix a view
that his Native students should not be constrained to painting scenes that were formal
clichés of their indigenous identity as constructed by their possible Anglo collectors.
By the end of Lloyd New’s first term at Phoenix Indian School he had the
opportunity to meet another central figure in Indian art, René d’Harnoncourt, when New
escorted his student Charles Loloma to the 1939 exhibition of Indian art at the Golden
Gate International Exposition in San Francisco. Charles Loloma arrived at Phoenix
Indian School as a high school junior just as New arrived to reinstate the art department.
Loloma, who grew up in a traditional Hopi family in Hotevilla on Third Mesa, had
studied the year prior at Hopi High School in Oraibi where the painter Fred Kabotie ran
the art department. While Loloma’s brief instruction from Kabotie proved instrumental to
his early success, leading directly to his work painting murals for at the Golden Gate
International Exposition in San Francisco and later for Indian Art of the United States at
the Museum of Modern Art in 1941 (both organized by René d’Harnoncourt), Lloyd
New’s influence would have a far more significant and lasting impact on Loloma’s career
and creative development. Loloma described New during this period as being strikingly
cosmopolitan, “a great, handsome man with his height, and incidentally, he was to me the
most impressive person because of his garments. I would visit his apartment to listen to

52
J.J. Brody, Indian Painters and White Patrons (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1971),
161-162.
34
classical music, and he took me on visits to see Frank Lloyd Wright. They would talk
about art, using words I didn’t understand.”
53

Lloyd New and Charles Loloma arrived in San Francisco in early January of
1939, where Charles was to paint “a series of figures representing the ‘Coming of the
Katchinas’ …in the Pueblo room, the theme of which is the four seasons of the year.”
54

The young artists, both student and teacher, were able to meet with René d’Harnoncourt,
who, as General Manager of the Indian Arts and Crafts Board (IACB), had organized the
exhibition. While Loloma maintained a relationship with d’Harnoncourt long after this
initial meeting, even visiting him at his offices at the Museum of Modern Art and
requesting letters of introduction for his first trip to Europe some decades later, New and
d’Harnoncourt’s early exchanges were much less amicable.
55
New later recalled their
first conversation during which he “solicited [d’Harnoncourt’s] support for my theory of
freedom of expression for my students at the Phoenix Indian school, for which I was
being criticized in the national press. He was practically rude, and made it clear that he
felt I was off track, that my ‘freedom of expression’ approach with my students was too
free and detrimental to the ‘preservation’ of Indian traditions.”
56
As late as 1958
d’Harnoncourt suggested that he believed Loloma’s continued association with New to

53
Quoted in Martha H. Streuver, Loloma: Beauty is His Name (Santa Fe, NM: Wheelwright Museum of the
American Indian, 2005), 4.
54
“Art Teacher Visits San Francisco,” The Phoenix Redskin, Vol. XXXVIII, No.9, February 1, 1939.
55
Erin Younger, “Interview with Charles Loloma,” 1975, Loloma Native Artist File 1921-1991, Billie Jane
Baguley Library and Archives Heard Museum.
56
Lloyd Kiva New, Cherokee Drums (Unpublished Autobiography, 2002), 400-401, Lloyd H. New Papers,
Series IV: University of Arizona/Rockefeller Foundation Workshop, 1957-1965, Box 5, Institute of
American Indian Arts. It is unclear where and how New’s approach was actually being criticized in the
national press, extensive searches revealed no such media coverage of New or the art program at Phoenix
Indian School.
35
be a “tragedy.”
57
New’s statements on d’Harnoncourt, made late in his life when he was
drafting his memoir, assert an oppositional dynamic between the two men. While it is
clear that there was some degree of personal animosity in their personal relationship, their
theories and approaches to Native arts were less divergent than New suggested, nor were
they the only figures advocating for support for such arts in this period.
It is striking that, once again, New apparently was seen as generally disagreeable
by a leading Anglo advocate for Indian art, particularly considering that in many senses
New and d’Harnoncourt’s views regarding the progression of Indian art corresponded, at
least on the surface. The nuance of New’s wording regarding his “freedom of expression”
approach being in opposition to the “preservation” of traditional art forms is informative.
D’Harnoncourt advocated for the expansion of an elevated market for Indian art that
would uplift production beyond the level of curios and dime store souvenirs. In his
discussion of d’Harnoncourt’s goals for the Indian exhibition at the Golden Gate
Exposition, W. Jackson Rushing explained that the exposition was intended to expand
recognition for Indian arts. Based on d’Harnoncourt’s vision, “Once the adaptability of
the Indian’s ‘rigorously simplified designs to modernistic homes and personal decoration’
was proven, he would acquire ‘economic self-respect’ and be competitive with the ‘best
importations for the luxury trade.’”
58
D’Harnoncourt’s belief in the marketability of
Indian art to appeal to the modern consumer is in many ways comparable to Lloyd New’s
desire for his students to be able to make a living through the sale of their artworks. It is

57
Charles B. Fahs, “Notes, Trip to Southwest,” January 13-18, 1958, Lloyd H. New Papers, Series IV:
University of Arizona/Rockefeller Foundation Workshop, 1957-1965, Box 5, Institute of American Indian
Arts.
58
W. Jackson Rushing, “Marketing the Affinity of the Primitive and the Modern: René d’Harnoncourt and
‘Indian Art of the United States,’” in The Early Years of Native American Art History, ed. Janet Catherine
Berlo, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1992), 204.
36
perhaps d’Harnoncourt’s assumption that quality Indian art was represented by
“rigorously simplified designs” that represents best the beginning of the cleave between
New’s freedom of expression and the desire by Anglo advocates, as represented by
d’Harnoncourt and the IACB, to preserve the pure simplicity of traditional Indian
designs. For New it was critical that his students were allowed to experiment across
differing styles and media, including, but not limited to Native American art traditions
and materials.
For d’Harnoncourt the potential for Native arts within “modernistic homes” was
driven by the placement and repurposing of “traditional” arts such as basketry, pottery,
and weaving within such homes. This is most clearly illustrated in his 1941 exhibition
Indian Art of the United States at the Museum of Modern Art where d’Harnoncourt used
hand-woven baskets as wastepaper baskets and woven blankets as rugs.
59
While
d’Harnoncourt sought to sustain traditional art forms by employing them for purposes
beyond their intended cultural roles, New sought to create space for adaptations and
innovations. In this sense, their views were in fact rather divergent. New’s approach to
creating objects that were appropriations or hybrids of traditional and non-traditional
forms drove his own creative practice and his art instruction.
New’s pedagogical approach to art education, which put him at odds with
d’Harnoncourt, have been discussed in relation to his work as the founding art director
and then president of IAIA, but clearly his theories about the critical role that art, and

59
See the exhibition catalog, Frederic Douglas & René d'Harnoncourt, Indian Art of the United States,
(New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1941) and Rushing (1995). As argued by Hutchinson, in The Indian
Craze: Primitivism, Modernism, and Transculturation in American Art, 1890–1915, the use of Indian
objects in domestic spaces predates d’Harnoncourt and his work with IACB and MoMA. D’Harnoncourt’s
view that such material was ideal for modern collectors was largely driven by the influence of Anglo
cultural preservationists such as John Collier and John Sloan.
37
specifically art education, could play in the lives of young Native students were already
evident as early as this period in Phoenix. While New’s art education practice was not
necessarily appreciated by all, it was clearly well received at the Phoenix Indian School
itself. By October of 1939 New was recommended for a pay raise from $1,200 to $1,400,
which was suggested in recognition of his ability and outreached his initial contract of
$1,200 for his second year.
60
At the start of his second year as art instructor, New
significantly expanded the offerings of the art department to include pottery, sculpture,
plaster of paris, drawing, painting, design, copper and silver work, weaving, photography,
basket making, and wood carving. New also aimed to have an exhibition gallery which
would be “equal to any other art gallery in the country” and to expand his students’
understanding of “the nature of materials, art media, [and] appreciation for traditional
Indian art.”
61
New was actively working to integrate into the classroom an awareness of
art making that was neither rigidly traditional nor overtly modern or Euro-American.
In the spring of 1940, at the end of New’s second year teaching, he wrote a
lengthy article in the school paper that was specifically about art education at the
elementary level, but more broadly expressed his personal view on the power of art
education for all of his students. New vividly argued for art education as a central facet of
each students’ experience which would guide them down the path of self-discovery,
Those who make art objects, paint pictures, write stories or invent songs
get an increased appreciation of themselves and their world through their
expression of ideas in material form. In short, they realize self discovery…
Art can be made an important thing – or art can be made into something
extra and not particularly important in a school program… It is meant that

60
Letter to Commissioner of Indian Affairs from R.M. Tisinger Oct 20, 1939, RG 75, Records of BIA,
Phoenix Indian School, Records of the Regional Supervisor of Education, 1933-1952, Folder 161, Box 11,
NARA - Riverside.
61
“Art Department Adds New Subjects” The Phoenix Redskin Vol. 39, No.1, October 1, 1939: 4.
38
art in this school shall be a fundamental part of every elementary child’s
school life… Art in the role of developer of the powers of imagination and
perceptions is a highly important element of all things that make up
education. For without imagination and perception there would be no
creation of many of the influencing factors in living…
62

He then went on to address the actual value of art in the lives of his students after their
schooling was complete. New suggested, “The art of everyday, the art in our home, art in
dress, art in the things we use, art in interpretation, art as another way to enjoy life is the
art that we are concerned with for the most part in education. A very small percentage of
students ever paint or even buy a picture after graduation, but they do go on living,
imagining, seeing, enjoying the beauties of the simple things which they all do have.”
63

This statement is especially prescient for New’s later career both as a craftsperson and
retailer and as an educator. Even at this early stage, two years out from his bachelor’s
degree, New had decided that art should be relevant to everyday life and that exposure to
such art could benefit his students in their own careers, even if they did not become fine
artists. Central to this belief was New’s view that his students should have an
understanding of their own, Native, art traditions, as well. He incorporated into his
classroom practice trips to both museums and surrounding reservations to introduce his
students to Indian crafts and the use of local resources such as native clay and palm
leaves to “teach an appreciation for craft growing out of available natural resource
material.”
64

On a theoretical level New’s views on how and why art should be taught to
Native students was rather advanced. Yet, it is unclear to what degree New succeeded

62
Lloyd Henri New, “Art Training in the Elementary School” The Phoenix Redskin Vol. 39, No.14, June 1,
1940.
63
Ibid.
64
Ibid.
39
within the classroom in pushing his students significantly beyond the styles and media
widely accepted as authentically appropriate at the time. When comparing Lloyd Henri
New’s paintings from the late 1930s and early 1940s, when he was the art instructor at
Phoenix Indian school, to those of some of his more successful students clear distinctions
in stylistic approach are immediately apparent. In a small sketchbook of watercolor
studies from the summer of 1941 New created a selection of pieces that evoke a diverse
array of creative influences that result in a certain pan-indigenous modernism. New
created many of the paintings in this selection during a trip to Mexico and the works
show a clear acknowledgement of pre-Columbian forms. But they also clearly draw upon
New’s exposure to Cubism, Expressionism, Mexican muralism, and the American
modernism of the Stieglitz Circle. In an untitled watercolor [Figure 1.1] from the
sketchbook New created an abstracted field of pattern with a central form that recalls
Mesoamerican plumed serpent imagery. The colors are relatively muted earthtones, yet
the movement of pattern across the page is active and energetic. New’s handling of the
watercolors, through washes, textured brushstrokes, and tonal modulations, add to the
general depth of the image. In another work from the Mexico sketchbook, New painted
an abstracted landscape with simplified architectural forms in the upper left and exotic
vegetation in the foreground [Figure 1.2]. The buildings suggest peasant or bungalow
architecture, with their spare walls and flat roofs, enclosed fields of growing crops in the
midground, and swaths of cerulean blue in the immediate background alluding to a
horizon of sky meeting water. The patterns in the foreground clearly represent palm trees
and other lush foliage, but they also recall, again, plumed forms resonant of
Mesoamerican serpent imagery. The plume-like vegetation is perhaps most striking for its
40
pan-indigenous allusions; while it is suggestive of the feathers of the plumed serpent
figure, it also suggests an abstracted feathered headdress, alluding to imagery resonant
with both Aztec and Mayan headdresses and Plains Indian warbonnets.
In rather stark contrast to such paintings by New, are works from the period by
two of his more successful students, Charles Loloma (Hopi, 1921-1991) and Hoke
Denetsosie (Navajo, b. 1919), and his studio assistant, Andrew Van Tsihnahjinnie
(Navajo, 1916-2000). All three of these artists worked closely with New during their
years at the Phoenix Indian School. Not only did New accompany Loloma to San
Francisco in 1939, he also took Tsihnahjinnie and Loloma to study mural techniques
under Olle Nordmark at the Indian Art Center in Ft. Sill, Oklahoma in 1940. New was
also directly involved with a major printing project that was undertaken by the Phoenix
Indian School for the Bureau of Indian Affairs that resulted in the publication of a
number of bilingual readers for Navajo children. Both Tsihnahjinnie and Denetsosie were
commissioned to create illustrations for these books, written by Ann Nolan Clark. New
advocated for Tsihnahjinnie and Denetsosie, at times traveling with them to the Navajo
nation on research trips.
65
Loloma continued to work alongside New, even after his
graduation, serving as one of his teaching aids and creating murals on the Phoenix school
campus.
Andrew Van Tsihnahjinnie (also known as Van Tsihnajinnie, Andrew
Tsinajinnie, or Andy Tsihnahjinie), was roughly the same age as New himself and had
graduated from the Santa Fe Indian School in 1936, where he studied with Dorothy Dunn
at the Studio, before he arrived in Phoenix and began to work as one of New’s teaching

65
For detailed discussion of the Navajo reader publications see Rebecca C. Benes, Native American Picture
Books of Change: The Art of Historic Children’s Editions (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 2004).
41
assistants. Because of Tsihnahjinnie’s early education under Dunn, it is not surprising
that much of his work from this period shows the direct influence of the Studio style. In a
1938 painting, Navajo N’Da-a [Figure 1.3], Tsihnahjinnie portrayed a Navajo social
dance, a typical image in the Studio style of everyday Navajo life. The scene is relatively
flat and static, even as the dancers fill the entire plane. The scene is devoid of any
identifiable background, aside from a scattering of stylized scrub bushes. The figures are
all outlined in black, again typical of the studio style. While Clara Lee Tanner in 1957
referred to Tsihnahjinnie as “One of the most versatile of all Southwestern Indian artists,”
suggesting that, “Originality is surely one of Tsihnahjinnie’s chief characteristics,
originality in subject matter and treatment thereof, and in color,” his style nonetheless
reflects the standards applied by the Studio to Indian painting at the time.
66
Even in works
that diverge in subject matter from the anthropological approach espoused by the Studio,
which meant that works typically eschewed contemporary scenes in preference to
timeless ceremonials, traditional costumes, and nature scenes, Tsihnahjinnie’s work still
was more stylistically aligned with the Studio style than any modernist painting styles.
For example, in Trading at the Trading Post, c. 1940s [Figure 1.4], Tsihnahjinnie
depicted a scene of modern daily life inside an Indian trading post. The painting is
particularly striking as it reveals a strong degree of social commentary not found in
typical Studio paintings; the central figure, a young Navajo man, is shown holding a
yellow rock which is connected with dotted lines to a small box on the shop counter. The
yellow rock is uranium and the small box with a strap is a Geiger counter, referring to
widespread uranium mining that took place across the Navajo reservation during and

66
Clara Lee Tanner, Southwest Indian Painting, Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1957, 115/117.
42
after World War II.
67
The trauma implicit in the presence of the uranium is lightened by
the pictured enjoyment of consumption particularly in the women and one man
enthusiastically swigging from bottles of soda and the possibility of future wealth found
within the glass cases in the form of row after row of jewelry.
Like Tsihnahjinnie, Loloma arrived at the Phoenix Indian School with previous
artistic training, having studied under Hopi painter Fred Kabotie at Oraibi High School.
Kabotie, an early, relatively self-taught Indian artist who was a student at the Santa Fe
Indian School prior to Dorothy Dunn’s creation of the studio, incorporated a much
greater degree of European style representation and naturalistic illusionism than Dunn’s
students at the Studio. This influence is evident in much of Loloma’s early work, as seen
in his watercolor, Houses Along the Plaza at Hotevilla, c. 1930-35 [Figure 1.5]. Loloma,
who was quite young when he painted this, depicted a simple scene of adobe homes
surrounding the plaza at Hotevilla in which he was clearly working to convey a realistic
space with relatively simple attempts at depth and recession of space and subtle
modeling. This painting, despite its subject, does not read as explicitly “Indian” in its
style, eschewing as it does most of the typical visual markers of the popular “traditional”
Indian painting styles of the period. By the time Loloma began to study under New he
was beginning to receive commissions for murals, beyond the major project at the San
Francisco Exposition. In Buffalo Dance, c. 1940 [Figure 1.6], a tempera on muslin
“mural,” Loloma created a scene much more reminiscent of both Kabotie’s active
ceremonial compositions [Figure 1.7] and, to a certain degree, many of the tropes

67
Marley Shebala, “Re-creating the Traditional Navajo Lifestyle,” Canku Ota (Many Paths) An Online
Newsletter Celebrating Native America, September 8, 2001 - Issue 44
www.turtletrack.org/Issues01/Co09082001/CO_09082001_Navajo_Lifestyle.htm
43
popularized under the categorization of “Traditional Indian Painting” as institutionalized
by the Studio and Oscar Jacobson and his primarily Kiowa students at the University of
Oklahoma.
68
While Loloma’s layering of his active figures adds a sense of depth and
movement across the plane, the blank background and distinctive outlining, as well as the
attention paid to the details of traditional costumes, do not radically break from the
formal standards expected of a mural by a young Indian painter in 1940.
Hoke Denetsosie came to Phoenix Indian School initially to study agricultural
trades, but by November 1939 he was president of the school’s art club and by the
summer of 1940 he was working on commissioned illustrations for Ann Nolan Clark’s
BIA sponsored Little Herder series of Navajo readers.
69
Since Denetsosie did not come to
Phoenix with previous instruction in art, one might readily presume that his work would
perhaps be more aligned with New’s own creative practice. While little work from this
period, aside from his many black and white illustrations for the Little Herder series
survive, what is available of Denetsosie’s early work suggests otherwise. In a c. 1940
painting, Lion and Deer [Figure 1.8], Denetsosie created an expressive natural scene that
J.J. Brody saw as emblematic of New’s influence on his students. According to Brody,
this painting,
…resembles contemporary Studio paintings, most obviously in the subject
itself (a forest scene with animals)…The brutality of the scene and its total
lack of idyllic quality, however, were fundamentally different from Studio
painting…the colors are acidic, dirty, dismal, and completely in keeping
with the mood established by the subject matter and the quality of the
drawing. Denetsosie’s was an unpolished picture, anything but a pleasant
or decorative landscape, but with personal and expressive qualities that
were generally absent from the work of Santa Fe-trained painters.
70

68
See Bernstein and Rushing and Anthes.
69
“Art Students Pick New Club Name,” The Phoenix Redskin, Vol. 39, No. 3, Nov. 1, 1939 and Benes.
70
Brody, 162.
44

For all of the expressive qualities apparently evident in the painting, when comparing this
work to New’s own paintings from the same period it is far more striking how distinctly
different the two artists’ works were. Denetsosie’s work is conspicuously more aligned
with those of Tsihnahjinnie and Loloma, all of which recall the formal attributes of the
Studio style. Brody’s insightful reading of Denetsosie’s painting is perhaps more
reflective of the general critique of the Studio style present throughout his text, but it is
significant that despite the similarities here to Studio painting that even Brody
acknowledges, the credit given to New does recall his agenda of “freedom of expression”
for all of his students. Yet it remains undeniable that New’s students, at least in the
existent works from this period, did not embrace stylistic experimentation at the level
found in New’s own artistic practice.
Even in the illustrations created by Denetsosie and Tsihnahjinnie for the Navajo
reader series created by the Bureau of Indian Affairs before the war, a clear degree of
traditionalism is visible. Both artists, while creating images that incorporated certain
Euro-American stylistic approaches, particularly through their skillful use of three-point
perspective and representational depictions of the natural world, evoked
anthropologically accurate scenes of Navajo life that recalled many of the simplified
formal traits of the Studio style with the consistent use of strong black outlining and a
general lack of modeling. In Tsihnahjinnie’s illustrations for Ann Nolan Clark’s Who
Wants to Be a Prairie Dog? (1940), the artist drafted relatively simple black and white
line drawings to compliment the humorous tale of a young Navajo boy’s encounter with
an anthropomorphized prairie dog. Drawing upon Navajo oral legends, Clark wrote a
fable intended to inspire a conscientious work ethic in young readers. Tsihnahjinnie’s
45
drawings of these scenes, such as one in which the little boy sits with the prairie dog
before her loom made of spiderwebs [Figure 1.9], are rather awkwardly drafted,
particularly in contrast to the artist’s more complex painted compositions. Despite this,
Tsihnahjinnie’s illustrations still express an awareness of the broader expectations for
such a commission. In Denetsosie’s illustrations for the four part Little Herder series,
also by Ann Nolan Clark, this awareness is perhaps more explicit. In “Firestarting” from
Little Herder In Winter [Figure 1.10, Benes 66], Denetsosie created a landscape scene
characteristic of the Studio style in its simplified background form of almost cartoon-like
mountain and tree forms. The detailed accuracy given to the two figures in the
foreground, while satisfying the traditionalist expectation of anthropological detail in the
portrayal of the figures’ dress, is perhaps more in line with Euro-American practice with
the emotive action and movement between the two characters. It is evident that these two
young artists were, again, working to satisfy the expectations for their commissions
before endeavoring toward formal experimentation. These illustrations fit nicely between
the more stylized Studio style, as would have been expected by the collectors and
connoisseurs of Indian art, and a more standard form of Euro-American picturebook
illustration, satisfying the desires of those more familiar with the publishing world. But,
in neither case do the artists begin to approach the formal style of their mentor, Lloyd
New.
The possible reasons for these formal divergences are numerous. Most of the
extant works by New’s students from this period are by the few who had lasting careers
that began while they were still at Phoenix Indian School. The fact that these young
students were being commissioned to create works of art suggests that their production
46
was appealing to the market, which at the time was dominated by Anglo connoisseurs
dedicated to “traditional” Indian painting as represented by the general style that emerged
from the Santa Fe Studio. In this sense it is not a surprise that such artworks do not
express any radical breaks with the canon of the time. In order to continue profiting from
such commissions these young artists would have to respond first to the requests of their
patrons and second, if at all, to New’s own calls for experimentation. Significantly, at this
point in his own career, New was focused on his work as a teacher and was not actively
trying to sell his own work. Thus the powerful sway of the market is secondary when
considering New’s own artworks. As late as 1943, after he had left Phoenix and joined
the Navy, New wrote “I still would like to be an artist and hope someday to be one, but
it’s certainly no easy thing to do. Someday when I think I can and am ready to be I shall
try it, when I’m older. In the meanwhile I shall do other things and keep at my painting
and related art work until I can believe in myself as an artist.”
71
But, it is also possible
that New’s desire to foster experimentation is his classrooms was purely theoretical at
this point. New, as well, was working within the considerable constraints dictated by the
Anglo officials of the Bureau of Indian Affairs who, even as they supported increased
cross-cultural education, also maintained strict visions of what “authentic” Indian art
could and should be which were aligned with those of the broader patronage system of
Indian art at this moment.
As World War II progressed Lloyd New left Phoenix, enlisting in the Navy in the
winter of 1942. Based on correspondence between New and R.M. Tisinger, the
Superintendent of Indian Schools for Arizona, New initially intended to return to his

71
Letter from Lloyd Henri New to R.M. Tisinger, nd, ca. summer 1943, BIA
47
teaching position at Phoenix after the war.
72
Yet, throughout this correspondence New
begins to express some degree of apprehension regarding his work as an educator within
this system. In a long undated letter from New to Tisinger in which New responds to
questions regarding a talented former student who was having difficulty succeeding and
staying out of trouble, what begins as a specific discussion of how for this student his “art
cannot be counted on as his salvation,” evolves quickly into an extended discussion of the
role of art education and the duty of art educators. In a particularly notable passage New
challenges Tisinger, and himself.
Consider the so called Indian School of art – how many of those kids who
could find it possible to make good money as artist have really stuck with
it since they’ve left the influence of those who wanted them to be artists
because they could ably follow a formula laid out by the school. All of
which leads me back to the question of: What is art’s responsibility in the
school? Evidently it is important, since there’s been such a rush for art in
the past few years… Is it our main interest to discover talented people in
these various fields and set them up to themselves to become artists or is
ours the responsibility of developing these arts as much as possible
through building personalities through the various art fields. If we turn out
sensitive people to the world who have an opportunity to know of the
beauties of surroundings and of beauties in their relationships to others
and who can fill their leisure time through the love for these beauties, and
who can learn some skill or trade for existence then haven’t we done
better than trying to make specialists of the talented?
73

This idea that art instruction should not purely be to encourage economic success as
professional artists seems to reflect directly New’s own experience as an artist who had a
“day job.” But it also exposes a deeper dissatisfaction with the broader agenda of art
education as represented by the Studio at Santa Fe. New suggests here that students
should not be pressed to become career artists simply because they “ably follow a

72
In a letter from Tisinger to New dated Aug. 13, 1943, Tisinger mentions that he had spoken with Beatty a
number of times regarding New’s position after the war. Tisinger stated that barring any significant funding
cuts, Beatty was interested in rehiring New in an expanded position serving various reservations in the area.
BIA Records
73
Ibid.
48
formula laid out by the school.” This is perhaps his most direct critique of the Studio
style of education which proposed a standard formula for creative production. New was
clearly not satisfied with generating “successful” students who did not have both external
and internal support to thrive in the world creatively.
This dissatisfaction led, at least in part, to New’s decision to leave teaching
behind after the war. Another factor that must have played a role in this shift were the
significant post-war changes in the educational and cultural agendas of the Bureau of
Indian Affairs. According to Szasz, “Beatty shifted the major emphasis in federal Indian
education from cross-cultural education, which emphasized both Indian and non-Indian
value systems, to education for assimilation, which trained young Indians for urban life
where they would be assimilated into mainstream society.”
74
Thus, even as
Superintendent Tisinger initially suggested that there would be a position waiting for
New upon his return, it is quite possible that this was no longer the case by the time New
completed his service in 1946. For New, the choice seems to have been relatively clear-
cut to leave the Indian Service behind in order to pursue a new career. This reflects the
general post-war shift toward federally encouraged assimilation and relocation of the
Native American population toward more urban lives. According to Kenneth R. Philp,
“By the early 1940s, forty-three thousand Indians had moved from their homelands to
find jobs in war-related industries, and another twenty thousand were serving in the
armed forces. The Indian Bureau estimated that approximately 25 percent of the total
Indian population had migrated away from reservations.”
75
New, in many ways,

74
Szasz, 106.
75
Kenneth R. Philp, Termination Revisited: American Indians on the Trail to Self-Determination, 1933-
1953, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1999, pg. 11.
49
represented this broader shift, yet his own complicated relationship to his Native identity
added complexity to his individual post-war status.
After the war New did return to Phoenix, where his wife Betty had remained
throughout his service. But rather than resume teaching, New decided to attempt to work,
through his own creative production, on what he saw as continuing questions regarding
the role of art education, particularly at the postsecondary level. As he explained, he now
wanted to see “what could be done at the next level…[to see] what happens to these kids
after they had been turned on to their art…to take a group of older artists and see if I
could find out if indeed one could put an economic base to being an artist.”
76
In a
coincidence of timing, a handful of acquaintances from Phoenix, including silversmith
Wesley Segner, painter Lew Schaefer, and his ceramist wife Mathilde Shaefer Davis,
were about to open studios in a new retail craft center in a former market in downtown
Scottsdale. The Arizona Craftsmen center, as this space was called, represented a major
shift in the cultural development of Scottsdale, from an un-incorporated desert town with
one paved road to a major tourist destination for travelers interested in an artistic enclave
with a sense of the old Wild West meets high end resort. The Arizona Craftsmen, whose
purpose was “the advancement of ancient Indian and contemporary Southwestern arts
and crafts, by adapting them to the practical needs and customs of the present day,”
provided the perfect opportunity for New’s creative experiment in melding the modern
and traditional into a highly consumable new Indian art.
77
A number of the artists from
the Craftsmen Center, including New, went on to be founding members of the Scottsdale

76
NY Times Oral History, 7
77
“Arts Center Established,” Arizona Republic, February 24, 1948.
50
Chamber of Commerce to help bolster the growing international reputation of the town’s
business, leading eventually to such visits such as that made by Mrs. Roosevelt.
It was at this point in his career that Lloyd H. New became Lloyd Kiva,
transforming himself almost overnight into a highly successful Indian entrepreneur.
Beginning with two Navajo assistants (who had never actually been his students and with
whom he had no apparent prior relationship) who happened to be technically skilled in
leatherwork, New opened his own shop specializing in handcrafted leather purses that he
designed loosely based on Navajo medicine pouches [Figure 1.11]. Soon these purses
became so widely popular that he was able to sell them for $200 to $300, which at the
time was on a par with high-end couture products.
78
These two decisions, to take the
professional name of “Kiva” and to produce Native-inspired leather goods, are striking
for their arbitrariness. New, as a half-Cherokee Oklahoman, had no immediate
connection to “kiva” as a cultural term aside from his personal interest in the cultures of
the Southwest. Nor did he have particular experience in leatherwork, although he did take
courses at the Chicago Art Institute related to design in general, such as pattern design,
life drawing and costume figure, and weaving.
79
The self-promotion that New undertook
as Lloyd Kiva is complicated in view of the degree of cultural appropriation that his
choices encompassed. As New explained, he himself did not become interested in his
own Native heritage until he began to investigate indigenous arts from across the
Americas. And even then, he chose to focus his products not on Cherokee forms, at least
initially, but rather on those of his adopted Arizonan home.

78
Ibid, 1
79
Chicago Art Institute Transcript
51
Yet, when considered in the broader context of American mid-century interest in
Indian culture and craft production, New’s seemingly arbitrary decisions can be seen as
representative of a broader shift in the cultural currency of “Indianness” in postwar
America. Philip J. Deloria, in Playing Indian (1998) discusses the post-war popularity of
a consumable Indianness that provided opportunities for Anglo-Americans to experience
firsthand the exoticness of Native culture. Deloria cites a transition from earlier forms of
engaging with “authentic” American Indian culture, which provided a decidedly
antimodern escape from the social unease of the early twentieth century, to a climate in
which “postwar Americans turned their anxious eyes toward individuals and their quests
for meaningful lives…” In this climate, “For whites of all classes, the quests for personal
substance and identity often involved forays into racial Otherness. Among the many
boundaries that separated ‘authentic’ Selves from Others imagined to be real and pure,
race was perhaps the most visible and the most interesting.”
80
While Anglo-Americans
became increasingly interested in the authenticity to be found in Native American
identity, the experience of individual Native Americans was being directly affected by
the federal government’s termination and relocation policies, as well as the cultural
aftermath of World War II. As Deloria explains, “during the 1950s, the sense of exotic
difference that lay at the heart of Indian authenticity grew increasingly tenuous. The
shared national traumas of economic depression and world war tended to reinforce ideas
– among Indians and non-Indians alike – of American cultural unity and homogeneity. As
a result, many non-Indians came to view Indian people as either assimilated or

80
Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998: 131-2.
52
imminently assimilable.”
81
This resulted in a complex dynamic in which authenticity was
based upon a slippage between an increasing amount of direct contact with urban Indians
and a continuing desire on the part of white connoisseurs and hobbyists to consume an
Indianness that could placate their simultaneous desires for modernity and their anxiety
over its inherent alienation. Lloyd New, perhaps quite consciously, positioned himself
within this paradigm of authenticity, offering to his broad customer base an opportunity
to experience, through his designs and his own personality, a slice of real Indian culture,
while not having to fully “go Native.”
The Arizona Craftsmen arts center provided the perfect environment for New to
establish his new identity as Lloyd Kiva and to present his Indian-inspired products to an
engaged public. According to a 1946 article in the Arizona Republic, “The purpose of the
Arizona Craftsmen is the advancement of ancient Indian and contemporary Southwestern
arts and crafts, by adapting them to the practical needs and customs of the present day.”
82

[Figure 1.12] Central to the experience of the center was being able to witness the
production of the various crafts in person. This degree of interactivity provided another
level of authenticity to the experience at the Arizona Craftsmen that was particularly
significant to the success of the Lloyd Kiva shop, where shoppers could work with Lloyd
to custom design the color scheme of their Kiva bag and observe as the shop’s Indian
craftspeople, including Kiva himself hand made their designs. The Lloyd Kiva
leathershop was not the only Native presence at the Arizona Craftsmen; in fact, two of
New’s former students were involved with the art center, Hoke Denetsosie painted a
mural for the interior patio and Andy Tsihnahjinnie had a painting studio there, as well.

81
Ibid, 142.
82
“Arts Center Established,” The Arizona Republic, February 24, 1946.
53
It is unclear why exactly New chose to enter into fashion accessories, rather than
painting like his former students, but clearly he saw some degree of greater success or
marketability in this path. In the early article on the center in the Arizona Republic New’s
products were described as “modern art in leather,” which provides at least a partial
explanation for this decision; perhaps New saw leatherwork and design as a form that
would permit a greater degree of experimentation in “modern art” than presenting his
own paintings which likely would have disappointed collectors seeking “authentic”
Indian painting such as that produced by Denetsosie and Tsihnahjinnie.
83

The success of Lloyd Kiva’s shop and his kiva bags was solidified by 1948, when
he was profiled, along with other key Scottsdale artists, in a feature article in The Desert
Magazine. [Figure 1.13] The article explains how New “developed the theory that Indian
arts and crafts could be acceptably fitted into modern living by shunting off some of the
traditional shapes, taboos, and religious symbols. The Kiva leather shop was designed as
a laboratory to try his theory.”
84
It continues to discuss how, as superintendent of the
Indian exhibit at the Arizona state fair, New created an intricate display that merged
modern furniture and clothing design with Native American crafts including rugs,
silverwork, leather wastebaskets, paintings and sculpture, and, of course, his own Kiva
bags, which were seen as “one of the most convincing examples of his efforts to fit
Indian crafts to modern life.”
85
This merging of Native American culture and modern life
fits perfectly in with the general atmosphere of mid-century Scottsdale, which was
promoted simultaneously as authentically Western and thoroughly modern, a destination

83
Ibid.
84
Christine B. MacKenzie, “Artists of Scottsdale,” The Desert Magazine, Vol 12, No 2, December, 1948:
8.
85
Ibid.
54
for the quickly expanding population of wealthy snowbirds to experience a vibrant arts
community, upscale shopping and resorts, and the rugged west all in one sunny locale
[Figure 1.14].
This was the beginning of a particularly vibrant period in the Scottsdale arts and
crafts community, with the Arizona Craftsmen being only one of many local creative
forces. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West, begun in 1937, was a major center for
modern architecture and design with a number of his students remaining in the area after
completing their studies. By 1949 New had attained enough success that he began to plan
for his next venture, entering into discussion with Frank Lloyd Wright’s offices about the
design for a new building. While this proposed project never came to fruition, a note
from Frank Lloyd Wright dated March 1, 1950 states “Lloyd Kiva is strongly and
intelligently interested in the work he sets forth in his proposed project. The work he
proposes seems to me to be one of the very few intelligent and worthwhile contributions
to the welfare and development of the Indian culture in out country today.”
86
This vague,
and rather condescending, memo goes on to recommend Kiva and the work he had
proposed. It is unclear, in either New’s or Frank Lloyd Wright’s papers, whom the
intended recipient for this memo was or what specifically the proposed work might entail.
It is possible that, even at this early date, Lloyd Kiva New was working on plans to create
a craft school for Indian students, as a number of later sources refer to New’s
collaboration with Frank Lloyd Wright on plans for such a project.
87
Even if this was not
his intention at this point and these discussions were regarding a new retail endeavor, this
correspondence reveals a level of engagement with an active modernist community that

86
“Memo,” Frank Lloyd Wright, March 1, 1950
87
Charles B. Fahs, Notes, Trip to Southwest, January 13-18, 1958, IAIA Archive
55
worked at a local and national level, as well as a commitment to expanding his work
relating to the development of Indian cultural production beyond his small leather shop at
the Arizona Craftsmen.
While New did not act on his desires to commission building plans from Lloyd
Wright, most likely due to his own financial anxieties over embarking on such a
substantial project, his career did radically expand shortly after this memo was drafted.
88

In late April 1950 the Arizona Craftsmen building burned down in a major fire that
destroyed the Lloyd Kiva shop and much of his merchandise.
89
By the end of May plans
for a new retail venture had been formalized, and in November the new Arizona Crafts
Center opened “mainly through the efforts of Lloyd Kiva and Wesley Segner” who
worked together on the architectural and interior designs of the new complex.
90
With this
move, Lloyd Kiva expanded his production to include custom-made day and
eveningwear. In 1951 he took his designs to the International Fashion Revue in Atlantic
City, showing designs that were remarked on in Women’s Wear Daily for being “Indian
in feeling, hand made by Indian craftsmen.”
91
In this revue, and the commentary
surrounding it, Lloyd Kiva was presented as simultaneously American and other,
positioned between designs from far-flung locales such as Japan, Sweden, and Mexico,
and other American designers who created popular items such as a square dance dress
[Figure 1.15].

88
In a letter dated September 20,1949 from Lloyd Kiva to Gene Masselink, Lloyd suggests waiting at least
through the winter season to move forward with any design plans. While his correspondence regarding
these plans did continue through at least February 1950, it is unclear if any plans were ever actually drafted
or what specifically they might have been intended for.
89
“Fire Razes Craftsmen Building,” Scottsdale Progress, April 27, 1950.
90
“Craft Center Will Open on Sunday,” Scottsdale Progress, November 16, 1950.
91
Jane Cahill, “International Fashion Revue in US,” Women’s Wear Daily, March 19, 1951.
56
As a designer, Lloyd Kiva began to occupy a privileged position within the
increasingly popular field of Western wear fashion, which fetishized the traditions and
forms of the Southwest’s Indian and Hispanic cultures. In their 2009 article “What’s In a
Name?: The 1940s-1950s ‘Squaw Dress,’” Nancy J. Parezo and Angelina P. Jones
discuss the popularization of the “Squaw Dress,” perhaps the most emblematic style of
Southwestern women’s wear popularized in mid-century America, as a style that
“represented both idealized femininity and Americanness because of [its] Native
American origins.”
92
Parezo and Jones analyze the complicated history of the term
“squaw” itself, tracing its path from a generalized colonial adaptation of the Algonquian
term for “woman” to a pejorative term applied to a racialized and sexualized other, and
then go on to address precisely how and why the term reacquired positive connotations as
popular, if still racialized, fashion trope. Countering this narrative the authors cite Lloyd
Kiva New as an example of a designer who was successfully “transform[ing] traditional
Indian cultural designs, objects, and materials into contemporary fashion as a way to
share the richness of Indians’ pasts.”
93
They go on to explain that Kiva “did not use the
term ‘squaw’ for any of his fashionable attire” because “it was too unspecific and
homogenizing” and “the Squaw Dress was too common in Arizona, and he wanted his
work to be distinctive.”
94

The manner in which Lloyd Kiva sought to distinguish his designs from the
problematically romanticized, highly popular Southwestern styles is visible in a 1952

92
Nancy J. Parezo and Angelina P. Jones, “What’s In a Name?: The 1940s-1950s ‘Squaw Dress,’”
American Indian Quarterly, Vol. 33, No. 3 (Summer 2009): 375. I employ the term “squaw” cautiously
here, with awareness of the history traced by Parezo and Jones, but also for the continuing negative and
offensive nature of the term. My use is thus always historically contextualized and would not be employed
contemporarily.
93
Ibid, 392.
94
Ibid.
57
two-page spread from Women’s Wear Daily entitled “Out of the West for Summer:
American Indian Fashions,” which featured a Kiva design alongside others by designers
from across the Southwest [Figure 1.16]. The captions are particularly elucidating, even
as they undermine Parezo and Jones’ argument that Kiva stood out from other designers
as he eschewed the term “squaw” in favor for more specific tribal terms such as a
Hohokam blouse, a Hopi tunic, a Seminole Skirt, or a Cherokee Dress.
95
This particular
fashion spread features three designs, out of eleven, that are clearly labeled as “squaw”
and two other designs that include the distinctive three-tiered flouncy squaw-style skirts,
even as they are not labeled as such. Lloyd Kiva’s striking design (number 10) is an
elegant one-shouldered shift dress described as an “adaptation of a manta worn by Pueblo
dwellers…of woolen woven by New Mexico Indians, with authentic hand-embroidered
design at the hemline…”
96
Both the design and description of Kiva’s “manta” dress stand
in stark contrast from the “squaw” dresses and skirts in the spread. However, Kiva’s
design is not alone in its sleeker, more modern style, nor is it the only example in this
piece that is listed as taking direct influence from specific, traditional Indian forms.
Number eight, from Sara Neary’s East-R-West Fashions in Scottsdale and made by
Diamond’s of Albuquerque, was an “all-cotton adaptation of a ceremonial dress worn by
the Isleta Indians of New Mexico” and number nine, from Arizona Originals in Tucson,
presented a “Tohono’ blouse, named for the Arizona Indian word for ‘desert,’ carriers
[sic] a label explaining the symbolism: U-shaped panel is the bowl of the earth, vertical
line means strength, horizontal line contentment.”
97
Clearly Kiva was not the only

95
Ibid.
96
“Out of the West for Summer: American Indian Fashions,” Women’s Wear Daily, January 23, 1952.
97
Ibid.
58
designer eschewing the “squaw” term or design in an effort to claim a higher level of
authenticity to appeal to customers invested in the romantic appeal of the Indians of the
Southwest.
It is the line of authenticity that does ultimately distinguish Lloyd Kiva designs
from others working with this widely popular stylistic theme. Even as much of the
language and forms employed by Kiva, and those discussing his work, resonates broadly
with mid-century American Indian-inspired fashion, subtle yet significant differences are
present. In the caption referenced above the material listed for Kiva’s manta dress is
“woolen woven by New Mexico Indians” and the design is directly inspired by the
traditional woven manta as worn by Pueblo women [Figure 1.17]. The level of
investment in honest representation and the use of materials crafted by contemporary
Indian communities distinguishes Lloyd Kiva’s cultural appropriation from that of other
designers at the time. Even as Kiva was creating designs based on Native forms distant
from his own, his insistence on meticulous research and conscientious representation is
present in this specific dress. Specificity was indeed present in the dress inspired by Isleta
ceremonial dress and the “Tohono” blouse, yet the specificity apparent in these designs
was far more cursory than that of the manta dress. The Isleta dress does not recall Isleta
ceremonial attire any more than the other squaw dresses, distinguished from those only in
name and the small addition of detailed rickrack patterning at the sleeve and fringed
panel. Similarly, the Tohono blouse with the evocatively detailed label is so abstracted as
to be little more than purposefully romantic.
Lloyd Kiva as a designer thus satisfied a widespread desire for authentic Indian
products that also succeeded in pushing the boundaries of popular design. By 1953 he not
59
only was continuing to craft his highly successful Kiva bags and resort wear crafted from
regionally sourced materials, he also ventured into the field of textile design and
production thereby extending his marketability even further. In a 1954 article in The
Arizona Republic his desire to continually expand modern Indian art, through his own
products, was once again expounded, “Lloyd has particular antipathy for the idea that an
intelligent, educated Indian youth must revert to old tribal customs and limitations. ‘This
is unnatural and false,’ he states. ‘An artist should retain the best of the old ways,
improve on them, adapt them to modern life.’” In design terms, he accomplished this
himself through “such touches as the sophisticated ‘step hemline’ [that] are more Indian
than squaw dresses.”
98
The article went on to explain that Kiva hoped to find an Indian
apprentice to whom he could teach his new hand-dyeing and silkscreening techniques,
much of which he had learned the previous year from Leslie and D.D. Tillett in New
York. Through the Tilletts New learned how to apply hand dyeing and silkscreening to
large-scale production, which allowed him to begin wholesale production of sized dresses
in his original designs.
Lloyd Kiva’s brief apprenticeship with the Tilletts, whom he had met at the
second annual International Fashion Revue in Atlantic City, was crucial to his own career
progress. The Tilletts, who had moved to New York from Mexico City in 1946, were
incredibly successful textile designers who had perfected the art of hand-dyeing and
silkscreening fabrics with bold, graphic patterns popular with Greta Garbo, Gary Cooper,
Harry Truman, and Jacqueline Kennedy [Figures 1.18 and 1.19].
99
Through this
relationship Kiva gained the ability to create his own graphic textiles, emblazoned with

98
“Lloyd Kiva Gains Acclaim For Styles” The Arizona Republic, March 7, 1954
99
Christopher Petkanas, “When Design Burst From Cloth,” The New York Times, October 12, 2012.
60
imagery that recalled general Native American and Southwestern imagery thereby
expanding his capacity to present his own self-curated vision of modern Indian design.
His apprenticeship with the Tilletts also provided an additional foray into the broader
realm of a pan-American modernism, given the Tilletts’ early careers in Mexico City and
their subsequent central role in the New York fashion world. Lloyd Kiva brought from
this experience the capacity and desire to expand further his retail craft projects, as would
be evidenced when in 1955 he embarked on a major development project that would
eventually encompass the multi-unit Kiva Crafts Center located on Scottsdale’s quickly
expanding Fifth Avenue.
The Kiva Crafts Center was designed as a modern complex of studios and retail
spaces encircling an open patio intended to continue the basic principle of open and
active working craft studios from which products were sold that had been the driving
appeal of the original Arizona Craftsmen center [Figures 1.20 and 1.21]. The Lloyd Kiva
shop included a sleek storefront, a leatherworks area, and an extensive silkscreen studio
at the back of the complex [Figure 1.22]. By this point in his career, Lloyd Kiva’s pieces
were sold in major retailers from Niemen Marcus to Lord & Taylor and widely reported
on in the national press. As the owner and operator of the Kiva Crafts Center, Lloyd Kiva
was able to carefully select the craftspeople who would occupy the other retail studios.
Kiva promptly contacted his former student Charles Loloma to see if he and his wife
Otellie would want to have the first studio and retail space there. His tenants soon also
included the studio of the Flemish Glazenier, a custom stained glass studio led by Joseph
Maes, jewelers including Fred Skaggs, and the Italian architect, ceramist, and
metalworker Paolo Soleri who first went to Scottsdale to study with Frank Lloyd Wright
61
and created and sold his handmade bells at the Kiva Crafts Center before he went on to
become an internationally respected avant-garde architect [Figure 1.23].
The dynamic energy of the new Kiva Crafts Center added a new level to Lloyd
Kiva’s public image; in short order Kiva began to organize major fashion shows on a
catwalk installed through the center of Fifth Avenue which had become a thriving retail
thoroughfare. With his increasing degree of financial and creative success New was also
able to instill in his production a greater degree of engagement with Native peers and
students. He began to employ apprentices to assist in the production of his designs and
fabrics, including the artists Manfred Susunkewa and Larry Golsch, as well as
collaborating on a number of textile designs with his former student Andy Tsihnahjinnie.
A Tsihnahjinnie-designed pony pattern recalls Tsihnahjinnie’s own earlier paintings that
so often featured dynamic horses in mid-gallop and suggests the degree to which the
production of Kiva designs became increasingly collaborative [Figure 1.24]. The
collaborations between New, Tsihnahjinnie, and later Susunkewa who eventually took
over the design and production at the Kiva shop after New left for Santa Fe, which
resulted in particularly vibrant designs, seems to represent New’s vision for an
apprentice-based educational system by which he could expose young Native artists to
his own extensive design and business experience. Yet, this dynamic is somewhat
troubled because at the time recognition of these design collaborations went generally
unacknowledged. Thus questions arise as to how much this was in fact a dynamic
exchange of ideas and forms and how much this was, possibly, New producing and
marketing un-credited works by his employees.
62
While the particular creative relationships between New and his employees or
apprentices do not necessarily provide clear evidence regarding the successful
implementation of New’s goal of providing a specific educational opportunity from
within his retail center, his ongoing association with Charles Loloma does represent a
certain fruition of New’s influence as a teacher and artistic mentor. Charles and Otellie
Loloma (Hopi) had spent the immediate post-war years working as potters, first enrolling
through the GI Bill at the School for American Craftsmen at Alfred University in New
York and then continuing work through a Whitney Foundation Fellowship to study
traditional Hopi clay traditions. For the Lolomas the cross-current between the traditional
and the modern was a main interest and led to the production of groundbreaking wares
that were a challenge to the standards in their Hopi community, particularly since pottery
was customarily a women’s craft.
100
The cosmopolitan world that Loloma had begun to
experience through New and his mural commissions while at the Phoenix Indian School
expanded exponentially when the couple went to the School for American Craftsmen.
Part of the curriculum there were courses in chemistry and marketing, and unlike
traditional Hopi potters they were working on wheel thrown pieces using commercial
glazes and kilns. They were also able to travel to the many museums and galleries in New
York City, even meeting with d’Harnoncourt at MoMA at one point.
101
According to
New, Loloma’s “experience at the crafts school in Alford [sic]… had expanded his and
Otellie’s world views, resulting in an expansion of his sense of artistic freedom and
openness to new technology, methodology, and ideology – a parallel to my life

100
Younger interview, 8-9
101
Tom McClure in “Loloma – And Beauty is His Name / Loloma”, publication printed after Charles
Loloma’s death, printed by Georgia Loloma, 1991
63
experiences and evolution of philosophy that we had discussed at length during our
earlier student-mentor relationship.”
102
For nearly a decade New and the Lolomas worked
alongside each other at the Kiva Craft Center. During this period Charles transitioned
away from pottery and into the jewelry designs for which he would become famous while
Otellie experimented with her own sculpture in bronze and clay. Eventually Charles
would contribute cast silver elements to New’s designs including buttons, buckles and
other hardware.
This period, from the construction of the Kiva Crafts Center through the early
1960s, was particularly fruitful in the careers of both New and Loloma, not only resulting
in the radical shift in Loloma’s own craft away from ceramics and toward modern
jewelry and New’s increasing success, but in the evolution of a shared vision for the
future. It was during this period, in 1958, that New and Loloma met with Charles B. Fahs
from the Rockefeller Foundation who was in the area to create a report on the state of
American Indian arts and crafts, which the Foundation was generally concerned about.
New and Loloma discussed with him their desire to create an art school for young Indians
in the hopes of receiving financial backing from the Rockefeller. Fahs was unwilling to
promise any such funding, but did encourage New to continue working on such a plan.
This brief encounter with Fahs would ultimately set in motion a series of programs at the
University of Arizona in Tucson including the New Directions for Southwest Indian Art
conference in October of 1959 and the Southwest Indian Art Project which ran during the
summers of 1960-1962. Joy Gritton has extensively discussed these Rockefeller
Foundation-sponsored projects and how they led to the creation of the Institute of

102
New, Cherokee Drums, 397.
64
American Indian Arts.
103
Gritton focuses primarily on the organizational details behind
these events, delving in great depth into the archival materials held by the Rockefeller
Foundation. The conclusion reached by Gritton was that the New Directions for
Southwest Indian Art conference and the Southwest Indian Art Project both perpetuated a
call for “the next step in the continuum of colonization of indigenous art production – the
de-tribalization of the creators of the arts themselves.”
104
While certainly a number of the
largely Anglo scholars and professionals involved in both of these programs boldly
proclaimed that Indian artists would need to toss aside their Indian identity in order to
become successful mainstream artists, what Gritton neglects to pursue in her study is the
agency held by the Native participants in these programs.
Strikingly absent from Gritton’s study is a rigorous assessment of Lloyd Kiva
New’s pre-existing pedagogical agenda which New was actively promoting across a
variety of media sources throughout this period. New’s self-promotion on this front went
far above and beyond any involvement with the Rockefeller Foundation, most likely
because he had been encouraged initially by the Foundation to seek funding elsewhere
for his own proposed art center. In surveying a selection of media coverage of Lloyd
Kiva’s work in the late 1950s one sees the degree to which the craftsman was striving to
attain broad support for this goal that initially extended far beyond the reaches of the
University of Arizona and Rockefeller projects. Throughout the years immediately
following Charles B. Fahs’ visit to Arizona, Kiva’s fashion work continued to garner
significant national and local press coverage, but increasingly Kiva took advantage of this

103
See Gritton (2000) and Joy Gritton “The Institute of American Indian Arts: A Convergence of
Ideologies” in Shared Visions: Native American Painters and Sculptors in the Twentieth Century,
(Phoenix: The Heard Museum, 1991).
104
Gritton, (1991), 25.
65
coverage to advocate for his cause. From 1958 to 1960 Kiva’s design work and the
expanding Kiva Crafts Center were reported on in publications including Women’s Wear
Daily, The Arizona Republic, Mrs. Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Our House” in The Capital
Times, and The Christian Science Monitor. In each article Kiva is quoted extensively on
his vision for the future of Indian art, which in large part was centered on his desire to
establish “an experimental design center” or school that would inspire young Indian
artists to pursue careers in the arts by exposing them to modern materials and
techniques.
105
In an article published shortly before the opening of the Kiva Craft Center
he is quoted as saying, “We are completing one dream, yes. But I still have another. My
next project will be the establishment of some kind of a design laboratory. We’ll teach
Indian boys and girls, just out of school, how to make a living with their own craft-work.
I’d like to put the bead work of the Yuma Indians, the native fabrics of the Navajo, Hopi
and Sioux into high fashion too!”
106

In “Design on Our Doorstep” by d.l.w. for Women’s Wear Daily in July 1959
Kiva suggested that his proposed center would be based on the model of Frank Lloyd
Wright’s architectural program at Taliesin and could ultimately function along the lines
of a successful project in Peru created in the 1940s by the American Truman Bailey
which aimed to revive native crafts.
107
The art center/school would gather the best young
Indian artists and expose them to “modern materials and modern ways in weaving,
silvercrafts, basket work and pottery.”
108
Beyond this basic technical instruction, Kiva
was developing an advanced curriculum that, according to a January 11, 1960 article in

105
d.l.w., “Design on Our Doorstep,” Women’s Wear Daily, July 29, 1959
106
Helen Fisher, “Lloyd Kiva, Indian Artist, To Finish Craft Center Soon,” The Arizona Republic July 20,
1958
107
Ibid and d.l.w. “Artist at Work,” Women’s Wear Daily, November 14, 1956
108
“Our House” by Mrs. Frank Lloyd Wright, The Capital Times, March 20, 1959
66
The Christian Science Monitor titled “American Indian Art Trail Blazed”, would span
four years of studies essentially paralleling his own career path,
Students will be “thoroughly indoctrinated in Indian culture” during their
first year. During the second, they will begin to work under such master
craftsmen, say, as Charles Loloma, the Hopi whose work in gold and
silver has become widely acclaimed. Business management will be
stressed in the third year. For many young Indians, this will mean
including the study of simple arithmetic and English, not to mention cost
accounting and tax law. What Lloyd Kiva didn’t know when he started
out, he wants other young Indians to be versed in. Marketing will come in
the fourth year.
109

For Lloyd Kiva, it was of the utmost import to provide for his proposed students every
educational, artistic, and business advantage so that they would be able to work
competitively within the mainstream art and craft worlds. Kiva believed that the
opportunities that he had been exposed to throughout his education at various Anglo
institutions, from elementary school to the Chicago Art Institute, were central to his
success, but he also clearly saw the necessity, again from his own educational experience,
for a strong “indoctrination” in Indian culture.
The pedagogical assumptions underlying Kiva’s theoretical art school expose a
complicated degree of paternalism. In discussing the contemporary challenges faced by
Indian art and art education in Mrs. Frank Lloyd Wright’s column Kiva explained,
“Indians are very gifted – 15 out of 20 have in their blood stream the potentiality of
becoming fine artists.” Kiva went on to conclude forcefully, “I have no use for the
exhibitionism of some Indians who strut around wearing Chief’s headdresses, silver
jewelry, pound their chests and shout about their noble blood line. Indians must fit into
the civilization of today, and I want to help them that they may fit in the best possible

109
“American Indian Art Trail Blazed” by Kimmis Hendrick Christian Science Monitor January 11, 1960
67
way, without compromising or sacrificing their innate gifts.”
110
In “Design on Our
Doorstep” he further rationalized “A talented young Indian can produce if you stimulate
and direct him. I employ a number in my own studio.”
111
The Lloyd Kiva presented in
these quotes is not the same Lloyd Kiva who proudly proclaimed his own Native identity
in order to market his craft, even as most of these articles do indeed mention his heritage.
Rather, the identity espoused here by the designer and educator is one of a benevolent
advocate and assimilationist far more aligned with Anglo proponents of Indian arts in the
period.
Again, Lloyd Kiva New’s self-identification(s) must be viewed within his specific
cultural-historical context in order to begin to understand why he chose to make public
statements such as those above. Certainly, his goal in each of these articles was to
promote his vision for an independently funded educational program, thus every word
must have been calculated in order to gain the greatest number of supporters, ideally ones
who would consider contributing actual funds to sponsor such a school. Lloyd Kiva New
was obviously by this point in his career an expert in marketing and knew how to present
himself and his work to his respective audiences in such a way that was generally quite
profitable.
His openness to assimilation and the entry of young Indian artists into the broader
contemporary art world were informed by the general climate of mid-century America
and by his own conscious awareness of the possibilities that such assimilation could
provide for a young, aspiring artist. As he explained repeatedly, there was at the time a
recognizable shift away from “traditional” Native art forms, and he thus believed that

110
“Our House”
111
“Design on Our Doorstep”
68
young artists must find a way to continue to produce meaningful work in the face of
many widespread national, local, and tribal changes. As he argued in his keynote address
at the Directions in Indian Art Conference, “The future of Indian art lies in the future, not
the past – let’s stop looking backward for our standards of Indian art production. We
must admit that the heyday of Indian life is past, or passing. Art has always been a
manifestation of the lives of those people who create it, reflecting the truth of the times.
Therefore, if Indian culture is in a state of flux then we must expect a corresponding
change in art expression.”
112
For Kiva, this forward movement of Indian art would
incorporate “new media, new technocracy and a new approach to personal self
expression.”
113

For Lloyd Kiva his proposed school was the fruition of his initial vision behind
opening a retail store, to work with “the young person who didn’t always feel
comfortable in the traditional world. He’s caught on the threshold of a new period in
history, and he’s got to find out what he can do that’s as important as what his
grandmother did.”
114
What becomes apparent, particularly through the significant media
coverage of his work in Scottsdale in the late 1950s and early 1960s, is that New saw his
extremely successful retail career as a stepping stone on the path to his ultimate goal,
regardless of the programming that was simultaneously being developed by the
Rockefeller Foundation and the University of Arizona. As we have seen, New and
Loloma purportedly were even discussing with Frank Lloyd Wright the prospect of his

112
Lloyd Kiva, “Directions in Indian Art, The Report of A Conference Held at the University of Arizona on
March Twentieth and Twenty First, Nineteen Hundred and Fifty Nine.” University of Arizona Press, 1959.
113
Lloyd Kiva, “Arizona Inspires Eastern Designers,” The Arizona Republic, September 21, 1959
114
NY Times Oral History, 7.
69
designing a building for Kiva’s proposed art center and school.
115
But it was this period
in Phoenix and Scottsdale when New’s own artistic career began to flourish, that
provided the specific pedagogical approach that he would come to employ when his
desire for an Indian art school was answered, or supplanted, by the Institute of American
Indian Arts.

115
Charles B. Fahs, Notes, Trip to Southwest, January 13-18, 1958, IAIA Archive
70
Chapter One
IMAGES

Figure 1.1: Lloyd H. New, Untitled, 1941
71

Figure 1.2: Lloyd H. New, Untitled, 1941
72

Figure 1.3: Andrew Van Tsihnahjinnie, Navajo N’Da-a, 1938
73

Figure 1.4: Andrew Van Tsihnahjinnie, Trading at the Trading Post, c. 1940s
74

Figure 1.5: Charles Loloma, Houses Along the Plaza at Hotevilla, c. 1930-35

Figure 1.6: Charles Loloma, Buffalo Dance, c. 1940
75

Figure 1.7: Fred Kabotie, Hopi Buffalo Dance, c. 1921

Figure 1.8: Hoke Denetsosie, Lion and Deer, c. 1940
76

Figure 1.9: Andrew Van Tsihnahjinnie, from Who Wants to Be a Prairie Dog?, 1940

Figure 1.10: Hoke Denetsosie, “Firestarting” from Little Herder In Winter, 1940
77

Figure 1.11: Kiva Bags, ca. 1904s
78

Figure 1.12: 1946 article in the Arizona Republic
79

Figure 1.13: Lloyd Kiva with Kiva bag and gloves, Desert Magazine, 1948
80

Figure 1.14: Arizona Craftsmen Center, 1950

81

Figure 1.15: Women’s Wear Daily, 1951
82

Figure 1.16: Women’s Wear Daily, 1952

Figure 1.17: H. S. Poley, Corn Dance- Tabla, 1915. Example of Pueblo mantas.
83

Figure 1.18: Leslie and D.D. Tillett in New York

Figure 1.19: The World of D.D. and Leslie Tillett exhibition image from Museum of the
City of New York
84

Figure 1.20: Kiva Craft Center, in Craft Horizons, 1957
85

Figure 1.21: People and Places Nov. 1956 (Published by your De Soto-Plymouth Dealer)
86

Figure 1.22: Lloyd Kiva silkscreen studio

Figure 1.23: Lloyd Kiva, Paolo Soleri, Fred Skaggs, Otellie Loloma From Craft
Horizons, 1957

87

Figure 1.24: Lloyd Kiva designs in hand silkscreened fabric, with Tsihnahjinnie pony
pattern, 1950s

88
Chapter Two
Acee Blue Eagle, Cultural Research, and the Making of the Bacone Style

Contemporary Native American art has long been viewed as an oppositional
project. Native American artists emerging in the mid-twentieth century who embraced
modernism and then postmodernism were seen as anti-traditional, anti-kitsch, anti-craft
and were thus situated in stark contradistinction from those who came before or
continued to produce work in a “traditional” style.
116
The binary thus created between
tradition and modern has resulted in a complicated, and fluctuating, construction of
authenticity in Native art. In the early to mid-twentieth century Native artists who
consciously eschewed Euro-American influences in their work were consistently deemed
more authentic, even as in later decades notions of “traditional” authenticity and
“individual” authenticity resulted in increasing conceptual tension. This dynamic was
largely cemented by critical studies such as J.J. Brody’s 1971 Indian Painters and White
Patrons, which concluded that, “The role of the Indian artist has been primarily that of a
performer, working from a script written by Whites…To the Indians [painting’s]
economic function was paramount, with psychic considerations counting for little and
social functions not at all.”
117

116
See Anthes, Native Moderns; Monthan, Art and Indian Individualists; and McFadden and Taubman,
Changing Hands: Art Without Reservation 1 & 2, especially Bruce Bernstein “A Story of Creation:
Tradition and Authenticity at Santa Fe’s Indian Market” and “It’s Art: ‘Keep talking while we keep
working, but hold it down so I can myself think,’” and David Roche, “Native Art at Auction: The Role of
the Commercial Marketplace in Developing Contemporary Native Art.” While works such as these address
this dichotomy from a more scholarly perspective, the world of collectors presents another view on
traditional versus contemporary as illustrated in Susan Dawn, “Contemporary Expression of Traditional
Native American Art,” The Collector’s Guide to Santa Fe and Taos (Volume 8, 1994): 24.
117
Brody, Indian Painters, 189.
89
The artist, performer, and television personality Acee Blue Eagle simultaneously
serves as the embodiment of this view, and its foil. Typically absent from more recent
analyses of twentieth century Native American art, Blue Eagle was, at one point in his
career, recognized as one of the top Indian artists of his day. Blue Eagle’s work as
student, teacher, and artist was all infused with a deeply research-based production of
identity, which he employed with varying degrees of criticality and self-awareness,
resulting in a career that may be seen as emblematic of the broader transition from
communally focused cultural production to the rise of individual Indian artists producing
works for the non-tribal market which so rapidly expanded in the first half of the
twentieth century.
Acee Blue Eagle, a name that he adopted at a young age, was internationally
renowned as an Indian artist with deep and profound connections to traditional lifeways.
Despite this reputation, it is unclear precisely what his heritage was and how it was traced
through his family line. This, of course, is not an unusual circumstance in individuals
from the “Five Civilized Tribes” of the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and
Seminole nations, who, like Blue Eagle, were born in Indian Territory before or around
Oklahoma statehood (1907).
118
But the ambiguity of his identity, along with his

118
The term "Five Civilized Tribes" came into use during the mid-nineteenth century, most widely in
Indian Territory and Oklahoma, to refer to the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole
nations. These tribes, which had varying degrees of cultural, political, and economic connections before
removal in the 1820s and 1830s, were seen as united both by place and their degree of (forced)
assimilation, taken as markers of “civilization” by white Americans. This designation clearly expresses
highly problematic period assumptions, yet can be historically revealing in this context, particularly as Blue
Eagle and other artists and public figures openly embraced such terminology. Throughout this chapter I
refer to Acee Blue Eagle as Pawnee and Creek, which was how he self identified and how these tribes
referred to themselves in the period. Today the Creek Nation self-identifies at the Muskogee (Mvskoke)
Nation and the Pawnee Nation self-identifies as Chaticks si Chaticks. Because of the historic nature of this
subject matter, I have chosen to maintain the usage of Pawnee and Creek. For more information on the Five
Civilized Tribes see Erik March Zissu, Blood Matters: The Five Civilized Tribes and the Search for Unity
in the Twentieth Century, (New York: Routledge, 2001) and Mark Edwin Miller, Claiming Tribal Identity:
90
compelling biography, have tended to overshadow any significant analysis of his artwork
and his position in influencing the direction of art education both within and outside the
Bacone College art department.
119
Yet his personality and cooptation of cultural
stereotypes are perhaps less exceptional than has hitherto been suggested by critics. The
position which Blue Eagle constructed for himself as an iconic artist had considerable
influence on the direction of Native arts at Bacone College and was, perhaps surprisingly,
prescient of the subsequent rise of Native and non-Native art stars in decades following.
Born Alex C. McIntosh around 1907, likely in Hichita, Oklahoma, Acee Blue
Eagle was generally recognized as Pawnee-Creek. The narrative of his early life shows
that he was given the name of Laughing Boy (Che-bon Ah-bee-la) by his parents,
Solomon McIntosh (likely Creek and descendent of Roley McIntosh, a well-known Creek
chief) and Mattie Odom (perhaps Pawnee, or Cherokee, or Choctaw).
120
His twin brother
and both of his parents died by the time Blue Eagle was six and he was raised briefly by

The Five Tribes and the Politics of Federal Acknowledgment (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,
2013). For more on the history of the Pawnee Nation see Martha Royce Blaine, Pawnee Passage: 1870-
1875, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990) and Richard White, The Roots of Dependency:
Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos, (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1988). For more on the history of the Creek Nation see Robbie Franklyn
Ethridge, Creek Country: The Creek Indians and their World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2003), Angela Hudson Pulley, Creek Paths and Federal Roads: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves and the
Making of the American South, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010) and Steven C.
Hahn, The Invention of the Creek Nation, 1670-1763 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004).
119
See Tamara Liegerot Elder, Lumhee Holot-Tee: The Art and Life of Acee Blue Eagle. (Edmond, OK:
Medicine Wheel Press, 2006) and Bill Anthes, “Why Injun Artist Me” in Brooke N. Newman and Gregory
D. Smithers, eds. Native Diasporas: Indigenous Identities and Settler Colonialism in the Americas
(Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska, 2014).
120
Various publications from during and after his life noted numerous, often conflicted, genealogies for
Blue Eagle. Bill Anthes, in “Why Injun Artist Me” traces through these differing accounts succinctly,
although he does not mention the archival notes referring to Solomon McIntosh’s Dawes roll number
identifying him as ¾ Creek (Manuscript Acee Blue Eagle Papers, Box 1, Folder Biographical/Genealogical
Data, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution). In a 1933 article in Sooner Magazine,
Blue Eagle is quoted as saying his mother was Creek and his father Pawnee and in a December 13,1931
article, “Artwork of Indian Student at Bacone College,” in the Muskogee Daily Phoenix, the author states
that Blue Eagle is the son of Mrs. Cora Harrison of Wewoka, which completely contradicts both Anthes
and Liegerot Elder’s assessments of his lineage.
91
grandparents, from whom he took the Blue Eagle name.
121
When these grandparents also
passed away Alex McIntosh / Acee Blue Eagle was sent to a series of BIA boarding
schools including Riverside Indian School, Nuyaka Indian School, and Haskell Institute,
eventually graduating from Chilocco Indian School in 1926 or 1928.
122
During this time
Blue Eagle faced constant pressure to acculturate to Anglo-American culture, completely
consistent with the context of the multi-tribal environment of 1920s boarding schools.
Despite the enforced assimilation of the boarding school, during this period Blue Eagle
began to participate in dances, embrace the name Blue Eagle, and begin to craft his
persona. It is likely that it was while at Chilocco that Blue Eagle first began to wear and
perform in his own self-made Pawnee-style dance regalia complete with feathered
headdress and bustle and a thunderbird-adorned Peyote rattle.
123
According to Tamara
Liegerot Elder, whose largely biographical study of Blue Eagle remains one of the very
small handful of publications on the artist, Blue Eagle was actually instructed by a
Pawnee roommate at Chilocco in the steps and significance of the dances which he would
continue to perform throughout his career, both for Anglo audiences and at inter-tribal
powwows across the region.
124

Presumably Blue Eagle was becoming increasingly aware of the power of his
indigenous identity, both at a personal and a professional level, as he worked against the
systematic effacement of tribal cultural heritage within the confines of Chilocco. He

121
The Acee Blue Eagle papers hold numerous biographical articles and notes in which Blue Eagle cites his
grandfather as the source of his Blue Eagle name. See “Acee Blue Eagle” (biographical statement), nd,
Juanita West, “Acee Blue Eagle,” nd, both (Manuscript Acee Blue Eagle Papers, Box 1, Folder
Biographical/Genealogical Data, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution). See also
Earl Deskins, “Acee Blue Eagle and His Native Art,” Design, (Vol. 41, No. 8, April 1, 1940): 8-10, 22.
122
Liegerot Elder (2006), 6.
123
Ibid., 8.
124
Ibid., 6.
92
seems to have been determined to invest in Native heritage even if it was one in which he
had not explicitly been raised. Not surprisingly, given his status as both an orphan and as
an Indian born during the transitional, fraught moment when Indian Territory became the
state of Oklahoma, Blue Eagle continued to build upon his Native persona after his
graduation from high school. At that point Blue Eagle, who had not yet settled on a career
as a visual artist, took his newly acquired dance expertise and Plains-style regalia on the
road, traveling to Hollywood to enter the film world as a small-time movie extra; he
would later also tour the country in the Fanchon-Marco theatrical circuit performing
“traditional” dances.
125
He likely created and sold works of art while on the road
performing, the success of which (or his relative lack of success in Hollywood) perhaps
influenced his decision to return to school, enrolling in Bacone College, a tribal school
run by the American Baptist Church.
Bacone College, founded in 1880 by the American Baptist educator, Almon C.
Bacone, as the Indian University, and renamed after its founder in 1910, was created as a
missionary program to bring to Indian students the guidance of Christianity through the
“teaching of the Jesus road” in an evangelical, assimilationist program. The main purpose
of this institution was to expand the reach of the American Baptist Church by training
young Indian pastors who could then proselytize and educate within their own
communities. As Indian Territory was continuously divided and threatened by land-
hungry Anglo settlers - particularly after the Dawes Act of 1887 and the Curtis Act of
1898, which opened up Indian land to division and purchase and abolished tribal law -

125
See Philip J. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places, (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2004),
especially his chapter “Representation: Indian Wars, the Movie,” for analysis of Native American
performers in film and the performativity of Indianness in general.
93
Bacone College became increasingly populated by Anglo students, contrary to its
intended objective. According to Lisa K. Neuman in Indian Play: Indigenous Identities at
Bacone College, “Making Bacone an Indian institution became a primary goal of its
American Baptist administrators during the twentieth century. Yet, their desire to make
Bacone appear Indian was ultimately motivated more by financial than by philanthropic
concerns. Moreover, their solution extended beyond simply changing the demographics
of the school’s student population and included new strategies designed to associate a
Bacone education with Indianness itself.”
126
This drive to increase the presence of Indian
students and thus their cultural influence only expanded over the first decades of the
twentieth century.
The school, from its inception, was rooted in a classical, liberal arts program with
a strong focus on religious doctrine. While it primarily was intended to provide advanced
educational training, Bacone did over the years offer coursework at the elementary and
high school levels. As the institution shifted to emphasize the Indianness of its students
some changes in pedagogy resulted. In 1918, the newly appointed president of Bacone,
the Reverend Benjamin D. Weeks, boldly moved to limit enrollment to Indian students.
Concurrent with this decision was a drive to dramatically increase fundraising, both
attempting to access new financial resources in the hands of select Indian families who
had managed to profit (if often briefly) from allotment in the coal rich lands of Eastern
Oklahoma, and seeking substantial donations from Anglo donors with interest in Indian
culture. In a programmatic publicity campaign Weeks began to increasingly emphasize
the Indian identity of his students, having them pose for the press in traditional clothing

126
Lisa K. Neuman, Indian Play: Indigenous Identities at Bacone College, (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 2014), 46.
94
and allowing them to perform Indian dances on campus, in dramatic distinction from both
federally run Indian schools and the American Baptist Church’s condemnation of all
forms of dance. As Neuman explains, “In the past at Indian University, Indian identities
were used publicly to contrast ‘primitive’ and traditional lifeways with the modernity of
the school’s students. Yet, by 1927, Bacone was promoting the Indianness of its students
as the most important feature of their modern identities.”
127
This shift in Bacone’s public
image is contextualized within the broader cultural climate of American progressivism
and changes in approach to the “Indian problem” from Anglo advocates who saw the
preservation of Indian culture as the primary objective of federal and local policy.
Part of President Weeks’ initiatives to focus more directly on the Indian identities
of Bacone’s Native student body was actively to hire Native faculty with expertise in
areas such as Indian culture, history, and art. Mary Stone McClendon, or Ataloa (“Little
Song” in Chickasaw) was a prominent figure of Chickasaw descent, attending numerous
non-Native institutions, before returning to Oklahoma to work at Bacone College as
faculty advisor and instructor in the language department in 1928. While Ataloa was
internationally recognized as an Indian authority on traditional culture, her own early life
was not particularly rooted in her Chickasaw heritage; she attended non-Native schools
throughout her life and her family had all converted to the Baptist Church. All
biographies focus on the influence of her maternal grandmother who educated her in
Chickasaw traditions, but whether her parents, particularly her father, embraced this
identity, as Ataloa eventually would, is unclear. Regardless of this relatively assimilated
upbringing, by the time she completed her education, receiving a Bachelor’s degree from

127
Ibid, 69.
95
the University of Redlands in California and Master of Arts from Columbia University in
1927, Ataloa had begun to promote herself as an authentic source of knowledge and an
active proponent of all things Indian.
128

Ataloa was an ideal fit for the refashioned Bacone College. She immediately
began to formulate plans for an ideal next extension of the college’s new commitment to
Indian culture. From 1929 to 1932 Ataloa was largely absent from the campus, spending
her time fundraising for her Indian arts and culture program at Bacone rather than
actively teaching. Through national tours performing as Ataloa “the Chickasaw
Contralto,” in which she would present songs and chants in Chippewa, Kiowa, Zuni, and
Ojibwe as well as Indian legends, all in “ceremonial gowns,” by 1932 Ataloa successfully
raised enough funds to establish an art department at the college.
129
The result of Ataloa’s
extensive fundraising campaign was the construction of the Bacone College Art Lodge,
and the Indian arts program which it housed [Figure 2.1]. The Art Lodge was built
around Ataloa’s guiding principles that
The public has taken for granted that the trinkets and beads that they see
made by Indians for the white man were Indian art. Art comes from the
soul – it can never be created for money. Many of the beautiful things
created by Indians have been taken far away, to museums in the east,
where the Indians rarely see them. We want to bring many of those things
here, and to other Indian schools, where Indians may see them and be
inspired by them.
130

This boldly aspirational statement, particularly her assertion that great works held in
Eastern museums should be returned to Native communities to further creative and

128
Garnet Wind (Jazrea Thomas) and S. Matthew DeSpain, “’As Tall in Her Moccasins as These Sequoias
Will Grow on Mother Earth:’ The Life of Ataloa,” The Journal of Chickasaw History and Culture,
(Volume XI, No. Two, Series 42, Spring 2008): 21.
129
Ataloa continued to tour even after she had successfully built the Art Lodge, this description is taken
from “Ataloa to Sing Indian Chants, Give Legends,” The Stanford Daily, Volume 87a, Issue 13, 6 August
1935.
130
The Bacone Indian, December 15, 1932: 2.
96
educational investment in Indian heritage, foreshadows the drive for cultural repatriation
that would not gain broad national traction for many decades.
131
Bacone began offering
courses in “Tribal Arts,” “History and Appreciation of American Indian Art,” and
“Capturing and Recording Indian Culture,” a course described as “a laboratory course
where old songs, legends, traditions, history, will be repeated, classified and preserved in
written form…and made available to individuals and groups,” as soon as the Art Lodge
was completed, and soon after that began recruiting faculty and students specifically to
pursue Indian art.
132
Ataloa concluded that “if the original arts and crafts of America are
to be preserved, they must be taught.”
133
Bacone would have to teach its students Indian
arts and culture, and it would have to recruit knowledgeable Indian instructors to help it
do so.
Blue Eagle, who entered Bacone College in the fall of 1928, would have directly
benefitted from the influence of Ataloa despite the fact that the “the Chickasaw
Contralto” was largely absent during his tenure at the school. While Blue Eagle was still
enrolled as a student at Bacone he worked as arts editor for the student paper, the Bacone
Indian, which had been created by Ataloa. Additionally, by 1928 the Bacone College
library had acquired more than 1,000 volumes, with an emphasis on publications centered
on American Indian culture and history.
134
This growing library served as a research tool

131
For more information on the repatriation of Native American artifacts and specifically the Native
American Graves Protections Act (NAGPRA) see C. Timothy McKeown, In the Smaller Scope of
Conscience: The Struggle for National Repatriation Legislation, 1986-1990 (Tucson, Ariz: University of
Arizona Press, 2012), Sangita Chari and Jaime M. N. Lavallee, Accomplishing NAGPRA: Perspectives on
the Intent, Impact, and Future of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (Corvallis:
Oregon State University Press, 2013) and Devon A. Mihesuah, Repatriation Reader: Who Owns American
Indian Remains? (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000).
132
Neuman, Indian Play, 104.
133
The Bacone Indian, December 15, 1932: 2.
134
The Bacone Indian, October 25, 1928: 3.
97
for both students and faculty. Ataloa’s belief that “one of the first needs in restoring and
developing Indian art is to teach Indians an appreciation of the vast wealth of traditional
forms, by showing them the best examples of tribal arts,” was applied not only to the
creation of the Art Lodge and its collection of art but to published research materials, as
well.
135
According to Lisa K. Neuman “Bacone’s art students and their teachers actively
engaged ideas about Indianness – increasingly examining what it meant to produce art
that was recognizably Indian – in the context of their own goals to re-create past cultural
lifeways and to succeed as professional Indian artists.”
136
Ataloa’s inherent philosophy
that students not only could benefit from research on material culture, but often would
need it in order to attain a strong enough understanding of their own cultural heritage to
represent it, and thus sustain it, through the arts was in line with Blue Eagle’s own
burgeoning practice. As his personal awareness of and investment in Indian culture
expanded, while at the college Blue Eagle increasingly painted works that drew directly
from, and aimed to accurately picture, Native culture. It was also during this period that
his work came to the attention of Professor Oscar Brousse Jacobson from the University
of Oklahoma (OU) in Norman, OK.
In 1926 a group of young Kiowa artists, Spencer Asah, Jack Hokeah, Stephen
Mopope, Lois Smoky, Monroe Tsatoke, and later, James Auchiah, were introduced by
their art teacher and field matron, Susie Peters, to Oscar B. Jacobson, the head of the
University of Oklahoma art department.
137
At this time Indians were not permitted to

135
Quoted in Neuman, Indian Play: 98.
136
Neuman, Indian Play, 161-162
137
The art and influence of the Kiowa painters has been discussed in various publications including: Janet
C. Berlo, The Szwedzicki Portfolios: Native American Fine Art and American Visual Culture, 1917-1952
(Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University, Tozzer Library, 2010); Lydia L. Wycoff, “Visions and Voices: A
Collective History of Native American Painting,” Visions and Voices: Native American Painting from the
98
enroll in accredited courses at a public institution such as the University of Oklahoma,
but through the influence of Jacobson these artists were allowed to take a series of
unaccredited courses, taught largely by fellow instructor Edith Mahier, at the university
and to eventually gain international recognition as the Kiowa Five (or the Kiowa Six
when Lois Smoky, the sole female artist is included). Jacobson, after being introduced to
the Kiowa artists, took it upon himself to further their careers by organizing the
international exhibition and publication of their work. In 1928 Jacobson organized the
entrance of the group’s work into the International Congress of Folk Arts in Prague, and
in 1929 he published a portfolio of Kiowa painting in France, both of which can be
placed within the broader cultural context of an increasing interest in a populist
Americanism that drew its sources from both American Indian and American folk art.
138

The Kiowa Five were included in the seminal 1931 Exposition of Indian Tribal Arts and
they painted murals under Work Projects Administration (WPA) in Oklahoma as well as
at the Department of the Interior in Washington, D.C.
139

Jacobson and Mahier clearly directly influenced the artists’ stylistic
developments, guiding the development of their unified approach into a widely
recognized aesthetic style. A 1939 article for the local newspaper, The Oklahoman,

Philbrook Museum of Art (Tulsa: Philbrook Museum of Art, 1996); Arthur Silberman, One Hundred Years
of Native Painting (Oklahoma City: The Oklahoma Museum of Art, 1978).
138
C. Swedzicki, pub., Kiowa Indian Art: Watercolor Paintings in Color by the Indians of Oklahoma, Nice,
France, 1929. This portfolio, as well as the five subsequent portfolios on Indian art published by C.
Swedzicki have been digitized by the University of Cincinnati Libraries at
http://digitalprojects.libraries.uc.edu/szwedzicki/. Janet Catherine Berlo wrote the introductory text for this
project, see, The Szwedzicki Portfolios: Native American Fine Art and American Visual Culture, 1917-
1952. Cincinnati: University of Cincinnati Libraries, 2008, which gives a thorough introduction to this
cultural context.
139
See McLerran’s discussion of the “Department of Interior Building Section of Fine Arts Mural Project,”
McLerran, 168-193.
99
described Jacobson’s immediate role in the development of modern Indian art in
Oklahoma and his influence upon the artists. The author explained:
[Jacobson] wisely advised [the Kiowa artists] against imitating whites, and
urged them to develop their own art along the lines of their racial tradition:
not that he desired to limit them to servile copying of the past. On the
contrary, he has little by little taught them how to handle many figures and
compositions, how to pass from watercolors and tempera to oil and fresco
work, from small paintings to large size murals. Now he is urging them to
enlarge the scope of their subjects.
140

Although the work of these artists drew directly upon their Plains Indian heritage and
maintained a certain level of visual continuity with early practices such as ledger painting
and tipi painting, these artists were working within an Anglo-dominated art world and
must have felt the need to satisfy the expectations of their white professors and
collectors.
141
Thus Jacobson’s direction to paint along a tribal tradition, even if it was a
constructed tradition, while incorporating increasingly westernized materials and formats
can be seen as expressing not only his purportedly altruistic interest in the Indian artists’
creative development but also the dominant culture’s assumptions regarding what modern
Indian art should be.
Jacobson and Mahier sought to encourage the natural talent of the Kiowa painters
and it has often been suggested that their works were created without outside influence. It
is likely that Jacobson purposefully segregated the Kiowa students from other OU art
students in order to discourage any non-traditional aesthetic “contamination”.
142
Yet, the
style that the Kiowa painters embraced, of flat, solid blocks of color portraying simplified

140
Jeanne D’Ucel, “Geronimo’s Grandson Sets Key for Modern Indian Art,” The Oklahoman, April 23,
1939: 118.
141
See Dunn’s history of Plains Indian art before the Modern School, Dunn 124-183.
142
Jacobson, quoted in Lydia L. Wyckoff, “Visions and Voices: A Collective History of Native American
Painting,” Visions and Voices: Native American Painting from the Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, OK:
Philbrook Museum of Art, 1996: 24.
100
scenes of Kiowa life taking place in spatial voids, did not have any direct sources in early
Kiowa art [Figure 2.2, Figure 2.3, Figure 2.4]. As J. J. Brody argues, “…we are left with
the realization that the Kiowa paintings neatly match many stylistic attributes of the
contemporaneous international decorative art style known as Art Moderne or Art
Deco.”
143
Berlo also suggests a clear, and conscious, link between the Kiowa paintings
and such styles by concluding that in selecting C. Swedzicki as publisher for the 1929
portfolio, Jacobson likely was “aligning the work of the Kiowa artists with other well-
known modern art movements, such as Art Deco, that were all the rage. He understood
that the audience for these modern American Indian art prints was the same audience that
appreciated the Art Moderne on display at the Exposition Internationale des Arts
Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes held in Paris in 1925.”
144
The resulting artworks
from the Kiowa painters represented one side of the formalized style of “traditional
Indian painting,” paralleling in style and subject matter the paintings of students at the
Santa Fe Indian School.
As the Kiowa painters’ style and renown grew, Acee Blue Eagle was working to
expand his own artistic practice in line with this influential group. Blue Eagle was fully
aware of the significant success that the Kiowa painters were attaining, both in Oklahoma
and abroad, as media coverage of them, and their instructors, grew exponentially after
1928, coinciding with Blue Eagle’s tenure at Bacone as a young student and aspiring
artist. Blue Eagle and Jacobson likely became acquainted personally around 1928, with
Jacobson soon encouraging Blue Eagle to enter paintings in the 1929 Oklahoma Free

143
J.J. Brody, Kiowa & Pueblo Art: Watercolor Paintings by Native American Artists, Mineola, NY: Dover
Publications, Inc., 2009: 14.
144
Berlo, 39.
101
State Fair.
145
Thus, it is not coincidental that one of the earliest articles featuring Blue
Eagle’s painting suggests a friendship and creative alignment between the young painter
and the established Kiowa artists. The 1931 article in The Muskogee Daily Phoenix titled
“Art Work of Indian Student at Bacone College in New York Exhibit,” discusses Blue
Eagle’s first successes as a visual artist, describing his inclusion in the seminal Exposition
of Indian Tribal Arts at the Grand Central Galleries in New York. The author asserts “In
some respects, it [Blue Eagle’s work] is similar to that of the Kiowa boys, who are
friends of his, who have attracted nationwide attention. However, no one would confuse
his paintings with those of any other artists…”
146
As a visual artist, Blue Eagle was
increasingly being aligned with the Kiowa painters and their “traditional” Indian painting
style, employing similarly flat, two-dimensional figures on blank or simplified
backgrounds. These formal similarities, espoused both by the media and Blue Eagle
himself, likely led to Oscar Jacobson’s invitation for the young artist to enroll at the
University of Oklahoma after his graduation from Bacone.
However, by the time Jacobson embraced Blue Eagle and his paintings, there was
at some level a shift within Jacobson’s own approach to the education of Native art
students, resulting in significant institutional changes at the University of Oklahoma as
well. As a result, Acee Blue Eagle was able to enroll at OU as a full-time art student,
from 1931 to 1932, taking courses including watercolor, history of design, drawing from
antiquities, and history of ancient classical art and art of Northern Europe and graduating

145
Leigerot Elder, 23.
146
“Art Work of Indian Student at Bacone College in New York Exhibit,” The Muskogee Daily Phoenix,
Sunday Morning Edition, December 13, 1931: 3-B. For more information on the Exposition see Horton &
Berlo, 2015 and Rushing, 1995.
102
with a B.A. in art.
147
The formal nature of Blue Eagle’s instruction at OU is a noticeable
departure from the experience of the Kiowa painters a few years prior. In these courses
Blue Eagle would have been exposed to the major styles and works of European art, as
well as Euro-American technical skills, which the Kiowa painters were denied. Despite
this difference in educational grounding Blue Eagle consistently aligned himself, both
stylistically and in the media, with the extraordinarily successful Kiowa artists. While
Blue Eagle did maintain close relationships with a number of these artists, his decision to
work in a style similar to theirs was a clear act of self-promotion. He was already creating
flat, stylized, graphic images of traditional figures prior to his enrollment at OU, even
being included in the groundbreaking 1931 Exposition of Indian Tribal Arts presented at
the Grand Central Art Galleries in New York City (as detailed in The Muskogee Daily
Phoenix), at a moment when this style was gaining increasing international recognition.
The fact that even after his coursework in Euro-American art practice and history, Blue
Eagle continued to work in the “traditional” style expresses the degree to which he was
aware of the cultural power and market value of this style. This is not to suggest,
however, that there was no creative, personal investment in creating such works of art.
Blue Eagle, like many artist peers, was critically aware of his position within the broader
art world. Rather than only possessing an innate, natural-born vision that came from his
heritage alone, Blue Eagle did not work in isolation from outside influences, as has often
been argued of the Kiowa painters and other early Indian artists.

147
Acee Blue Eagle, Official Transcript, University of Oklahoma, 1932 (reissued 1935 & 1945),
(Manuscript Acee Blue Eagle Papers, Box 1, Folder Biographical/Genealogical Data, National
Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution)
103
That Blue Eagle graduated with a B.A. and concluded his formal courses at OU in
1932, the same year that Dorothy Dunn established the Studio at the Santa Fe Indian
School, further illuminates his complicated relationship as one simultaneously linked to
the formative artists of traditional Indian painting, and distinct from their experiences in
terms of training and education. While Dunn was encouraging her students to paint
exclusively from tribal sources, Blue Eagle was immersed, if briefly, in classical
antiquities and Northern European masterpieces. Despite this varied instruction, the
extant paintings from this period express Blue Eagle’s consistent commitment to creating
work in line with market expectations established by both the Studio at Santa Fe and the
Kiowa painters.
Based on the style employed by Blue Eagle in six paintings formally dated from
1932 and held in the Acee Blue Eagle collection at the Smithsonian, he was, indeed, more
influenced in this period by fellow Native painters than by the European artistic styles
that were the focus of his courses.
148
That being said, this selection of pieces at the
Smithsonian, including Creek Chief and Two Horses; Representation of Sand Painting of
Kachina and Animals; Four Dakota (?) Warriors on Horseback; Sacred Pipe Dance;
Stickball; and Two Indian Men Hunting Wild Turkeys with Bow and Arrow all show how
incredibly varied Blue Eagle’s early influences and sources were. Given his openly
voiced alignment with the Kiowa painters and his presence at OU one could easily
assume that his works would be overtly indebted to these painters. However, these
paintings, both in subject matter and style, diverge from the Kiowa painters works from
the same period. Stickball [Figure 2.5], with its boldly outlined figures captured mid-

148
Most of the paintings held in this collection are noted by the Smithsonian as undated.
104
action on an entirely blank background, as if the players were not on a field within a
natural landscape but rather in a void of space, with their actions and those of the small
ball transcending gravity even as the men’s bodies feel deeply and firmly rooted to an
absent ground, most strongly recalls the scenes painted by James Auchiah, Spencer Asah,
Jack Hokeah, Stephen Mopope, and Monroe Tsatoke. Spencer Asah’s mural panel from
1939 of an individual stickball player later exemplified the stratified style evoked by Blue
Eagle’s earlier rendition of the same game [Figure 2.6]. Asah’s image, with a lighter,
more delicate handling of paint and greater attention given to facial detail and modeling,
still isolates an active figure, outlined in black, on a blank background. In comparing
these two images of stick ball players one can identify how Blue Eagle was attempting to
adapt and learn from the Kiowa painters’ representational style. The relative coarseness
of Blue Eagle’s treatment of the figure here, in contrast to Asah’s, can be read as
evidence of the artist’s evolving style. While Asah’s image was created some seven years
later than Blue Eagle’s, the older artist’s style was so firmly established at this point that
it is likely that this stylistic adaptation was entirely one direction.
Sacred Pipe Dance similarly evokes the Kiowa flat-style paintings, with its
ceremonial themed scene capturing figures in mid-motion all boldly outlined with a solid
black line positioned on a relatively blank background [Figure 2.7]. While this image
does include some spatial markers, including the buffalo hide upon which the central
figures stand and the two small plants framing them, the blank white of the paper itself
remains the primary component of the background. Blue Eagle here expands upon his use
of decorative, abstractly “tribal” decorative elements, as visible in Stickball, with a solid
patterned lower border demarcating the outer edge of the plane and a highly stylized
105
cloud pattern spanning the “sky” of the scene and terminating in symmetrical lightning
bolts mirroring the active forms of the two outer dancers. These decorative elements,
while clearly meant to suggest a pan-Indian visual vocabulary, bring to mind the art deco
detailing often cited as an influence on the Kiowa painters as well.
149
The abundance of
art nouveau and art deco architecture and decorative murals and design in Norman,
Oklahoma and other cities across the state, including the campus of OU itself, likely
further enhanced the general influence of these styles on these artists, blending the
expanding popularity of all things Indian with a prevalent style popular in domestic and
public spaces frequented by their collectors.
150

In contrast to Stickball and Sacred Pipe Dance are Creek Chief and Two Horses;
Four Dakota (?) Warriors on Horseback; Two Indian Men Hunting Wild Turkeys with
Bow and Arrow; and Representation of Sand Painting of Kachina and Animals [Figures
2.8, 2.9, 2.10, 2.11]. These other paintings dated from 1932 suggest the broader influence
of other Native American artists from the 1920s and 1930s, particularly artists working in
and around Santa Fe and Dorothy Dunn’s studio at the Santa Fe Indian School. This
formal exchange between the two primary institutions of Indian painting in the 1930s -
the Santa Fe Indian School under Dorothy Dunn and OU under Oscar Jacobson - is most
strikingly visible here in Blue Eagle’s Representation of Sand Painting of Kachina and
Animals. This image of a Pueblo katsina (or kachina) figure and animals is clearly based
on the studies of pottery created by Pueblo artists beginning in the first decades of the
twentieth century, first under the auspices of Edgar Lee Hewett and Kenneth Chapman at

149
See Berlo, (2010)
150
See Berlo (2010) and Mark White, Oklahoma Moderne: The Art and Design of Olinka Hrdy, (Norman,
OK: The University of Oklahoma, 2007) for discussion of the influence of Art Nouveau/Art Deco in the art
of the Kiowa painters and at the University of Oklahoma in general.
106
the New Mexico Museum of Art and later under Dorothy Dunn at the Santa Fe Indian
School. Dunn herself created numerous studies of decorative elements from historic and
modern Pueblo pottery, sharing these studies and encouraging her students to create their
own at the Studio in Santa Fe [Figure 2.12].
151
Blue Eagle’s katsina figure here evokes
images of the Diné (Navajo) Yei figure drawn from petroglyphs, sandpaintings, and from
the late 19
th
century, on figurative rugs. This figure is framed by two parrots, likely based
on Acoma pottery, all illustrating Blue Eagle’s engagement with both historic and
contemporary sources from multiple tribal origins.
Whether due to a conscious acceptance that such imagery often holds spiritual
significance for individual tribes, or due to a lack of accurate sources or skills, these
representations are far from exacting. But the style of this early painting, which is more
refined and finished than a simple sketch or study, was one to which the artist would
return. In the 1950s Blue Eagle created a series of silkscreened greeting cards produced
by Paines Greeting Cards of the Southwest out of Forth Worth, reproducing a series of
his paintings in this easily marketed and distributed form. A card with a Navajo Yei,
similar to this early painting, was accompanied with Blue Eagle’s own description of the
Yei figure [Figure 2.13].
152
Blue Eagle explains, “The Navajo Indians have, in their
religious culture, many divinities known as Yeis. It is their belief, that thousands of years
ago, their gods gave these divinities to the Navajos to be used in their sacred

151
Bernstein and Rushing both discuss Dunn’s use of formal and technical studies of Pueblo sources in her
classroom instruction in Modern By Tradition: American Indian Painting in the Studio Style, pp 15-22, 33-
37.
152
Acee Blue Eagle papers, Series 3:1, Box 27
107
ceremonies.”
153
An undated Blue Eagle print, also likely from the 1950s, blends attributes
from both Representation of Sand Painting of Kachina and Animals and the Navajo Yei
greeting card, again affirming the artist’s appreciation of this visual model. While Blue
Eagle clearly had at least a basic understanding of the spiritual/religious power of the Yei
figures, these forms are all clearly his own version; each Yei is more stylized, blocky, and
graphic than Diné images in any medium.
An awareness of the reproducibility of his images, so obvious in Blue Eagle’s
later explicitly commercial ventures, including his series of greeting cards, is already
present in these early paintings. Likely this was directly inspired by the increasing
number of reproductions of Kiowa and Pueblo paintings that circulated in the popular
media and, even more significantly, in the pochoir publications of Kiowa Indian Art from
1929 and Pueblo Indian Painting from 1932 released by l’Edition d’Art C. Szwedzicki in
Nice, France. As Jessica L. Horton and Janet C. Berlo argue, the year 1932 marked a
profoundly influential moment in the expanding international dissemination and
reception of Indian painting, resulting in exhibitions, publications, and major media
coverage of Native artists from the Southwest.
154
Blue Eagle directly benefited from this
context both creatively and professionally. This is manifest in the shifting style applied in
the last paintings dated from 1932: Creek Chief and Two Horses, Four Dakota (?)
Warriors on Horseback, and Two Indian Men Hunting Wild Turkeys with Bow and
Arrow. These three paintings mark a major stylistic departure for Blue Eagle, to the
degree that these works could easily be mistaken, aside from their Plains and Creek

153
Ibid. For a thorough analysis of Navajo pictorial forms, their cosmology and religious significance see
Janet Catherine Berlo, “Navajo Cosmoscapes—Up, Down, Within.” American Art, vol. 25, no. 1, 2011, pp.
10–13.
154
Horton & Berlo, 2015.
108
subject matter, for those by Navajo painters such as Quincy Tahoma, Andy (Andrew
Van) Tsihnahjinnie, or Harrison Begay [Figures 2.14, 2.15, 2.16], among others, based on
Blue Eagles increasing use of a similarly “stylized, idealized landscape form” as opposed
to the purely blank background preferred by the Kiowa painters.
155
Blue Eagle’s ever
expanding and interchangeable cultural style here again affirms his awareness of and
engagement with artworks coming out of Dunn’s Studio in Santa Fe as well as his more
local influences, and vice versa.
While these paintings suggest that the young Blue Eagle had begun to find and
further cultivate his own artistic voice through his stylistic experimentation, his self-
portrayal in the media suggests that his identity as artist, and as individual, remained in
flux throughout his time at OU and beyond. In 1933 an alumni highlight on Blue Eagle in
The Sooner Magazine, the University of Oklahoma Foundation publication, expresses the
degree to which Blue Eagle was still resolving how to shape his own career and identity
as an educated, modern Indian. The feature, emblazoned with a visually-potent
photographic portrait of a nude Blue Eagle posed introspectively in beaded moccasins
and feathered headdress on a draped pedestal like a typical artist’s model [Figure 2.17],
runs from one troubling stereotype to another - all presumably sanctioned to some degree
by Blue Eagle himself. The focus of the article is Blue Eagle’s imminent departure for
Hollywood where he traveled, leaving behind his burgeoning painting career, in order to

155
Brody, 1971: 142. For more information on the Navajo painters working out of Dunn’s Studio see
Brody, 1971: 140-146. These three Blue Eagle paintings, dated at 1932 by the Smithsonian, might be of a
slightly later date if only because of their similarity to the works of these Navajo painters whose fully
developed expression of images on these conventionalized landscape backgrounds began to emerge later in
the 1930s. Of course, it is also quite possible that Blue Eagle himself began to create scenes such as these
on his own and conversely influenced artists in Santa Fe. Certainly, either way this only further cements the
inter-tribal and inter-institutional exchanges which were a constant throughout the early decades of the
development and popularization of “Traditional Indian Painting.”
109
audition for the lead role in the film production of Oliver LaFarge’s novel Laughing Boy.
Invoking natural parallels between Laughing Boy and Blue Eagle, the article opens with
an explanation of one of Blue Eagle’s names, Chee-bon-Ah-Be-La, here attributed as
“Laughing Boy” and given by his father, an “old Pawnee Medicine Man.”
156

This article continues to trace his early artistic and performing successes,
asserting that “the little Indian boy had been taught the ways of the white civilization and
had learned to excel in many of its activities…”
157
While the article does address Blue
Eagle’s painting career, highlighting his winning of fourth grand prize in the international
art exhibition at the 1932 Los Angeles Olympic contests with his painting Indian Ball
Game, likely the same work as the above discussed Stickball, the emphasis remained on
Blue Eagle’s boldly aspirational ambition to receive Hollywood fame. It is unclear how
far his venture actually took him and whether he ever made it before the film’s producers
for an audition: he certainly did not get the part and soon returned to Oklahoma and to
painting.
158
However, the boldness of Blue Eagle’s attempt to gain a lead role in any
Hollywood film at a time when Native Americans were most often played by white actors
in “redface” reiterates his profound desire to transcend, and/or profit from, entrenched
cultural boundaries.
159

156
“Acee Blue Eagle,” The Sooner Magazine, December 1933: 65 & 68. Throughout this article Blue Eagle
identifies his lineage as Pawnee on his father’s side and Creek on his mother’s, which contradicts his more
commonly attributed family heritage. Additionally, the article notes that after his graduation from OU Blue
Eagle returned to his mother’s ranch, which also seems to contradict the widely disseminated notion that
Blue Eagle was orphaned at a young age.
157
Ibid. 65.
158
The lead part in the 1934 production of Laughing Boy was ultimate given to the Mexican-American film
star Ramon Novarro with the female lead given to Mexican-American actress Maria Velez.
159
See Deloria (2004) for specific discussion on Native Americans in early film and the choices made in
casting either Native or non-Native actors for Native American roles.
110
Even the nude photograph of Blue Eagle accompanying this article reveals the
conflicted nature of his burgeoning self-identity. This image recalls the overtly sexualized
neoclassical images and sculptures of the Noble Savage widely popularized in the late
19
th
and early 20
th
centuries. S. Elizabeth Bird explains, “As the ‘Indian problem’ grew
less pressing in the middle of the nineteenth century and into the 1890s, the noble and
often eroticized savage gradually ascended, as the physical appeal of the imagined Indian
body grew increasingly overt … Often the beauty of the Indian body was coupled with a
romantic nostalgia, with the rise of the ‘doomed Indian’ stereotype – the Indian who
knows his time is past, but accepts it with honorable resignation.”
160
In this photograph
Blue Eagle fully assumes this persona, from his introspective, if not mournful, downward
gaze to his ornate headdress (neither Pawnee nor Creek). While certainly Blue Eagle is
portrayed as the Noble Savage here, contemplating resignedly the fading cultures of his
forebears, his active participation in both the creation of this image and the
accompanying text undermines what Bird suggests is a unifying “relative powerlessness”
across all images of the nude Noble Savage, wherein they are “physically strong, of
course, but structurally impotent.”
161
Blue Eagle here is not some anonymous fantasy, but
rather is an active participant in the creation of a modern identity, one in which an Indian
had his paintings displayed internationally, sought to portray a character in an adaptation
of a Pulitzer Prize winning novel, won athletic letters in football, baseball, basketball and
track, was an announcer on a local radio station, and also simultaneously adopted (or co-

160
S. Elizabeth Bird, “Savage Desires: The Gendered Construction of the American Indian in Popular
Media,” in Carter Jones Meyer and Diana Royer, eds., Selling the Indian: Commercializing &
Appropriating American Indian Cultures, (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2001), pp 68 & 70.
161
Bird, 75.
111
opted) “traditional” practices from multiple indigenous sources to achieve even greater
success.
At this early stage in his career, at the age of 26, Blue Eagle had already begun to
participate in the creation of an image that was an amalgamation of cultural ideals and
expectations, willing to cull source material from not only his own Creek/Pawnee
heritage but many other regional tribes as well. As Anthes explains, “Of Creek ancestry
and formed by the experience of displacement and loss, Blue Eagle’s persona was,
moreover, a diasporic performative – a savvy reinvention of self and culture that drew
from then current and quite powerful images and ideas of Indianness in the context of an
emerging ‘culture of personality’ in the early twentieth century.”
162
Blue Eagle’s
“diasporic performative, as Anthes so aptly terms it, was only just being formulated at
this point, and would expand exponentially as the young artist discovered a potent visual
voice informed by study and research and his own identity as both student and teacher.
After Blue Eagle’s graduation from the University of Oklahoma, and his failed
Hollywood venture, his relationship with his mentor Oscar Jacobson continued to
expand, with Blue Eagle consistently acknowledging Jacobson for his early successes. As
he transitioned from student to professional artist, Blue Eagle’s close ties with the art
professor would indeed provide substantial opportunities. In 1934 Acee Blue Eagle was
selected by the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), a division of President Roosevelt’s
New Deal Works Projects Administration (WPA) to paint a series of murals across
Oklahoma at the Carnegie Library and the Veteran’s Hospital in Muskogee, Bacone
College, Central State College in Edmond, Oklahoma College for Women in Chickasha,

162
Anthes, “Why Injun Artist Me,” 556 (?)
112
and the post offices in Seminole and Coalgate. The commissioning of Blue Eagle was not
incidental Jacobson himself was the regional administrator for the PWAP and he
handpicked Blue Eagle, the Kiowa painters, and other leading Native artists to paint the
majority of the New Deal murals in Oklahoma. Jacobson’s background in working
extensively and directly with these artists was particularly influential in how he would
work in his role as the Oklahoma representative for the PWAP and the later New Deal
programs. As a relief program, artists were selected for PWAP projects based on
financial need, with little to no concern given to relative skill levels, creative innovation,
or credentials. Only twenty PWAP projects were completed in Oklahoma, yet the state is
notable for the early and significant presence of works by Native American artists.
163
The
working relationship established, through Jacobson, between Native artists and this
federal program would continue through the subsequent years of the New Deal
initiatives. Ultimately, Jacobson was responsible for the creation of murals across
Oklahoma by Native Americans that pictured a relatively anomalous regional image that
differed both in style and subject matter from most other New Deal murals across the
country. While there are a number of Oklahoma murals that were painted by white
painters from Oklahoma and elsewhere that seem to merge with the popular vision of
New Deal art, the number of Indian murals created by local artists in the traditional
painting style of Blue Eagle and others stands out.
The most intact mural cycle created by Blue Eagle extant today (and his first in
his series of PWAP projects) was created in two classrooms in the Health and Physical
Education Building at what was then the Oklahoma College for Women (the school is

163
Greiner and White 97.
113
now the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma) in Chickasha, Oklahoma, a small
town about fifty miles southwest of Oklahoma City. Blue Eagle’s murals at the College
for Women in Chickasha can be seen as directly expressing the basic principles behind
the government’s initial agenda for the New Deal and PWAP. As a local artist in need of
financial support Blue Eagle was an ideal candidate for receiving such a commission, and
his murals can been viewed as expressing an informative, historical perspective of the
region. Yet there are significant ways in which these murals are incongruous with this
vision as well. Since the commission itself was part of the PWAP, this suggests that the
selection of Blue Eagle as the artist was based purely on his financial need, yet the fact
that Blue Eagle was working directly with Jacobson at the University of Oklahoma
clearly points to the probability that this choice transcended need and aimed to showcase
Blue Eagle’s vision and talent, a decision that ultimately would reflect upon Jacobson’s
own work as well. Beyond the status of his selection as a PWAP artist, Blue Eagle’s work
at the College for Women stands out for both its style and subject, particularly when we
consider the location of the murals within two classrooms in the Health and Physical
Education Building on the campus of Oklahoma’s first women’s college. The selection of
a Native American artist, even a well-known one with local ties to paint a mural
anywhere at this time is relatively unusual, but to have Blue Eagle paint a mural cycle
depicting his image of Plains Indian culture and history at this particular location is rather
surprising.
Blue Eagle’s Chickasha mural cycle, adorning the walls of two classrooms,
depicts a series of life-size figures and decorative motifs that are drawn from Plains
Indian culture and are stylistically resonant with his established practice. Although the
114
murals were not titled at the time they have been loosely referred to as Indian Spear
Dancer, Dancer with Headdress, Drummer, Thunderbird, Buffalo Dancers, and Moving
Camp.
164
They were painted in oil and tempera directly onto the surface of the walls with
a bold palette and a matte finish. This mural cycle was affected materially by the location
and means of its creation. The images were painted directly onto the cement walls, not as
frescoes upon wet plaster, but rather on the dry and rough surface itself. This, and the use
of both tempera and oil paints, only heightens the visibility of his stylistic traits, inspired
by his Kiowa peers, such as bold, flat colors applied in solid swatches of paint, little to no
modeling, and rigid figures. The colors themselves throughout this mural cycle range
from the muted and plain browns, blacks and grays of Moving Camp and Indian Spear
Dancer to the surprisingly bold and vibrant turquoise and blue of the beaded vest and
headdress band of Dancer with Headdress and the incongruent, and severely faded gold
of the masks of the Buffalo Dancers. This confusion of hues, perhaps attributed first and
foremost to the availability of paints, is a marked departure from Blue Eagle’s works on
paper in which he often plays with color in innovative ways. Yet, none of this diminishes
the effect of richness and the thoughtful use of detail and strong lines throughout these
murals.
The first classroom contains two walls decorated with nearly life-size figures. On
one side of the room is Moving Camp that shows a Plains Indian couple walking through
the empty white space of the wall, leading a packhorse carrying their belongings behind
them [Figure 2.18]. The couple is looking steadfastly forward, both of their faces

164
Alyson Greiner and Mark White, Thematic Survey of New Deal Era Public Art in Oklahoma, 2003-
2004, Oklahoma City: Oklahoma State Historic Preservation Office, Project No. 03-401, 2004) 25. I will
continue to refer to them with these titles for clarity.
115
captured in severe profile. They are dressed in traditional attire and the man carriers a
long spear and shield, suggesting his status as a warrior and a hunter. The scene recalls
the earlier nomadic lifestyle of Plains Indians prior to the US government’s creation of
Reservations across the region. On the opposite wall is the scene of Buffalo Dancers;
picturing two active male dancers wearing buffalo head masks facing each other
performing beneath a stylized symbol of the four cardinal directions [Figure 2.19]. These
two figures, much like the Moving Camp, call forth a cultural past that had been
challenged by the American government. Yet, unlike the nomadic past of the Plains
Indians, ceremonial dances continued to exist in the face of forced assimilation. Thus
Blue Eagle was picturing both a past that should not be forgotten and a present that
actively expressed cultural and spiritual perseverance. The Buffalo Dancers are activated
in a manner not seen in the Moving Camp couple. While the man, woman, and horse
appear statically frozen in a moment of migration, the dancers, symmetrically posed with
their outer legs and arms lifted up and out to each other, are dancing forward to
eventually meet in the empty space between them.
The second and larger classroom contains the murals Indian Spear Dancer,
Dancer with Headdress, Drummer (now destroyed), as well as some smaller decorative
bird motifs. Currently, no original photographs of the now destroyed Drummer have been
found and all that remains at this point is the exposed brick of the wall upon which this
image was painted [Figure 2.20]. The opposite wall bears the two figures of the Indian
Spear Dancer and the Dancer with Headdress, which recall the active poses of the
Buffalo Dancers [Figure 2.21, Figure 2.22]. Again, the two figures mirror each other’s
position, although in this case the poses vary slightly and the two are identified as
116
individuals both through their costumes and their visible faces. The torqued, three-quarter
profiles of these two figures expose the solid forms of their backs while giving the
appearance that they are looking out into the white space that surrounds them. Both wear
detailed costumes with particularly striking headdresses and bear ceremonial and
functional weapons in their upraised hands.
In each of the classrooms that Acee Blue Eagle painted at the Oklahoma College
for Women the figures were crafted through the application of solid, almost geometric
swatches of color. Form and contour are suggested through the use of solid white lines,
rather than black outlining, which is only present as a descriptive tool in the rendering of
details on the clothing and headdresses. Through this lack of outlining the fields of color
come to constitute the substance and form of the body and costume on each figure. Many
details are only suggested through general shapes, as is particularly evident in Blue
Eagle’s depiction of the hands, which are simplified mitten-like forms, and the facial
features that are shown only through the angles of the profiles. The overall effect of the
use of color and essentializing of detail is a flattening of the figures, leaving them utterly
two-dimensional. This flatness is only heightened by the bright white background of the
empty space that surrounds each scene. The figures come to appear as cutouts placed
upon a blank sheet of paper where their bodies and costumes are the only referents to
time, space, and identity present.
This mural cycle, and the others completed subsequently by Blue Eagle across
Oklahoma, mark a transition point in his career and his approach to his practice. In
moving from the role of student - first in the comparatively innovate Indian-centered
Bacone College of President Weeks and Ataloa and then as a fully-registered art student
117
at the University of Oklahoma - to professional, self-supporting artist, Blue Eagle was
increasingly devoting time and energy to creating his own version of traditional style
painting grounded in in-depth cultural research. Blue Eagle began to pursue an identity of
not just artist, but expert in all things Indian, leveraging the success of his numerous
large-scale federally sponsored public mural projects in so doing. Blue Eagle explained
of his murals, “I am interested in recording the story of my ancestors which will soon be
forgotten unless immediate steps are taken.”
165
Blue Eagle consistently began to embrace,
and profit from, a modern salvage paradigm, positioning himself as a creative savior for
the cultural heritage of his people at large. Yet rather than investing himself fully in
traditional practices, ceremonies, and lifeways as theoretically he could have done in
order to attempt cultural preservation, in order to fully benefit from this burgeoning
career path Blue Eagle through his persona and his art embodied popular Anglo
stereotypes of Indians writ large.
The success of Blue Eagle’s mural commissions propelled his career, firmly
cementing his status as a successful painter and public persona. In 1935 the 26-year-old
artist was appointed as the first art director of Bacone College’s newly established art
department and was invited to attend an international conference on education in Oxford.
Blue Eagle embarked on the sea voyage to England in August of that year, on a journey
which was covered in The New York Times, The New York Herald Tribune, and many
local publications across Oklahoma. The articles, many featuring photographs of Blue
Eagle dressed in full regalia, all remarked on the spectacle of an Indian sailing aboard the
Normandie to give lectures in the stony halls of Oxford. Both The New York Times and

165
Muscogee Times Democrat, Muskogee, Oklahoma, Nov. 19, 1939.
118
The New York Herald Tribune commented on Blue Eagle’s arrival on board in a tailored
suit or “civilian clothes” going unnoticed as just another passenger, then after responding
to requests Blue Eagle impressed the press and autograph seekers after changing, briefly,
into the dance regalia which he had brought along for his lectures on American Indian
dance, art, and music [Figure 2.23].
166
The performativity of Blue Eagle’s indigenous
identity again presents as fluid and multivalent, as he is here described as variously “a
full-blooded Creek Indian… in full regalia…handed down in his tribe since his ancestor,
Chief William McIntosh, who died in 1825” and a “Pawnee-Creek Indian…whose
paternal ancestors all were medicine men…and his mother was descended from a line of
chiefs and headmen reaching back to Chief William McIntosh.”
167
Of course these minor
variations could certainly be attributed to inaccuracies in reporting, yet the ambiguity of
which parental line was Creek, which was Pawnee, and where exactly Chief McIntosh
fell in that mixture, is a regular refrain in media coverage of the painter.
Upon his arrival in Oxford, Blue Eagle was the subject of a brief article in the
Oxford Mail in which the author describes him as a “tall, stately Redskin…speaking with
a cultured American accent.”
168
The anomalous nature of Blue Eagle here in his role as a
civilized savage is emphasized by the accompanying image in which he is posed again in
full regalia framed by the dowdy, suited, mayor and mayoress of Oxford [Figure 2.24].

166
“Creek Indian Sails to Teach at Oxford,” The New York Times, Aug. 1, 1935 and “Edge Departs on
Normandie, Hopeful of ’36,” The New York Herald Tribune, Aug. 1, 1935. Both in Acee Blue Eagle Papers
(Manuscript Acee Blue Eagle Papers, Oversize Box 1, Scrapbook, National Anthropological Archives,
Smithsonian Institution)
167
Ibid.
168
“Descendant of Chiefs – In Full Costume,” Oxford Mail, Aug. 15, 1935 in Blue Eagle Papers
(Manuscript Acee Blue Eagle Papers, Oversize Box 1, Scrapbook, National Anthropological Archives,
Smithsonian Institution)
119
Blue Eagle’s own words regarding his art, however, firmly position him in the realm of
the educated art world at large. In explaining Indian painting Blue Eagle asserts:
This form of art is extremely unusual. There are only six of us in the world
who can create it. We renewed an old culture, and although we study other
forms of art, we aim at keeping it absolutely pure and unaffected by them.
It is, however, perfect in its adaptation to European work, and in America
we have been very successful in mural work, while I myself have
illustrated two books for an American writer. It is rather like the Egyptian
art found on tombs – we have similar figures and ceremonial dances and
so on, in which there is always a symbolic meaning.
169

In these few sentences Blue Eagle succinctly addresses the status of American Indian
painting in 1935, and his own specialized position within this field. Beyond his self-
aggrandizing assertion that there were only six practitioners of this art form at that time,
what is perhaps more revealing in his statement is the role of non-Native art forms. His
acknowledgement that that while the cultural forms present in his paintings might be
generations old, none of these six painters (presumably himself and the Kiowa Five) were
working without a deep awareness and study of “other forms of art,” exposes the
complexity of his own claims of the authenticity and purity of this painting style. That the
style was also highly adaptable to European and American formats and media only
further complicates the assumption that this art form could only be authentic if it were
purely Indian.
However fraught Blue Eagle’s view of his art practice in light of his educational
grounding in international historic and modern artistic styles might have been, his
successes only expanded after his return from Oxford to his alma mater. The art
department at Bacone College was driven exponentially forward when Acee Blue Eagle
was appointed as the college’s first Art Director [Figure 2.25]. Blue Eagle returned to the

169
Ibid.
120
campus to teach after Ataloa left to pursue independent research in Native American art
in the fall of 1935. John Williams and Howard Meridith, in their history of the college,
explain “In the early 1930s, thanks to the influence of Ataloa, this department supported
an appreciation of traditional Indian art forms, including the study of historic tribal
motifs, styles and techniques.”
170
When Blue Eagle joined the department as its first
Director his own practice was already clearly aligned with this paradigm of research-
based, historically influenced “traditional” art making. Blue Eagle’s position at the
college was a mutually beneficial decision, bringing Blue Eagle’s already significant
fame to the Art Lodge at Bacone which Ataloa had successfully opened in 1932, the same
year that Dorothy Dunn established the Studio at the Santa Fe Indian School, while
confirming Blue Eagle’s legitimacy as a professional artist.
The Art Lodge, Ataloa’s final triumphant project of her tenure at Bacone College,
served to house Blue Eagle’s newly established art department as well as the college’s
growing collection of Native American arts and publications. Through the Art Lodge the
pedagogical and artistic views of Ataloa, Blue Eagle, and President Weeks were
catalyzed. Likely driven by Ataloa’s statements regarding the significant power of
indigenous arts, particularly when returned to the hands and minds of tribal community
members, as much as by his own desire to both maintain a profitable institution and
expand opportunities for the student body, President Weeks increasingly advocated for
the educational necessity of the arts in Indian education. According to Weeks, Indian
education had failed to capitalize on the abilities and skills of Native Americans: “The
trouble has been that the Indian’s education has never fitted him for anything worthwhile.

170
John Williams and Howard Meridith, Bacone Indian University, (Muskogee, OK: Oklahoma Heritage
Association, 1980), pg 28.
121
We have been trying to make carpenters out of artists, house painters out of musicians,
and printers out of poets. We are beginning to realize that the Indian is an artist in the
truest sense of the word.”
171
This statement could very well have come from Blue Eagle,
as he himself maintained the image of the natural born artist throughout his career.
When Blue Eagle arrived in the fall of 1935 the direction of the new art
department had largely been solidified by Ataloa and Weeks. The vision of an art school
for Indian students, teaching Indian arts, with Indian instructors, came from Ataloa and
Weeks. The weight of the fact that Blue Eagle became the director of this new kind of art
school just two years after Dunn formalized her teaching at the Studio at Santa Fe has
often been overlooked. However, the distinction between an Anglo woman teaching
painting, however deeply invested she may have been in her students’ cultural and
creative engagement, and an art department intended from its outset to be led by Native
artists for Native students was a radical prefiguration of the approach taken three decades
later at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Even as the work created by Blue Eagle and
his students was formally more akin to the stylized Traditional Indian Painting rejected
by this later institution, the art director’s conceptual framework was far more
complicated.
In a 1935 article on the Bacone art department Blue Eagle addresses this
complicated nature of the approach and style that he was bringing to his students. Blue
Eagle explains,
These symbols composed a universal language among all tribes. Each
symbol carried its particular significance. Taken together, they formed a
pictorial language, on that was written on buffalo hides and teepees and in
sand paintings. The modern Indian youth in the art school here applies this

171
Neuman, Indian Play, 96
122
age-old symbolism to a new form of art with new mediums. The modern
youth uses the white man’s utensils: brushes, paints and paper. But he
remembers, as he works, that centuries ago his forebears painted these
symbols with paints of mineral origin, with brushes made from the spongy
bones taken from the knee of the buffalo and with paint cups carved from
horns and shells.
172

This statement echoes his remarks given to the Oxford Mail earlier that year. His
assertion that, despite using the white man’s tools, there is a clear and direct line
connecting his students from an ancestral past to their present art making implies that
both Blue Eagle and collectors were seeking something that each would consider to be
“authentic” or more aligned with ancestral traditions and an accompanying image of what
Indians could acceptably create.
Perhaps the most significant aspect of Blue Eagle’s teaching philosophy at
Bacone, which would influence a new generation of artists and propel his own work
through its various later incarnations, was a research-based approach to the creation of
works of art. In the same article cited above, the author describes how
Blue Eagle does not minimize the amount of research work that must be
done before an Indian artist can hope to adequately portray his message.
He himself has done much research, not only in visiting old Indian ruins,
and in searching through yellowed documents, but in contacting directly
the elderly men of various tribes from whom he may obtain information
concerning ancient rituals, traditions and ceremonies.
173

Of course, given Blue Eagle’s own personal development it would make sense that as an
artist who had been raised from a very early age under the assimilationist doctrine of
boarding schools he would need to conduct research in order to create accurate depictions
of historic scenes of Native life and culture, as he attempted to do in the majority of his

172
Blue Eagle quoted in LaVere Anderson, “Bacone Students Work for Indian Art Revival,” Unknown
Publication, December 29, 1935 in Acee Blue Eagle Papers (Manuscript Acee Blue Eagle Papers, Box 21,
Folder Bacone, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution)

173
Ibid.
123
works.. However, in her writings on Bacone College, Lisa K. Neuman has argued that
this anthropological approach benefitted not just Blue Eagle, but the college’s students as
well. As she puts it, “A history of forced relocation and cultural assimilation had
produced a generation of young Indians with little or no knowledge of the lifeways of
their great-grandparents. This was particularly true for many of Bacone’s own students,
who tended to come from the more culturally assimilated families of the Five Tribes.”
174

That Blue Eagle and his students shared this cultural dislocation made his approach more
effective in and out of the classroom.
This research-based practice served emotional, intellectual, and economic
purposes for those involved. Again, Neuman succinctly expresses this dynamic.
“Baconians came to view art informed by ethnography as an important form of cultural
record-keeping for future generations…” while they simultaneously, and to a degree
contradictorily, “selectively used anthropological accounts of Native cultures, along with
their own research, to meet the demands of a growing number of consumers who sought
‘authentic’ portrayals of traditional Native American cultures.”
175
The relationship
between painting and anthropology was certainly not exclusive to Bacone and Blue
Eagle: in fact, the significance of this relationship is undeniable in tracing the early
origins in Santa Fe of Traditional Indian Painting as a concrete style. But the cultural
contrast between students in Santa Fe and Blue Eagle and his students, predominantly
from the Five Civilized Tribes as Neuman notes, calls attention to the ongoing

174
Lisa K. Neuman, “Painting Culture: Art and Ethnography at a School for Native Americans,”
Ethnology, Vol. 45, No. 3 (Summer, 2006): 97.
175
Neuman, (2006): 174.
124
importance of anthropological sources for their creative production.
176
While the mostly
Pueblo student body at the Santa Fe Indian School maintained strong memories and ties
to the “lifeways of their great-grandparents” even as they were torn from these traditions
to attend boarding schools, for the students at Bacone such practices were indeed often
entirely absent from their memories or even from those of their parents. The resources
available to the students at Bacone included artworks and books gathered at the Art
Lodge. In particular, the library selections of works of ethnographic studies of Native
American history and culture would have been central to the research-based art making
advocated by the school and which Neuman concludes was anthropological in practice.
177

While Blue Eagle would only teach at Bacone for three years, his impact carried
on for years. It was during his tenure there that his adaptation of “Traditional Indian
Painting” would come to be known and promoted as the Bacone Style. This synthesis of
Kiowa, Pueblo, Navajo, and Euro-American styles was embraced by Blue Eagle’s
students including Dick West, and many other subsequent students and department
chairs. The Bacone Style would come to dominate the regional market, much as the Santa
Fe Studio Style would drive the scene further west. Also like the Studio Style, Bacone
painting was promoted as pure and authentic, at least publicly contradicting the cross-
cultural and research-based influences that Blue Eagle brought to the school. Yet, Blue

176
See Brody Pueblo Indian Painting and Bernstein and Rushing Modern By Tradition for analysis of the
relationship between anthropologists and the early Pueblo painters. Unlike Santa Fe, where professional
anthropologists and archaeologists were directly and personally involved the expansion of a painting style
and market, the anthropology present at Bacone was largely isolated to written sources actively acquired by
the faculty to be used as sources in the classrooms and studios.
177
According to the student paper, the Bacone Indian, books held at the Art Lodge library included Swift-
Eagle of the Rio Grande by Elizabeth Willis DeHuff, with illustrations by Fred Kabotie, Winnebago Stories
by Oliver La Mere and Harold Brough Shinn, The Story of the American Indian by Paul Radin. Bacone
Indian, April 4, 1929: 4.

125
Eagle’s approach to art education and production drove the Bacone art department
through all of its subsequent art directors. His alignment with the theoretical agenda of
Ataloa, Weeks, and the Art Lodge was elemental in this trajectory. The Art Lodge’s
extensive holdings of traditional cultural art and the college’s in-depth library of history,
ethnography, and anthropology merged with Blue Eagle’s stringent commitment to
traditional Indian painting resulting in countless young artists creating paintings loosely
based on their tribal heritage even as these scenes were foreign from most students’ daily
lives.
The creative actions undertaken by art students at Bacone were laced with an
undercurrent of critical agency often not accorded to the Bacone style of painting which
largely came to be read as assimilationist and market-driven. Neuman explains, “By
portraying the traditional tribal cultures of their elders accurately (i.e., without reference
to European or intertribal influences), many of Bacone’s Indian artists demonstrated that
they, as educated Indians from a Baptist school, had not lost touch with Indian
communities or with their Indian identities.”
178
Their artworks were the visual
embodiment of their push against the very pressures to assimilate with which their work
came to be associated. That this school and art program could be described in 1935 as “an
art school unlike all other art schools, for its students are young men and women who are
not only striving for personal proficiency but are working toward a revival of the art and
culture of their forebears” - a statement that just as easily could have been applied some
thirty years later to the Institute of American Indian Arts - illustrates just how radical this

178
Neuman, (2006): 189.
126
program was for its time.
179
The program continued to thrive for decades after Blue
Eagle’s departure, being led by Woody Crumbo (Potawatomi) from 1938-1941 and then
Dick West (Cheyenne) from 1947–1970.
The effectiveness of the Bacone approach to an anthropological art, begun by
Ataloa and her drive to create and supply the Art Lodge with a diverse collection of
publications and objects and propelled forward by Blue Eagle’s teaching, stimulated his
students and the art director himself to engage increasingly with the expanding market for
Native arts. When Blue Eagle left Bacone to focus on his painting career his own interest
in the history of Native American art had crystallized. By this time Blue Eagle’s
paintings were regularly being shown in small galleries, shops, and clubs around the
country and he was beginning to write, if not necessarily publish, various histories and
statements on American Indian art. In a 1938 statement of “Plans for Work” Blue Eagle
addresses his intended career path. Likely written as part of an application for funds to
support this work, Blue Eagle proposes an in-depth visual research project in which he
will visit with tribal elders in order to document through his paintings the traditional ways
of various communities. As he explains, he will embark on a “first hand study and
research of invaluable facts which otherwise might never be contributed to the history of
our native [sic] Americans.” He addresses the pressing need for accomplishing such
work, explaining “Inevitably, oncoming generations will arise with such questions as:
What was the native [sic] American like? What were the moods and modes that went to
make up his peculiar civilization? ... It is hoped that that these paintings would be

179
LaVere Anderson, “Bacone Students Work for Indian Art Revival,” Unknown Publication, December
29, 1935, (Manuscript Acee Blue Eagle Papers, Box 21, Folder Bacone, National Anthropological
Archives, Smithsonian Institution).
127
authentic answers to these questions.” The urgency of this project is driven by “the fact
that the American Indian is so rapidly making the transition from his peculiar mode of
living to the modern, it is obvious that it is a matter of only a short time, relatively
speaking, until these questions will arise. Therefore it is easy to see that this work will be
a valuable contribution to authentic knowledge of our American history.” Blue Eagle,
with his position as both a cultural insider and established practitioner of modern Indian
painting positions himself in these statements as both an ideal documenter and as the
creator of “a tremendous development in the establishment of the only true American
School of Painting.”
180
While the images that Blue Eagle was creating from this
perspective might have ultimately read as overtly kitsch and inauthentic, his creative
agenda was rooted in a vision of the power of art to preserve and promote cultural
narrative and truths.
181

It is unknown if Blue Eagle was able to embark on this documentary art project to
the extent that he describes in his plan, but he did at least venture to New Mexico to meet
with Pueblo artists, elders, and to advocate for the increasingly popular stylized Indian

180
Acee Blue Eagle, “Plans for Work,” Oct. 13, 1938. (Manuscript Acee Blue Eagle Papers, Box 5, Folder
Plans for Work, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution)
181
In the 2001 exhibition Tourist Icons: Native American Kitsch, Camp, and Fine Art Along Route 66 at the
Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe, curator Joseph Traugott addresses the issues of
authenticity, kitsch, camp, and Native art suggest that works made by Native American artists for the
tourist, or non-museum, market can be simultaneously all of the above. He states “While the term has
precise art historical meanings, kitsch connotes artistic inferiority, poor taste, substandard craftsmanship,
and a complete lack of sophistication. On the other hand, camp—the idea that something is so bad that it's
good—also applies to Route 66 popular culture. Native artists also created art. These finely-crafted
works—including Navajo weavings, Pueblo ceramics, and easel paintings—were sold along side popular
mementos in tourist outlets.” (Online exhibition site
http://www.indianartsandculture.org/exhibits/icons/kitsch2.html). Traugott is clearly drawing upon both
Susan Sontag’s definition of “camp” in Notes on "Camp," The Partisan Review. , Fall 1964, pp. 515-530
(which is particularly useful in thinking of Blue Eagle’s work) and Clement Greenberg’s definition of
kitsch in “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” [1939, v. 1] in Clement Greenberg. Clement Greenberg: The Collected
Essays and Criticism, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986-1993). Also of use in conceptualizing
the role of kitsch, camp, and authenticity in Native art is Jonathan Batkin, The Native American Curio
Trade in New Mexico, (Santa Fe: The Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, 2008).
128
painting he so passionately embraced. In an article in the Santa Fe New Mexican on his
visit out west his comments on his painting, and Indian art in general, both mirror his
plans for work and position his style simultaneously within and distinct from the canon of
American modernism. He asserts “Stylized art is traditional among Indians. They were
modern to start with. Yet now we modernize our art by using permanent materials, and
we still exclude foreign influences. Modern Indian art is the answer to the questions in
generations to come: ‘What were the Indians like.’”
182
Once again, the article, and his
own statements assert that Blue Eagle’s paintings possess purity and authenticity.
However, the inclusion of “modern” and its variants throughout every single quote from
the artist belies a deeper engagement with “foreign influences” than Blue Eagle was
willing, or able, to admit publicly. The notion that modernization came more through
materials than style or subject is critical to Blue Eagle’s argument that there was a natural
and unbroken continuum between his work and his ancestors. That it would be clear to
most viewers who had a basic familiarity with Native art forms deemed traditional such
as pottery, weaving, or beadwork, that watercolor on paper looked different, his argument
could assuage any possible anxiety over his traditionality and Indianness; whether
watercolor on paper could be accepted as more “permanent” is another question all
together.
Over the years Blue Eagle’s expressive experimentation with “modern” art ranged
from his primary focus using stylized flat painting to occasional forays into forms that
recalled more explicitly those “foreign influences” which he purportedly eschewed. In

182
“Indian Art Is Going Streamlined Says Foremost of Oklahoma Group.” The Santa Fe New Mexican,
Sept. 1, 1938. (Manuscript Acee Blue Eagle Papers, Oversize Box 1, Scrapbook, National Anthropological
Archives, Smithsonian Institution)
129
large part, his commitment to the set style of Traditional Indian Painting was driven by
the market that supported him. His paintings were shown regularly in Oklahoma and
beyond, often with lectures and performances by the artist himself accompanying the
images. The rise of small, independent Indian art galleries and shops which largely
revolved around the influence of well-off women’s clubs fascinated with Indian culture
and lore were central to Blue Eagle’s, and other Native artists, increasing marketability in
this period.
183
A prime example was Nettie Wheeler’s Thunderbird Tea Room in
Muskogee, for which Blue Eagle designed and produced logos and interior murals
[Figure 2.26]. The fact that this market was supported primarily by small-scale
organizations, rather than professional art institutions, illustrates the role of Native arts as
still peripheral to the mainstream art world, even as its popularity garnered media
attention, popular interest, and sales. The gendered nature of many of these organizations,
from tearooms to women’s clubs only further accentuates this status. Yet Blue Eagle was
able to construct a space in which his artistic production, which would come to bridge the
fine and commercial art worlds via such institutions, was self-sustaining.
The reproducibility of Blue Eagle’s syncretic style, with its bold lines and flat
forms, further eased the artist’s integration into the commercial art world. Throughout the
1940s and 1950s Blue Eagle created images not just for supporters like Nettie Wheeler
but increasingly both for Native communities in the form of posters and fliers for regional
powwows and also for his own promotional activities. These included his greeting cards
and even a collaboration with a chain of gas stations which reproduced his images on

183
For more on gender and the collection and display of Native American art in the early and mid-twentieth
century see Margaret D. Jacobs “Women and the Indian Arts and Crafts Movement,” Engendered
Encounters: Feminism and Pueblo Cultures, 1879-1934, (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1999).
130
glass tumblers and pitchers for Oklahoma-based Knox Gasoline Industries had
commissioned Blue Eagle to produce eight paintings to be reproduced on tumblers
[Figure 2.27]. Knox Industries made the glasses available with a 10-gallon purchase of
gasoline, all of which served to profit directly from the expansion Route 66 oriented
tourism. These images typically replicated the Kiowa painters’ influence, focusing on one
central figure in action on a blank surface. In paintings and silkscreened reproductions,
such as a particularly graceful untitled and undated rendering of a dancer in full regalia
described by the Smithsonian as Indian Man in Costume and Feathered Headdress,
Holding Feathers and Dancing, Blue Eagle creates a form so utterly flat that it defies the
very movement depicted [Figure 2.28]. The sinuous outline of the dancer curving
continuously from the top of his headdress to the tip of his delicately raised right foot is
all that conveys his action. His body is void of any musculature, lacking the contours
expected of a body in motion, rendering the form not only flat but also somewhat
contorted. This unexpectedly recalls a cubist portrait with all sides of the figure
simultaneously presented on the same plane. But, like a cubist painting, the movement
and action of the scene remains undeniable.
To suggest a likeness between Blue Eagle’s work and cubist painting might
appear initially as a Euro-American art historical projection onto the Native artist’s
“pure” art form. However, throughout his career Blue Eagle created numerous works in
which he explored various artistic sources beyond Native imagery. While generally he
did not sell these works and many of them remain together in his papers and collection at
the Smithsonian Institution, his skillful applications of a multiplicity of styles belie his
public persona of untouched authenticity. Such works vary from rough sketches to
131
completed works and generally do incorporate at least a degree of Native-inspired
imagery, with the more developed pieces shifting increasingly toward something
describable as “Indian” art more than any Euro-American ism. Interestingly, many of
Blue Eagle’s more experimental works can be linked to direct visual sources also held in
his own collection. For example, an undated painting Indian Man and Buffalo in a cubist-
inspired style visually parallels a print in his collection of Dancers by the regionalist
painter Trew Hocker [Figures 2.29 and 2.30]. Blue Eagle’s Indian Man and Buffalo is
superficially a familiar form for the artist, with a single, flat figure outlined in bold black
imposed upon a blank background adorned with only a few stylized decorative elements
floating upon that void. Despite this familiar trope, however, Blue Eagle here embarked
on a radical departure from his typical practice. His figure is now an amorphous form
draped in a multi-hued red covering lacking any of his typical detailed costuming. The
man is cartoonish in features, simultaneously recalling cubist figures, petroglyphs, and a
Sunday paper comic strip. The background, now a wash of delicate blues and greens,
rather than a blank page, is adorned with a strikingly simple and angular geometric
pattern rather than the flowingly ornate and curvilinear art deco-styled lines Blue Eagle
often favored. Indeed, in first viewing this image there is nothing present apart from the
artist’s clear signature to suggest that image was painted by Blue Eagle.
The foreignness of this image in the repertoire of Blue Eagle is only emphasized
further when it is paired with Trew Hocker’s silkscreen of Dancers. Blue Eagle was an
avid collector of paintings and works on paper, amassing a selection of works by many of
the most notable early twentieth century Indian painters and a handful of less well-known
Anglo artists as well. This image is the only work by Trew Hocker in Blue Eagle’s
132
collection, and also one of the least representational works. In this print Hocker depicts
two dancers merged into one form, pieced together as a multi-colored patchwork or
puzzle. The woman’s body, in a pattern of white, pink, and red, curves evocatively into
the man’s more angular, darker form. That the colors and shapes of Hocker’s figures
translate almost directly into Blue Eagle’s Indian Man and Buffalo is no accident. Blue
Eagle, contrary to his numerous public statements, was clearly a passionate student of all
visual forms, something attested to by both his images and his collection. That Blue
Eagle’s own cubist-style foray has a direct formal influence does not necessarily detract
from the significance of this piece. What might be read as blatant appropriation can also
be taken as evidence of a rather fraught and complicated attempt by the artist to push
beyond his own self-imposed artistic boundaries. While Blue Eagle consistently sought to
please and appease his public and collectors by embodying his constructed identity as a
profoundly authentic leader of Indian painting, he was clearly endeavoring to create
works that could satisfy what appears to be a desire to learn about other styles and
practices beyond his own.
Blue Eagle’s investigative synthesis of varied styles is most visible in unfinished
pieces or sketches that reveal far more of the artist’s internal process than his refined, and
constrained, final works. An untitled and undated ink on paper sketch of a boxer viewed
from behind articulates Blue Eagle’s interest and ability in depicting the human body,
something rarely suggested in his flat-style paintings [Figure 2.31]. Whereas most of his
figures tend to remain solidly flat without any reference to musculature or the actual
physical tensions created by their active poses, this image, though a relatively rough
sketch of a life study, bears the marks of the taut and well-formed muscles of an athlete.
133
In a photograph of Blue Eagle, likely from the 1940s, the artist is seated in a brocade
armchair studying a book of art reproductions [Figure 2.32]. The image of Blue Eagles’
focus is George Bellows’ 1909 Stag at Sharkey’s, one of the American painter’s seminal
paintings of the drama and physical action of a boxing match [Figure 2.33]. The torsion
and sinewy lines of the boxers’ bodies so painstakingly rendered by Bellows seems to
draw Blue Eagle into deep contemplation. This contemplation is transferred into Blue
Eagle’s own study of a boxer, though his sketchier technique both emphasizes the fact
that this piece, though signed is a mere study, not intended for Blue Eagle’s selective
clientele. The man, with no distinctive cultural or racial markers, recalls Blue Eagle’s
typical subjects only in that the scene again captures a moment of action frozen in time
and abstracted space. However, the signature itself implies a degree of satisfaction and
completion on the part of the artist himself. While Blue Eagle knew that he could not sell
works such as these as authentic Indian painting, he nonetheless privately devoted
himself to exploring explicitly non-Native styles and techniques.
Perhaps if Blue Eagle’s success had not been so deeply grounded in the context of
traditional Indian painting and the expanding market surrounding it, his more
experimental pieces might have held some traction in the public sphere. However, the
artist’s increasing success paralleled directly the rise of not only small retail spaces and
social clubs dedicated to Indian art, but also the significant expansion of fairs, markets,
and powwows that created another niche for the sale of traditional Indian painting. One
of the most important venues, both for Blue Eagle’s own career and the promotion of
Indian painting in general, was the establishment of the Philbrook Museum’s Indian
Annual, a juried exhibition and sale of Indian painting that began in 1946. The 1946
134
announcement of the first Philbrook Annual stated that their "[s]ubject matter should
concern traditional ceremonial or mystic themes relating to the life or thought of Indian
peoples."
184
During the early years of the Indian Annual, artists were asked to submit
their work according to one of the following geographic areas: Plains Region, Southwest
Region, Woodland Region, Alaska, or Canada and the focus was dedicated exclusively to
painting rather than other traditional art forms found at the markets in Santa Fe or Gallup.
The Philbrook annual was an ideal outlet for Blue Eagle’s syncretic style of
internal-ethnography, with the juries generally favoring traditional Indian painting with a
focus on “authentic” subject matter. The Philbrook annual’s 1947 release on the
exhibition category of “American Indian Painting” stated that successful Indian painters
should depict their own tribes through accurate details, preferably in scenes of
“traditional, ceremonial, or mystic themes” resulting in works that were “valuable
ethnologically as authentic records of American Indian culture, as well as being a
significant art expression.”
185
Such statements regarding the authenticity-based value of
Indian painting effaces the complicated nature of the identity of Native artists such as
Blue Eagle, whose own tribal identity became increasingly performative across his career
and was largely based on research on Indian culture broadly, resulting in works of art
depicting not only the tribes with which he identified, but of tribes with which he had no
affiliation. However, Blue Eagle was able to attain great success at the Philbrook, which
ultimately came to favor the Bacone and Santa Fe styles of traditional Indian painting.
Blue Eagle received ten awards in the Woodlands category, including one Best In Show

184
“First Indian Annual,” 1946, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, OK, annual files.
185
“American Indian Painting,” press release, June 1947, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, OK, annual
files.
135
Award in 1951 and entered a total of forty-five paintings between 1946 and 1959.
186
The
Philbrook became a constant in the final years of Blue Eagle’s career, even as the artist
would embark upon increasingly commercial projects, become a fleeting television star
with his popular, if short-lived, children’s program Chief Blue Eagle which aired across
Oklahoma in 1954, teaching at Okmulgee A & M Tech School, and even returning to
school to study sculpture.
187

Blue Eagle once told a Bacone student, during one of his numerous return visits to
lecture at the school, that Indian artists should enter the Philbrook and other art
competitions to “tell the people that you’re still alive.”
188
This statement, clearly aligned
with the salvage paradigm, propels Blue Eagle’s agenda into a contemporary moment
deeply infused by the past yet also asserting a subtle agency against assimilationist and
destructive policy. Blue Eagle’s historically themed paintings were an attempt to
document what he saw as threatened cultural traditions and he believed that this should
be the overriding goal of Indian painting in general. Blue Eagle consistently insisted upon
the authenticity of the painted image. In discussing the superiority of the painted image
over the written word in preserving cultural heritage he cited the tendency of Anglo
scholars and researchers to become the “butt-end of a huge joke” wherein the “Indian
intentionally falsifies the information he gives. And the well-meaning historian puts this
inaccurate data into books… But with the Indian artist there is no such misrepresentation.
His record is true, for he secures his information either through personal experience or

186
Stephanie Peters, Creating to Compete: Juried Exhibitions of Native American 1946-1960, Masters
Thesis, Arizona State University, 2012.
187
For more on Blue Eagle’s short-lived television career see Anthes, 2014
188
Wyckoff, 92.
136
directly from the old men of his tribe.”
189
Whether or not Blue Eagle steadfastly believed
in this position at an internal level is unclear. However, it elides the significant role
played by the Anglo art market in the production and dissemination of Native American
paintings in this period. As soon as paintings were produced for Anglo collectors in the
early twentieth century, individual artists simultaneously sought to accurately portray
their own cultures in order to both educate their collectors and preserve their own
heritage, as Blue Eagle suggests, while also actively working to protect profoundly
sacred, and thus unknowable, ceremonies, images, and figures from outside forces.
Both Bill Anthes in Native Moderns: American Indian Painting, 1940–1960 and
Sascha Scott in A Strange Mixture: The Art and Politics of Painting Pueblo Indians have
addressed the complexity of “culture brokers” such as the Pueblo painters Awa Tsireh,
José Lente, and Jimmy Byrnes. Anthes and Scott elaborate on the fraught dynamic
between these artists, anthropologists, and the market which supported their art-making.
As relatively traditional members of San Ildefonso, Isleta, and Acoma, respectively,
Tsireh, Lente, and Byrnes all faced degrees of ostracization from their home communities
for sharing sacred and protected tribal imagery with outsiders, and for benefiting
economically from their complicity with anthropologists and collectors alike. However,
there was a greater degree of agency and cultural affiliation within these artists’ practices
than was historically accorded them. As Scott suggests in her discussion of Awa Tsireh,
“By deploying evasive visual strategies - including silences, misdirection, coding, and
masking - the artist celebrated his culture at a time when it was under attack, helped to

189
In LaVere Anderson, “Bacone Students Work for Indian Art Revival,” Unknown Publication, December
29, 1935 in (Manuscript Acee Blue Eagle Papers, Box 21, Folder Bacone, National Anthropological
Archives, Smithsonian Institution)
137
develop a market that benefited himself and his community, and did so while attempting
to protect Pueblo knowledge.”
190
By identifying Anglo scholars as the “butt-end of a
huge joke” Blue Eagle jovially frames the relationship between insiders, outsiders, and
the market, which many Native painters of the early and mid-twentieth century were
navigating.
Blue Eagle’s own engagement with the market was more direct than Tsireh,
Lente, or Byrnes. He was a happy participant in the production and reproduction of his
artwork and his image for a white audience. In part, this can be linked to his own
personal distance from tribal religion and ceremonies. Even as Blue Eagle was an active
and very committed participant in the pan-tribal powwow circuit, this arena, certainly by
the time he was engaged with it, was less about ceremonial practice and more about
performance. If anything, this distance permitted Blue Eagle more freedom to develop a
research-based or anthropological art of his own, actively appropriating the role of
outside observer and documenter. In its own way this did, in fact, provide for, at the least,
a new form of authenticity that an Anglo scholar could never approach. As
simultaneously a “culture broker” and an outsider Blue Eagle’s indigenous ethnography
presaged the era of identity studies through the lens of mid-century stereotypical Indian
imagery. While his “studies” of Indian traditions now appear troubling for their degree of
cultural appropriation and kitschiness, his own political and cultural agency is present
throughout.
In a hand-written note held in Blue Eagle’s papers the artist addressed his own
approach, situating it within the broader field: “Expense of good research to improve

190
Sascha Scott, “Awa Tsireh and the Art of Subtle Resistance,” The Art Bulletin, Vol. 95, No. 4
(December 2013): 597.
138
their art – besides myself, Walter Richard West and Joe H. Herrera are the only Indian
artist [sic] that I know of, who have devoted a tremendous amount of work to research, so
as to develop, improve and better their Indian art.”
191
This research was far reaching
throughout his career, resulting in countless notes on translations between English and
various tribal languages of common words and phrases, as well as artworks and images
from across much of the United States. Despite his enticing bravado and projected self-
confidence as a self-proclaimed “Chief,” Blue Eagle apparently inhabited a space of
profound anxiety regarding his own rather ambiguous identity, as belied through the
numerous notations on family names and roster numbers, extensive research on the
McIntosh family history, and at times conflicting family trees present in his personal
papers. His near compulsive drive to invest significant time and energy in pursuing good
research to better his art originated in his own sense of cultural ambiguity and unending
desire to create an authentic space for himself and for other modern Indians who were
equally disconnected from their own tribal traditions.
The final painting that Blue Eagle entered in the Philbrook was his 1959 Haida
Medicine Painting [Figure 2.35]. The tempera on paper painting is surprising on multiple
levels, marking a shift both in style and subject matter for the artist. While Blue Eagle
consistently depicted cultural scenes from beyond his own identity, this image of
Northwest Coast traditions goes much further afield than his other works. This break with
a dedication to –broadly speaking - a regional focus is heightened by Blue Eagle’s
experimentation with the distinctive graphic form-line style of the Northwest Coast. Blue
Eagle painted figures loosely depicting ceremonial Haida dancers, both wearing

191
Handwritten note in (Manuscript Acee Blue Eagle Papers, Box 5, Folder Misc. Notes, National
Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution)
139
variations on chilkat blankets, with one holding a painted paddle and wearing an
articulated raven mask and the other wearing a painted spruce root hat and lifting a
carved ladle above a zoomorphic feast bowl. These figures are all presented in front of
Blue Eagle’s interpretation of a Haida long house screen. While these images undeniably
evoke a general Northwest Coast sensibility, the painting, with its perplexing palette of
lilac, periwinkle blue, and mustard yellow and cartoonish, almost cute renderings of
Haida clan animals, is certainly far from an “authentic” cultural representation. Equally
complicated is the fact that Haida Medicine Ceremony garnered Blue Eagle the first place
award in the Woodlands category, based on Blue Eagle’s Creek (and not his Pawnee)
identity, rather than the subject of the painting. The formal divergence in this painting,
despite its cultural incongruities, expresses the degree to which Blue Eagle sought to
merge his own dedication to research-based subject matter and an increasing engagement
with stylistic adventuring at the very end of his career. Blue Eagle received this award in
May of 1959 and he died of liver failure in a V.A. hospital in relative poverty, despite his
successes, the following month.
In many ways Blue Eagle functioned as a proto-Pop artist, consciously embracing
and manipulating popular media through his fine and commercial art (between which
there is negligible distinction), his constructed persona, and his enthusiastic consumption
and collection of select works by some of the most influential early to mid-twentieth
century Native artists, as well as an array of Indian kitsch ranging from post-cards to
Indian Princess pin-ups. His consumption and production of commercial art and popular
culture and his embrace of serial reproducibility of his artworks prefigure the actions of
140
the American Pop artists.
192
Bill Anthes notes that Blue Eagle was simultaneously a
“consummate American artist,” a “modern artist,” and the embodiment of “the
ambivalent position of Native Americans in the first decades of the twentieth century.”
193

The late 1950s is the moment typically cited as the beginning of a clear and asserted
critique of the traditional style of painting by Native artists. As Anthes explains, “Native
artists who desired to reinvent themselves as modern individuals had to formulate a
critique and come to terms with the dominant legacy of the Studio style.”
194
This
significant shift is undeniable when considering mid-century artistic production, but
perhaps Blue Eagle’s earlier pan-Indian work, as beholden as it was to the traditional
style, evidences an earlier and more pivotal moment of questioning regarding the nature
of authenticity.

192
Whether or not Andy Warhol, for example, was aware of Blue Eagle at all is not what I am arguing,
though it is interesting to not the visuals in Warhols series Cowboys and Indians from 1983. My argument
here is more in line with William C. Agee’s case that Stuart Davis was a proto-Pop artist in Modern Art in
America, 1908-68, (London: Phaidon, 2016).
193
Bill Anthes, “’Why Injun Artist Me’: Acee Blue Eagle’s Diasporic Performative,” Native Diasporas:
Indigenous Identities and Settler Colonialism, Gregory D. Smithers & Brooke N. Newman, eds. PAGES?
194
Anthes, 143.
141
Chapter Two
IMAGES

Figure 2.1: Ataloa Lodge, Bacone College, Muskogee, OK, pictured 2015.

142

Figure 2.2: Stephen Mopope, Eagle Dancer, Pochoir print, 1929

143

Figure 2.3: Jack Hokeah, Buffalo Dance, Pochoir print, 1929

144

Figure 2.4: Lois Smokey, Kiowa Family, Pochoir print, 1929

145

Figure 2.5: Acee Blue Eagle, Stickball, watercolor on paper, 1932

146

Figure 2.6: Spencer Asah, Stickball, mural, 1939

Figure 2.7: Acee Blue Eagle, Sacred Pipe Dance, watercolor on paper, 1932
147

Figure 2.8: Acee Blue Eagle, Creek Chief and Two Horses, watercolor on paper, 1932
148

Figure 2.9: Four Dakota (?) Warriors on Horseback, watercolor on paper, 1932

Figure 2.10: Two Indian Men Hunting Wild Turkeys with Bow and Arrow, watercolor on
paper, 1932
149

Figure 2.11: Representation of Sand Painting of Kachina and Animals, watercolor on
paper, 1932

150

Figure 2.12: Dorothy Dunn instructional material

151

Figure 2.13: Acee Blue Eagle, Navajo Yei, silkscreen greeting card, 1950s
152

Figure 2.14: Quincy Tahoma, Riders Resting, Watercolor on paper, 1937

153

Figure 2.15: Andy (Andrew Van) Tsihnahjinnie, Herding Sheep, casein on board, nd
154

Figure 2.16: Harrison Begay, Painting of a Young Navajo Boy Tending his Sheep, casein
on board, nd

155

Figure 2.17: “Acee Blue Eagle,” Sooner Magazine, 1933
156

Figure 2.18: Acee Blue Eagle, Moving Camp, mural, 1934

157

Figure 2.19: Acee Blue Eagle Buffalo Dancers, mural, 1934

158

Figure 2.20: Acee Blue Eagle Drummer, mural, 1934

159

Figure 2.21: Acee Blue Eagle Indian Spear Dancer, mural, 1934

160

Figure 2.22: Acee Blue Eagle Dancer with Headdress, mural, 1934
161

Figure 2.23: Acee Blue Eagle and unknown man aboard the Normandie, 1935

162

Figure 2.24: Acee Blue Eagle with Oxford mayor and mayoress in the Oxford Mail, 1935
163
Figure 2.25: Acee Blue Eagle and unknown art student at Bacone College, c. 1936

Figure 2.26: Acee Blue Eagle painting mural at Nettie Wheeler’s Thunderbird Tea Room
in Muskogee, OK, undated postcard
164

Figure 2.27: Knox Gasoline promotional brochure for Acee Blue Eagle “Famous
Oklahoma Indians” tumblers
165

Figure 2.28: Acee Blue Eagle, Untitled (Indian Man in Costume and Feathered
Headdress, Holding Feathers and Dancing), silkscreen, nd

166

Figure 2.29: Acee Blue Eagle, Indian Man and Buffalo, tempera on paper, nd

167

Figure 2.30: Trew Hocker, Dancers, silkscreen, nd
168

Figure 2.31: Acee Blue Eagle, Untitled (Boxer), ink on paper, nd
169

Figure 2.32: Acee Blue Eagle seated with book, nd

170

Figure 2.33: George Bellows, Stag at Sharkey’s, oil on canvas, 1909

171

Figure 2.34: Acee Blue Eagle, Haida Medicine Painting, tempera on paper, 1959

172
Chapter Three
“To Be Really Contemporary:” The GI Bill and Native American Artists
World War II marked a point of significant transition for Native American
communities and individuals. Images of the Navajo Code Talkers, Ira Hayes, the Pima
man who helped his fellow Marines raise the flag at Iwo Jima, or Native servicemen who
were forced on the Bataan Death March come to mind.
195
These vivid images begin to
express the profound role of war on America’s indigenous communities, but the impact
continued to stretch after treaties were signed and peace was declared, touching all levels
of homelife, including education and the artmaking of Native individuals. In 1944 the
federal government united to respond to the mounting needs of the countless World War
II veterans who would soon be returning stateside to face the often traumatic, financially
difficult transition back to civilian life. A politically charged decision, complicated by the
conflicted legacy of New Deal policy and programming, and known as “The
Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944,” was intended to respond to this large, but
select population in order to provide direct support to veterans while also attempting to
sustain and expand the economic thrust of wartime industry.
196
What was not considered

195
On Navajo Code Talkers see Däwes, Birgit. "Transnational Debts: The Cultural Memory of Navajo
Code Talkers in World War II." American Studies Journal 59, no. 59 (2015), Nixon, Brian. "Last of the
Original Navajo Code-Talkers Dies." Indian Life 35, no. 1 (2014): 1, Tohe, Laura. Code Talker Stories.
Tucson, AZ: Rio Nuevo Publishers, 2012. On Ira Hayes see Hemingway, Albert, 1950. Ira Hayes, Pima
Marine. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1988 and Carstarphen, Meta G., 1954 and John P.
Sanchez 1953. American Indians and the Mass Media. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012. On
Native Americans and the Bataan Death March see Jordan Beltran Gonzales, “Bataan Death March and US
Colonialism,” online http://newmexicohistory.org/people/bataan-death-march-and-us-colonialism
196
See United States, Congress. House, Committee on World War Veterans' Legislation, Servicemen's
Readjustment Act of 1944 -- and the Act Providing for Vocational Rehabilitation of Disabled Veterans .
with Amendments Prior to January 1, 1946 1946, Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin The G.I. Bill:
A New Deal for Veterans, (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), Suzanne Mettler, Soldiers
to Citizens: The G.I. Bill and the Making of the Greatest Generation (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2005), Stephen R. Ortiz, Veterans' Policy, Veterans' Politics: New Perspectives on Veterans in the Modern
173
by any on the political front was the possibility that this economic sustainability program
would radically influence cultural production in mid-century America. While the role of
the artist was rather clearly delineated within the New Deal, whether or not the returning
veterans would choose to direct their GI Bill supported paths toward the creative fields
was of little consequence to the government or military alike.
This relative lack of interest in the arts on the part of administrative officials is
likely one of the reasons why so little has been written on the impact of the GI Bill on the
arts. The data is simply not available through which we might learn which and how many
veterans chose to study art through their education allotment, nor are there numbers that
tell us how many independent art schools were created solely to serve (and profit from)
this newly formed student body. Despite this lack of hard numbers and statistics, the
paths of individual artists as they passed through and beyond World War II, expanding
their careers with the application of their GI Bill funds, can nonetheless be followed in
order to reach a significant conclusion regarding the impact of this particular moment on
American art history.
The expansive rise of the United States as a cultural force emerging from the
battlegrounds of World War II was only heightened by the influence of young artists
employing their GI Bills to study at colleges, universities, and ad hoc art schools across
the nation, Europe, and even Mexico. Such American art icons as Richard Diebenkorn,

United States (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012), Kathleen Frydl, The GI Bill, (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009), Keith W. Olson, The G.I. Bill, the Veterans, and the Colleges,
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1974), Wilson Smith and Thomas Bender, American Higher
Education Transformed, 1940-2005: Documenting the National Discourse, (Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2008).

174
Ellsworth Kelly, and Robert Rauschenberg, as well as leaders in the expansion of the
American craft scene like William Daley, Ramona Solberg, and Harvey Littleton, all
benefited from an art education undertaken through the GI Bill. Yet the broader impact of
the educational opportunities sponsored through this program go far beyond the effects
on a handful of renowned and highly-studied artists. As MaLin Wilson-Powell asserts,
the Bill “ not only turned blue-collar America into white-collar America, it turned
American artists from fringe figures into citizen artists.”
197
The promulgation of the
visual arts as a viable field of study spread across the United States as countless degree
and certificate-granting art programs cropped up, receiving countless government dollars
to support their creative pedagogy. A particularly significant, yet underappreciated, result
of the cultural impact of the GI Bill was a wave of GI Bill-educated Native American
artists who studied across the nation at non-Native art institutions and subsequently went
on to influence the direction of both Native American art history and art education. The
rise of mid-century Native American artists, who increasingly sought artistic expression
that incorporated both tribal and individual identities, traditional and Western forms and
techniques, was directly related to this period of transition in American art education.
In spite of this artistic florescence, the essence of the GI Bill was a practical
attempt to ease returning World War II veterans back into civilian life and bolster post-
war economic growth. Providing assistance in three areas - unemployment compensation
of $20 per week for a maximum of fifty-two weeks; up to four years of education and
training at an annual tuition rate of as much as $500 (and a monthly stipend of $50 for

197
MaLin Wilson-Powell, “AFTER THEY'VE SEEN PAREE,” Art Issues no64 23-6 S/O 2000

175
single men and women and $75 for those with dependents) to GIs who had served at least
ninety days; and VA-guaranteed home, farm, or business loans - the Servicemen’s
Readjustment Act resulted in significant and lasting changes to the face of American
culture. According to the 1955 Census there were roughly 15,750,000 World War II self-
reported veterans in civilian life across the United States. Approximately 12.4 million of
those received at least one of the three G.I. Bill benefits.
198
Title II of the GI Bill, which
provided college or vocational education for up to four years for all veterans, regardless
of rank or race, encouraged significant demographic shifts in existing colleges and
universities. According to LIFE Magazine’s April 1947 cover story, “Veterans at
College,” veterans on the GI Bill constituted up to 50 percent of the total college
population, with 1,575,000 veterans enrolled in the prior twelve months.
199

The GI Bill has been seen as the great democratizer of American higher
education: for the first time college became possible for many lower and middle class
students. This applied to many minorities as well, “According to a survey conducted by
the Veterans Administration in 1950, 49 percent of nonwhites (compared to 43 percent of
whites) used education and training benefits at the college or subcollege level.”
200

Throughout the statistical data that outlines which areas of the GI Bill benefits were taken
advantage of by various racial and ethnic groups, there is a general lack of evidence about
the number of Native American service men and women who received any GI Bill funds,
much less whether they received educational, unemployment, or individual loans. This
lack of data is a direct result of the cultural and political climate in the US at the outbreak

198
Altschuler and Blumin, 8.
199
“Veterans at College,” LIFE, April 21, 1947: 105.
200
Altschuler and Blumin, 129.
176
of World War II.
201
While African Americans were strictly segregated into black-only
regiments, Native American enlistees generally served alongside White soldiers in all
branches of the armed forces. Unfortunately we do not know today how many Native
American veterans actually took advantage of the educational opportunities afforded by
the GI Bill.
Much of what has been written about Native American use of the GI Bill focuses
on vocational training, agricultural apprenticeships, and BIA endorsed employment
opportunities such as Navajo veterans teaching English to students across the Navajo
Nation, where there were stark teacher shortages. Additionally, the Veterans
Administration did little to track actual areas of study for those GIs whose educational
paths were documented. Thus there are no records attesting to the number of veterans,
Native or not, who studied the arts at colleges, universities, and private institutions.
Despite this paucity of statistical data, it is undeniable that the GI Bill had a significant
effect on the widespread establishment of studio art departments, the broader acceptance
of art as major field of study, the creation of small-scale for-profit art schools, and thus
the careers of any number of artists.
202
Particularly significant when considering Native
American artists is the attendant shift away from Bureau of Indian Affairs programs of
study and funding and a resulting increase in artistic and financial autonomy. Prior to the
institution of the GI Bill, college enrollment by Native American students was limited,

201
Alison R. Bernstein, in American Indians and World War II: Toward a New Era in Indian Affairs, states
that approximately 25,000 Indians served in World War II, while several hundred Native American women
served as WACs or Waves. Alison R. Bernstein, American Indians and World War II: Toward a New Era
in Indian Affairs. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991, pg 40. However, according to Howard D.
Morgan in Army History: The Professional Bulletin of Army History, No. 35 (Fall 1995), pp. 22-27, more
than 44,000 Native Americans served across all fronts of the military throughout the war.
202
John Warren Oaks, “How the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 (GI Bill) Impacted Women
Artists’ Career Opportunities,” Visual Culture & Gender, Vol. 1, 2006: 25.
177
largely due to the deficits in academic versus vocational instruction at most BIA high
schools. While the statistics do not exist that would allow us to trace the precise numbers
of pre and post-war Native American college graduates, the general rise in enrollment
spurred by the GI Bill did result, at least in the immediate post-war years, in an increase
in American Indian college attendance. Yet the general sense of a rise in college students
does little to illuminate how such experiences might have changed the individual career
paths of Native American veteran students, nor does it contribute to a greater
understanding of the role played by these expanded educational opportunities in the rise
of Native American artists who emerged alongside their Anglo counterparts. It was not
only the Rauschenbergs and Kellys who achieved increased artistic success through their
use of their GI educational funds.
In considering the post-war rise of increasingly successful individual Native
artists, this general shift away from artists working within Bureau of Indian Affairs
programs (such as the Studio at the Santa Fe Indian School led first by Dorothy Dunn and
then by her mentee Geronima Cruz) to artists studying within non-Native institutions is
considerable. By looking at the educations attained by individual Native American artists
through the GI Bill, rather than attempting to consider Native American veterans as a
whole, one can begin to see the rippling effects that these educational opportunities had
on their artistic practice. Native American artists who advanced their studies through the
GI Bill represent a complicated intersection of the mid-century rise of American
modernism, the concurrent revival of studio crafts, and the shifting identities of
relocation-era American Indians in general. For generations, Native American artists
were seen as traditional craftsmen, creating art forms that were unbroken from an
178
ancestral past in technique, medium, and meaning. While many Indian artists were able to
gain national and international acclaim for their works, largely beginning with the
widespread popularity of “traditional Indian painting” in the 1920s and 1930s, they were
not typically embraced for their artistic departures from this relatively codified style.
World War II brought about widespread shifts in Native American cultural experiences,
resulting in shifts away from rural lifeways on reservations toward increasingly urban
locations and an increase in work either directly or indirectly in service to the military.
While many Native Americans moved away from their communities during and after the
war, there was a simultaneous rise in direct engagement with tribal religion and
ceremonies that was also contingent upon the war’s influence, as countless returning
veterans were reintegrated into their tribes through purification ceremonies meant to ease
the transition from battle to home life. While these shifts were certainly far from
universal, their impact cannot be overlooked, particularly when considering the history of
twentieth century Native American art.
i
Charles Loloma and Otellie Pasiyava, both Hopi, met when they were students at
the Phoenix Indian School, where they studied under Lloyd New’s innovative art
education department. New’s influence on Charles and Otellie is clear throughout their
careers, both professionally and creatively. Yet Charles’ artistic career had already begun
by the time he arrived at Phoenix, largely due to his earlier studies with the Hopi artist
Fred Kabotie, and continued exponentially from there, culminating with his completion
of murals for the 1939 exhibition of Indian art at the Golden Gate International
Exposition in San Francisco organized by Rene D’Harnoncourt. Kabotie himself was
179
asked by D’Harnoncourt to arrange for young painters to create these murals onsite to be
used as supplementary imagery for the artifacts on display. Loloma worked alongside Joe
Duran (Tesuque Pueblo) and Ignacio Moquino (Zia Pueblo), creating images of nearly
life-size Hopi katsinas painted in the Studio style [Figures 3.1 and 3.2] As World War II
progressed, Charles enlisted in the army, serving for four years, three of which were
spent building roads on the Aleutian Islands. In 1946, after completing his service,
Charles joined Otellie at Second Mesa where she had spent the war years teaching
kindergarten. Charles was engaged to illustrate Edward Kennard & Albert Yava’s
(Hano/Tewa) bilingual children’s book, Little Hopi.
203
Part of a series of Bureau of
Indian Affairs-funded books for young Indian readers illustrated by Native artists, many
of whom studied under Lloyd New, Little Hopi marks an early transitional period in
Charles’ career [Figure 3.3]. Loloma’s illustrations for the book show an increased level
of expressiveness through his treatment of the human characters, the landscape, and the
narrative development, all drawing upon the influence of his high school courses with
New whose open melding of Western techniques and mediums with those of Native
traditions represent a considerable break with the dominant force of Traditional Indian
Painting.
For Charles and Otellie Loloma this was only the beginning of a career transition
that would lead them to increasingly question the boundaries of “traditional” and
“Western” art. Shortly after Charles’ return, before Little Hopi was even published, the
Lolomas decided to leave their home in order to further their art education. Upon the

203
See Rebecca C. Benes, Native American Picture Books of Change: The Art of Historic Children’s
Editions, Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 2006 for more information on Little Hopi and the other
BIA sponsored readers.

180
recommendation of Willard Beatty, the Director of Education for the Bureau of Indian
Affairs, the Lolomas decided to embark on a transformative journey from Second Mesa
to Western New York to study at the recently formed School for American Craftsmen at
Alfred University.
204
They were able to apply Charles’ GI Bill, as well as a scholarship
awarded to Otellie, in order to study ceramics, a medium with which neither of the young
artists had significant prior experience. The School for American Craftsmen was a
relatively new institution when the Lolomas arrived in 1947. It was founded by Aileen O.
Webb, who was also the president of the American Craftsmen’s Educational Council and
had created the America House craft store in Manhattan. Webb explained that the school
originated in 1944 when a “valuable and somewhat crazy GI” called her to the front of
the shop at America House and suggested that she open a craft school in his
hometown.
205
This began a series of conversations that led to the opening of the School
for American Craftsmen in 1946 at Dartmouth College. The war ended that year, and
with the large number of returning veterans, the school was relocated to Alfred
University in New York, which already housed a well-established ceramics school.
The School for American Craftsmen is emblematic of certain pedagogical shifts
that emerged directly from the post-war American context. With the general rise in
college enrollment brought on by veterans taking advantage of the GI Bill, there was a
broad increase in the number of art students interested not only in creative exploration,
but in the applicability of the arts to a functional career choice, as well. In part inspired
by Bauhaus-influenced European émigré artists who fled to the US during and after the

204
“Hopi Indians Come to Alfred to Learn Modern Pottery Methods,” Fiat Lux, Alfred University, Vol.
XXXV, No. 20, March 23, 1948, p. 1.
205
Ellen Paul Denker, "Aileen Osborn Webb and the Origins of Craft's Infrastructure." The Journal of
Modern Craft 6, no. 1 (2013): 11-34.
181
war to teach and create, such as Josef and Anni Albers, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, Walter
Gropius and others, young American artists sought out art programs that could blend art,
industry, craft, and conceptual abstraction.
206
Increasing numbers of art departments
began offering MFAs and employing practicing artists to teach in newly formed studio
arts departments. Alfred University itself offered the nation’s first MFA in ceramics in
1943, establishing a path toward professional art education and production beyond
traditional painting and sculpture programs. Throughout this period American studio craft
became appreciated, both in the market and in the university, as equal to the fine arts.
207

When Webb and the other members of the American Craftsmen’s Educational Council
organized the School for American Craftsmen in 1944, it was in this context and in
expectation of the waves of returning veterans who could benefit from integrated,
professionalized craft training.
According to the Faculty Handbook,
The fundamental aim of the School for American Craftsmen is to
implement the current trend in education, summed up by the phrase, ‘Real
Life in Education,’ by a program which will give these words vitality and
meaning in the realm of the Hand Arts. Students graduated from such a
course should be able immediately to take their place in the economic
field, either as self-employed craftsmen, in special industrial positions, or
in teaching.
208

The educational framework for the craft courses at SAC was based on developing
students’ design principles through exposure to diverse object samples, technical skills

206
Frederick A Horowitz and Brenda Danilowitz, Josef Albers: To Open Eyes : The Bauhaus, Black
Mountain College, and Yale (London: Phaidon, 2006), Margret Kentgens-Craig, The Bauhaus and
America: First Contacts, 1919-1936 (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1999), Jill E. Pearlman, Inventing
American Modernism: Joseph Hudnut, Walter Gropius, and the Bauhaus Legacy at Harvard
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007).
207
See Janet Koplos & Bruce Metcalf, Makers: A History of American Studio Craft. University of North
Carolina Press, 2010, for more information on the history of American Studio Craft.
208
Faculty Handbook School for American Craftsmen, Linn Phelan Archive, courtesy Andrew Phelan.
182
through extensive studio time and testing, and marketing and production capabilities so
that departing students would be well-prepared for economically sustainable careers. The
School for American Craftsmen represented the broader belief held by Webb and other
members of the American Craft Council that hand work had a critical role to play in post-
war America, a role which was indelibly tied to the post-war psyche regarding the
relationship of the individual to mass production and consumption.
209
In the original
brochure for SAC, Horace H. F. Jayne, president of the American Craftsmen’s
Educational Council, asserted as much, “The living patterns of the future, and the
promise of greater comfort and ease growing out of the vast technological resources
developed for war, all point to dynamic changes in our concepts of the uses of craftsmen
and their products…The need now is to redefine hand work, analyze its status, and
establish for its products a place paralleling the machine made article and not competing
with it.”
210
Central to this agenda was the individualism and authenticity attributed to
craft goods versus mass-produced objects, which made hand work particularly
marketable in this period [Figure 3.4].
The ceramics department, in which the Lolomas were enrolled, was led by the
potter Linn Phelan. Phelan’s work, both as an artist and educator, was firmly rooted in the
Arts and Crafts movement and a firm belief in the functionality of craft in all forms. This
is not to say that he was not invested in creative design, as is evident in the student and

209
Denker and Emily Zaiden, "An Unyielding Commitment to Craft: Aileen Osborn Webb and the
American Craft Council." Archives of American Art Journal 50, no. 3/4 (2011): 10-15. Also Janet Kardon
and Ralph T. Coe, eds., Revivals! Diverse Traditions, 1920-1945: The History of Twentieth-Century
American Craft (New York: H.N. Abrams in association with the American Craft Museum, 1994), Janet
Koplos and Bruce Metcalf, Makers: A History of American Studio Craft (Chapel Hill, NC: University of
North Carolina Press, 2010),
210
SAC Brochure, Linn Phelan Archive, courtesy Andrew Phelan.
183
faculty samples of works produced at the school that clearly show the influence of world
cultures and formal archetypes including European folk ceramics, early Maiolica Arcaica
pottery from 13
th
– 15
th
century Italy and Spain, and others [Figures 3.5 and 3.6]. Phelan
rigorously instructed his students in wheel throwing, slab construction, glaze formulation,
and firing techniques. Phelan himself, who had established two successful pottery studios
early in his career, was the first ceramist hired by the School for American Craftsmen.
His own work was directly inspired by Ruskin, Morris, and the English Arts and Crafts
Movement, although both in his studios and his teaching he advocated for the application
of a full range of technical skills beyond hand building, including wheel-throwing and the
use of molds and jiggering. In addition, Phelan, and the School for American Craftsmen
in general, believed that students should be fully prepared to operate as self-sustaining
craftsmen at the end of their educations. As Phelan’s son, Andrew L. Phelan explained,
“The idea of self-sufficiency and the concept of the craftsman drawing on local resources
was a central tenet of the educational program at the nascent school,” and in the ceramics
courses, that meant that students were expected to source local clays and create their own
glaze formulas.
211
Otellie, whose grandmother was an active potter, had experience
working with natural clays, but neither she nor Charles were familiar with working on a
potters wheel, firing in a commercial kiln, or formulating glazes. But they both invested
fully in their work, spending extra hours in the studio and working through the
mathematical formulations for various glazes and firing temperatures, as well as
calculating material and labor expenses [Figure 3.7].

211
Andrew L. Phelan, Becoming the Village Potter: The Life of Linn L. Phelan, (Norman, OK: Quail Creek
Editions, 2012), 86.
184
Students and faculty alike were expected to spend forty hours per week in the
studio. Instruction for all areas of study was expected to include three basic concepts:
design, techniques (including shop practice and production), and marketing [Figure 3.8].
Design included the study of color, technical drawing with pencil and brush, how
materials influence design, how function influences design, and “understanding and
appreciation of good design and its relationship to craftsmanship.”
212
Intrinsic to the
instruction of studio techniques and production was the assumption that every successful
working craftsperson would “be obliged to produce to live” and thus students should
learn to produce in mass at the wholesale level, and not just concentrate on “the
production of an isolated beautiful piece.”
213
Through such pedagogical approaches, the
School for American Craftsmen forthrightly distinguished itself from any other fine art
school. Further enhancing its singularity was the Marketing and Production department,
which coordinated with students for the entry of their works into the salesroom at the
America House [Figure 3.9]. All students were required to study “the problems of
marketing, market awareness, public desires and reactions, [and] pricing and styling”
214

The students and faculty at the School for American Craftsmen, even with their devotion
to “hand arts” over industry, were first and foremost product designers and secondarily
individual artists. Yet creative expression was not absent in the studio classroom. In an
undated and untitled course description Phelan asserts, “[the student] goes at his own
pace thru [sic] a well designed course in which he discovers how he best can use clay for

212
Faculty Handbook for the School for American Craftsmen, 1. From collection of Quail Creek Editions /
Andrew L. Phelan.
213
Ibid, 2.
214
Ibid, 4.
185
his own creative interpretations of developing a line of functional pottery suitable to
express his own day and age: i.e. – to be really contemporary.”
215

The educational and social opportunities afforded to the Lolomas at the School for
American Craftsmen were multi-tiered. The work that they created there represents the
point of departure for both of their practices through the merging of traditional Hopi
design, meaning, and pattern, with modern techniques, materials, and design theories. As
artists (markedly not craftspeople), each Loloma embraced and reacted against various
aspects of their SAC educations. As successful business people, particularly in the case of
Charles, there is much that should be credited directly to their work in both the ceramics
and marketing departments; and as educators it is clear that this early exposure to a
groundbreaking alternative educational approach was influential even decades on. While
Charles and Otellie eventually diverged personally and professionally, their early years
working side-by-side first at the School for American Craftsmen and then subsequently at
their own successful studio and shop directed the next stages of their respective careers.
It was at the School for American Craftsmen that Otellie Loloma fully invested in
the medium that would remain her primary focus for the rest of her career. While much
of her early work shows its indebtedness to Phelan’s functional agenda, her mature pieces
transcend such categorization, recalling more the modernist works of artists such as Peter
Voulkos, or, through her manipulation of the classic pot form, the creative play and
manipulation of standard styles seen in the work of Betty Woodman, a fellow SAC
graduate, all while maintaining a deep footing in Hopi form and traditions [Figures 3.10

215
Reproduced in Phelan, 87.
186
and 3.11]. The grounding in design principles and studio techniques from SAC, however,
were crucial to the development of her advanced style. In samples of Otellie and Charles’
works from this period and shortly thereafter there is often a shared stylistic approach
between the two artists, particularly in their functional works [Figure 3.12]. Significantly,
these works fall somewhere closer to modern arts and crafts-style ceramics like those of
their mentors and peers than traditional Hopi pottery. While both Otellie and Charles
incorporated stylized Hopi motifs such as corn kernels or stalks, abstracted katsina forms,
or geometric patterns, their pieces were wheel-thrown rather than hand-built with the coil
technique. Additionally, their contrasting use of high-gloss glazes and unglazed
stoneware emphasized the substance of the materials and the artists’ mastery of these
techniques in line with their studio instruction.
In an instructive article from a 1949 issue of Craft Horizons titled “For the
Ceramist: Thrown Ceramic Sculpture,” School for American Craftsmen instructor Joan
Frantz Meyer discusses a new technique of wheel-thrown (rather than hand-built)
ceramic sculpture and provides a number of examples of student work to illustrate the
end results. Included in this selection is a vaguely saccharine mouse sculpture by Otellie,
built in segments on the wheel and then glazed in contrasting high-gloss and rough matte
glazes. Also included in the article are a number of other student examples that in many
ways prefigure some of Otellie’s own later adaptations of this process with their clear
traces of the finger rings left from the wheel work, slightly archaic, solid-looking figures,
and textural surfaces. This influence is apparent when comparing this early example and
the examples of her cohort’s production to her own later sculptural works such as Bird
Girl (1969) where Otellie employed both wheel throwing for the cylindrical form and
187
hand building for the subsequently layered details and features [Figure 3.13]. Frantz
Meyer explains in detail this last step before firing, “…while the clay is still damp and if
a decorative treatment is desired, different colored slips can be painted on the clay to
suggest, for instance, feathers of a bird or stripes, or spots characteristic of other textures,
to give a more varied effect and to break up severely plain areas. Carving into parts of the
clay, sgraffito lines in the slip, increase the particular textural aspects.”
216

Loloma’s diminutive mouse figurine does not portray an extensive level of
textural or formal experimentation, but all of these techniques can be located in Bird Girl,
even as it was inspired by Hopi legends. The slip molded feathers covering the young
woman’s abstracted body display the artist’s own hand modeling each feather with the tip
of her finger, while a slightly uneven dark brown glaze outlining the feathers adds a
visual sheen in contrast to matte stoneware, invoking the glint of glossy feathers as they
ruffle. The young maiden’s squash blossom hair whorls are defined with sgraffito lines,
with texture that simultaneously heightens their hair-like quality and further abstracts
their distinctive form. This piece is emblematic of Loloma’s general adoption of practical
techniques in which she was obviously instructed at the School for American Craftsmen
and stand in clear distinction to the forms of “traditional” Hopi pottery that had gained
increasing popularity over the early twentieth century, due to the recognition garnered by
early potters such as Nampeyo who brought pre-contact forms to light in her turn-of-the-
century pots.
217
Otellie continued throughout her career to be informed by her studio

216
Joan Frantz Meyer, “For the Ceramist: Thrown Ceramic Sculpture,” Craft Horizons, (vol. 9., no. 2, June
1, 1949): 26
217
See Barbara Kramer, Nampeyo and Her Pottery, (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996)
and Robert Ashton, Jr., "NAMPEYO the Birth of Contemporary Hopi Pottery," Southwest Art (3.2 ,1975):
74-5 for discussion of Nampeyo and her influence of moden and contemporary Hopi Pottery.
188
education from SAC even as she increasingly pushed the boundaries of both functional
and figurative pottery as applied to Native and non-Native traditions alike.
While much of Otellie’s mature work took the form of varyingly abstracted
figurative sculptures, even in her pieces that took functional form she positioned herself
fluidly between typically static boundaries. In a 1971 Pot with Handle, Loloma pushes
far beyond the formal model of Phelan [Figure 3.14]. Phelan’s own style from around the
period of the Lolomas’ tenure at SAC was deeply rooted in the artist’s own investment in
the historical basis of Western ceramics. In pieces like Trumpet Shell Bowl (1946),
Phelan adapts Byzantine, Cypriot and later Mediterranean styles for his anti-industrial
practice [see Figure 3.5]. The glaze and decoration of this particular bowl reads as
inherently historic, even as the textured pitting of the glaze was thoroughly modern in
production. In a slightly later Folded Dish (1950) Phelan employs a similar palette of
Mediterranean blue but further abstracts both the decoration and form [Figure 3.15].
Despite the inherently mid-century aesthetic of this dish, the patterning and structure in
fact again recall historic precedents, evoking the folded form of early Cypriot ceramic oil
lamps. Otellie Loloma chose not to adopt similar influences into her work, decisively
rejecting Western decorative forms. But Otellie’s work was never ahistoric; rather she
worked from the obvious perspective of her own culture’s traditions even as she
manipulated form and function to her own vision. Her Pot with Handle, even as it
radically departs from Phelan’s style, is intensely grounded in historical research and
appreciation.
Pot with Handle is illustrative of Otellie Loloma’s reworking of functional
traditional Hopi pottery. This pot recalls the form of the Hopi olla which was part of the
189
broad pottery revival led by Nampeyo and subsequent artists [Figure 3.16].
218
The basic
structure of this pot is decisively historic, yet it was not made in the traditional coil
method but was instead wheel-thrown, as evidenced by the finger rings that were not only
left visible but heightened through the application of glazing on the lower half of the pot.
Additionally, Loloma merges the traditional and modern, Western and Hopi, through her
incorporation of non-ceramic materials, including twine, leather, and turquoise and shell
heishi on the handle. In Effigy Pot from 1972 Otellie again adapts the olla form while
exposing her preference for a mechanically-enhanced process [Figure 3.17]. In this pot,
she incorporates two of her most used Hopi motifs, the corn kernel and the young maiden
hair whorls, while obfuscating the line between pot and sculpture. The maiden figures,
more resembling amorphic chrysalises than young women, embody the corn itself as their
bodies have been replaced with demarcated kernels along small individual cobs. Their
corn-bodies, blended with slip to the very surface of the pot, curve toward the opening
while their distinctively hair whorl adorned heads peer in to regard the contents, or
perhaps the emptiness, therein. These works challenge the expectations of what a modern
craftsperson or a Hopi potter could be, and do so in perhaps an even more complicated
manner than her more divergent figurative sculptures. That these pots adapt traditional
forms with modern techniques, in highly personal, non-functional works of art, suggest
that Otellie was critically conscious of her intersectional position within and without
these realms.

218
For more on Nampeyo and the pottery revitalization associated with her work see Barbara Kramer,
Nampeyo and Her Pottery (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), Diane Dittemore, The
Nampeyo Legacy: A Family Dynasty of Hopi-- Tewa Potters Carries on a Tradition of Excellence, (Vol.
31. Houston: F & W Publications, Inc, 2001) and Holly Elizabeth Chervnsik,"Six Generations of Hopi
Pottery: A Stylistic Analysis of Nampeyo Family Designs." (ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2003).
190
The early ceramic works of Charles and Otellie Loloma are often
indistinguishable, as the couple worked in tandem in the studio, beginning with their time
at SAC. But for Charles this foray into ceramics was temporary, if still influential. The
two entered the School for American Craftsmen not because either was particularly
driven to pursue studies in either studio craft or pottery, but perhaps because Charles’
former instructor Fred Kabotie, by that time well-known for his painting and his work in
developing and teaching Hopi silverwork, had turned down a proposed scholarship from
SAC and suggested Charles as the recipient in his stead, or perhaps their presence was
due to the suggestion of Willard Beatty, commissioner of Indian Education.
219
Regardless
of the impetus, for Charles in particular the decision to study ceramics was surprising. As
he recalled, “No other Hopi person – a man in particular, was doing pottery then. Because
at that time, this was only the woman’s art, they’re the ones that are supposed to be
involved in it.”
220
Charles’s lack of prior engagement with the material did not dissuade
him from investing in every level of his studies, nor did the radical move of partaking in a
typically woman’s medium deter him. Perhaps even at this early stage in his career the
possibility of creating work that could undermine stereotypical expectations, both in and
out of his own tribe, of what Hopi art and artists should look like only further encouraged
his progress. It is clear that as he continued to gain acclaim Loloma basked in the certain
frisson of tension that his career produced.

219
Archives of American Art Oral History: Susan Peterson, Peterson recounts that Kabotie received the
pottery scholarship but recommended Charles as the recipient as he was not interested.
220
Erin Younger, “Interview with Charles Loloma, May 26, 1978, Hotevilla,” Charles Loloma File, Native
American Artists Resource Collection, Billie Jane Baguley Library and Archives,Heard Museum, Phoenix,
Arizona, pg. 8.
191
In considering Charles’ work, the influence of his studies at School for American
Craftsmen is generally less immediately evident, as his career is largely defined by his
tradition-bending jewelry designs, which by the mid-1950s had become his medium of
choice. Yet Charles recalled of his time at SAC that, “when I was taught design there, I
immediately connected quite a number of ways of doing things and composing things,
organizing things…I didn’t want to copy directly from our sources here. So instead I
understood then that the impact of your emotional responses comes out no matter
what.”
221
The design principles introduced through the ceramics department course of
study were thus profoundly influential for Charles. At this time there were even subtle
indicators as to his future investment in other media. In an undated paper written by
Charles after a class trip to the 13
th
Annual Syracuse National Exhibition of Crafts in
1948 in which he was generally unimpressed with ceramic entries, he concluded “The
enamels are much [more] exciting.”
222
But this retrospective glance should not detract
from a consideration of Charles’ own pottery production while at SAC and shortly
thereafter.
Much as was the case with Otellie’s early work, Charles blended the influence
and techniques brought by Phelan with his own interpretation of Hopi design principles.
In a selection of Charles’ work from 1948, likely included in a student exhibition or sent
to the America House for sale, the young artist presented a wheel thrown tumbler and
plate and a hand-built duck statue [Figure 3.18]. The duck statue is perhaps most
representative of a direct response to a classroom assignment, with little evidence of the

221
Ibid. pg 9.
222
Quoted in Phelan, 86.
192
artist’s own creative exploration or adaptation of techniques or forms. The other two
pieces, however, suggest certain directions that Charles would pursue in his own career
as a ceramist and then as a jeweler. The tumbler is a form that the young artist would
return to as he and Otellie began to sell their products in their own studio upon
graduation. This particular piece with its incised, graphic decoration repeated across the
exterior surface and its high-gloss interior glaze relates to the artists’ later work. The
plate is the only piece given a specific title, Hopi (Peacefull) [sic] Design, and is
described as a “silk-screen plate under glase [sic] experiment.” This experimental piece
prefigures certain design systems that are common in Loloma’s later decisive work.
Described as a Hopi design, the imagery on the dish is rather more notable in its
non-Hopi aspects. While birds are common images across Puebloan pottery in general,
these particular birds do not immediately resemble any of the birds treated
iconographically in either Hopi or neighboring pottery traditions. Many pots that depict
birds display either local specimen such as quail, hummingbirds, or even roadrunners,
stylized forms such as the thunderbird imagery, or representatives of transcultural
exchange as we see with the surprising ubiquity of parrot imagery, but this bird defies
any of these forms. Perhaps vaguely reminiscent of the figure on an early polychrome pot
from Acoma, Loloma’s bird at first glance most closely resembles at pigeon or dove
[Figure 3.19]. The form upon which the pair of birds is overlaid once again defies
expectations for a Hopi design representing peacefulness. If anything, this form resonates
more immediately with a Mesoamerican glyph, implying a multiplicity of possible
interpretations. Perhaps Loloma was committed to engaging with his Hopi visual
heritage, but apprehensive about adapting culturally specific, even sensitive, imagery into
193
his commercial production. Later in his career it is clear that while much of his forms
were drawn directly from Hopi imagery, Loloma was supremely conscious of how to
respectfully represent figures from his Hopi iconographic tradition whilst using imagery
acceptable for a broad public rather than a private tribal or clan community.
223
This
imagery could also suggest the expansive material to which the Lolomas were both
exposed at SAC, material that encompassed influences of a global perspective.
In addition to this transcultural, expansive design sensibility, both Lolomas were
exposed to an increasingly cosmopolitan experience. Presumably the Lolomas could have
have remained in Arizona where Charles could have studied jewelry with Kabotie who
was working as artistic director of his own GI Bill supported program teaching
silverwork to Hopi veterans. The style taught by Kabotie was no more traditional Hopi
than the pottery techniques the Lolomas studied at SAC: rather it was an adaptation of
Zuni and Navajo practices paired with a silver overlay technique that had been suggested
as a technical apparatus for Hopi designs by an Anglo museum curator.
224
Neither of the
Lolomas ever explicitly state why they chose to travel across the country to immerse
themselves in an unfamiliar field and community rather than remain close to home to
study with an early and influential mentor like Kabotie. It does seem likely that the
Lolomas were both actively seeking an opportunity to explore new cultural, creative, and
professional experiences in this bold decision. While at the School for American
Craftsmen they were able to travel to the many museums and galleries in New York City,

223
See Martha Hopkins Streuver, Loloma: Beauty is His Name, (Santa Fe: Wheelwright Museum of the
American Indian, 2005).
224
For further discussion of this jewelry program see Lois Essary Jacka, “Art of the Hopi,” Southwest Art
(Aug 1998: 28, 3): 64-71, 178.
194
even meeting with d’Harnoncourt at MoMA at one point.
225
According to Lloyd New,
Charles’ “experience at the crafts school…and trips to New York City with sympathetic
faculty members to museums, symphonies, and enlightening social contacts, had
expanded his and Otellie’s world views, resulting in an expansion of his sense of artistic
freedom and openness to new technology, methodology, and ideology...”
226
The Lolomas
were equipped with a new creative and professional vision, based on a cosmopolitan,
modernist vision of craft work, when they left SAC to return to Hopi. Their training in
marketing and production prepared them to operate their own successful studio and shop
alongside New at the Kiva Craft Center in Scottsdale, and eventually to share the same
principles of successful craft entrepreneurship at the Southwest Indian Art Project and the
Institute of American Indian Arts.
227

While much has been written about the inherent modernity of twentieth century
Native American painting, Native American craft has held a much more tenuous place in
the well-worn scholarly and artistic debates between what is traditional versus what is
modern.
228
Native American craft forms such as pottery and jewelry have typically,

225
Tom McClure in “Loloma – And Beauty is His Name / Loloma”, publication printed after Charles
Loloma’s death, printed by Georgia Loloma, 1991
226
New, Cherokee Drums, 397. Martha Streuver also suggests that they must have met the jewelry
instructor Philip Morton, who was a key figure in modern craft jewelry & was in MoMAs 1946 Modern
Handmade Jewelry.
227
Immediately following their time at the School for American Craftsmen the Lolomas returned to Hopi
where they briefly taught pottery and received a Whitney Foundation Fellowship to study local clays and
shale glazes. In 1955 they were asked by Lloyd New to become the first tenants in his newly constructed
Kiva Craft Center on Scottsdale’s 5
th
Avenue. They maintained their studio and shop there until relocating
to Santa Fe in 1962, again to work alongside New, at the Institute of American Indian Arts.
228
For examples of the discussion of “modern” American Indian painting see Bill Anthes, Native Moderns:
American Indian Painting, 1940-1960, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); W. Jackson Rushing III,
Native American Art in the Twentieth Century: Makers, Meanings, Histories, (London: Routledge, 1999);
J.J. Brody, Pueblo Indian Painting: Tradition and Modernism in New Mexico, 1900-1930, (Santa Fe:
School for Advanced Research Press, 1997); Bruce Bernstein and W. Jackson Rushing III, Modern by
Tradition: American Indian Painting in the Studio Style, (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1995);
195
particularly in the early years of scholarship, been upheld as exemplars of how tribal
communities are able preserve their traditional art forms. “Collaboration rather than
individualism has often been a characteristic of Native American craft practice.”
229

Collaboration was indeed a part of the Lolomas’ early careers as they worked alongside
one another, first at the School for American Craftsmen and then at their studio/shop in
Scottsdale, but as they progressed in their own work each began to gain increasing
creative independence through experimentation. Charles shifted from one craft form to
another during this period. As he began to experiment increasingly with metal work,
beginning with tufa casting, he shifted his practice away from ceramics but maintained
his dedication to a self-aware employment of modern and traditional forms, motifs, and
techniques. Charles suggested that his transition from clay to metal was a natural one, as
much of what he had learned about ceramic chemistry gave him a grounding in similar
processes with metal. After his initial explorations with silver he learned further
techniques from the influential John Adair book, Navajo and Pueblo Silversmiths,
published in 1944.
230
It was also during this period that the Lolomas became acquainted
with the radical architect and designer Paolo Soleri who, like the Lolomas had settled in
Scottsdale in the mid-1950s. The Lolomas began to sell Soleri’s cast bronze and ceramic
bells in their shop at the Kiva Craft Center, the zenith of Scottsdale’s thriving high-end
craft market.

and Jessica Horton, Places to Stand: Native American Modernisms on an Undivided Earth (Durham: Duke
University Press, forthcoming), among others.
229
Gail Tremblay, “Cultural Survival and Innovation: Native American Aesthetics,” in Revivals! Diverse
Traditions: The History of Twentieth-Century American Craft, 1920-1945, Janet Kardon, ed., (New York:
Harry N. Abrams and American Craft Museum, 1994), pg. 80.
230
Loloma describes his early foray into silverwork in the Erin Young interview: 16-17.
196
The immediate years following their graduation from the School for American
Craftsmen represented the culmination of the Lolomas’ training, even as it marked only
the beginning of their respective careers. The opportunity to open their own retail craft
shop, for which they had received such specialized training through their educations, was
fortuitous. It meant that the two young artists could apply their knowledge-base of
balancing production costs with creative experimentation and pursue the marketing
techniques of both SAC and America House. In a 1956 photograph of Charles and Ottelie
in the retail area of their shop, their ceramics and Charles’ early explorations in jewelry
designs are presented in a sleek glass display case [Figure 3.20]. Each work is given a
degree of space, the jewelry presented on a sleek, tweed-covered platform. This approach
to product display strongly resembles that of America House, which voraciously
advocated for a broad appreciation and elevation of craftwork, thus displaying
handcrafted objects in sleek, modern displays in a well-lit, minimal space evoking more
the Museum of Modern Art than a rustic, folksy workshop. The Lolomas brought this
sensibility with them to Scottsdale, where it aligned perfectly with Lloyd (Kiva) New’s
own approach to modern craft, which was largely shaping the rising popularity of
Scottsdale as a modern Western fantasy landscape.
A few short months after opening their shop, the Lolomas were profiled in the
Arizona Republic; the article “Hopi Indian Couple Find True Happiness in Art Up to
Elbows” begins with a basic appreciation of their pottery. The author quickly moves into
a brazen idealization of their Hopi heritage, stating at one point, with surprise, that
Charles, “In his easy, excellent English… rattled off an impressive list of works that he
finished before his graduation from Indian service high school” as if his success was
197
particularly unexpected from his background. The piece concludes with a return to their
pottery, positioning their work within a paradigm of modern tradition: “They use only
Arizona clays and glazes, and although some of their creations are of modern appearance,
always included is a touch of the Hopi heritage that is basic to their lives.”
231
This article,
though seemingly paternalistic in a contemporary context, in fact represents precisely the
position from which the Lolomas, and Lloyd (Kiva) New alongside them, quite self-
consciously profited.
ii
If the Lolomas’ educational experience through the GI Bill was the beginning of
successful careers that represented a relatively seamless merging of modern and tradition
form and medium, the path of Eva Mirabal (Eah Ha Wa, Fast Growing Corn) exposes a
divergent encounter with a modernist idiom and pedagogy. Unlike the Lolomas, Eva
Mirabal’s artistic career remains relatively unknown. While she is mentioned
occasionally in books on Dorothy Dunn’s Studio at the Santa Fe Indian School, her work
beyond this period has received little attention.
232
As a young painter from the highly
traditional Taos Pueblo who studied under Dorothy Dunn, Mirabal created paintings of
tribal scenes in the Studio style.
233
Like Charles Loloma she completed mural projects
early in her career; she was one of a number of young artists who completed scenes for

231
Don Dedera, “Hopi Indian Couple Find True Happiness in Art Up to Elbows,” Arizona Republic (March
12, 1956): 17.
232
The exhibition “Eva Mirabal and Jonathan Warm Day” (February 09 - May 05, 2013) at the Harwood
Museum of Art in Taos, NM did contribute, at least locally, to the recognition of Mirabal’s work.
233
While Taos Pueblo is by far the most traditional of the Eight Northern Pueblos, Mirabal’s early exposure
to Euro-American art traditions was likely as her father was a model for Anglo painters Nicolai Fechin,
Joseph Imhoff, and Walter Ufer. The extent to which this influenced Mirabal’s career is unclear. For an
excellent discussion of Walter Ufer’s relationship with his Pueblo models and the racial complexities of his
work see John Ott, “Reform in Redface: The Taos Society of Artists Plays Indian,” American Art, Vol. 23,
No. 2 (Summer 2009), pp. 80-107.
198
the Santa Fe Indian School. In one panel she portrayed a familiar Pueblo scene of
traditionally-dressed women of all ages collaboratively working around an horno, an
adobe, wood-fired, outdoor oven [Figure 3.21]. This image captures the essence of the
stylistic tropes of Studio style paintings, a relatively static moment of traditional Pueblo
life drafted upon a blank background. Mirabal’s thoughtful rendering of an inter-
generational gendered interaction does express her own vision and identity, but that is not
unique to her own practice. Dunn, in what at the time was a pioneering approach to
American Indian art, guided her students to engage with their own experiences of tribal
traditions and Mirabal seemingly happily acceded.
Mirabal’s artistic successes while at the Santa Fe Indian School served her well
after she left the Studio. In 1942 she painted a War Bonds poster, which along with works
by other Native American artists was distributed by the government to encourage civilian
support for the war effort [Figure 3.22]. In this image Mirabal was calling on a sense of
nativist, romanticizing patriotism that was widely promulgated in the popular visual
culture of the war period. Mirabal, signing the work with her given name of Eah-Ha-Wa,
adapted the basic stylistic principles of the Studio style to popular advertizing, showing a
young, muscular Indian Warrior type sending off a smoke signal that develops in the sky
into the stylized “smoke” text of “Buy War Bonds!” Contrasted with other War Bonds
ads this image is strikingly minimal, with its Studio style blank background and limited
landscape details: it conveys a powerful message through its very simplicity. Another
work from this period, a watercolor sketch of a sexualized pin-up style portrait of a young
woman with vibrant red, parted lips, an evocatively arched eyebrow, and an ambiguous
feathered headband, which is part of the Acee Blue Eagle Collection, plays into the
199
popular mid-century trope of Indian Princesses [Figure 3.23].
234
While this woman is
overtly sexual, in what might seem to be a particularly surprising manner for a female
artist from a traditional Pueblo background, the ferocity of her gaze challenges the viewer
in an adversarial stance. Her raised brow and open mouth are simultaneously erotic and
violent, alluding to an agency unexpected from the prototypical Indian Princess. These
two images radically diverge from Mirabal’s earlier paintings from the Studio in Santa
Fe. They suggest that, as a young artist, she was highly aware of how her own identity
was typically co-opted by popular media and seized upon these very stereotypes to both
challenge and profit from them.
In 1943 Mirabal enlisted in the Women’s Army Corp. During her years as a WAC
she created a number of large-scale murals at various stateside military stations that no
longer exist. In addition to these mural assignments, she created a comic strip series for
WAC publications. Her comic, “G.I. Gertie,” was one of the first widely distributed
comics by a woman, most likely the first comic by a Native American, and evidences the
degree to which Mirabal was invested in experimenting outside the stylistic boundaries of
the Studio style [Figure 3.24]. Gertie, the WAC featured in Mirabal’s comic, was
pictured as a young, peppy Anglo woman whose high-jinks often led her to humorous
encounters with her superiors.. That she chose to render these experiences in the formal
language of popular comic strips again reveals her committed engagement with popular
culture that far superseded any interest in drafting images of traditional Pueblo life in any
form, and particularly not in the Studio style of painting in which she had been instructed.

234
See Nancy Marie Mithlo, Our Indian Princess: Subverting the Stereotype, (Santa Fe, N.M: School for
Advanced Research, 2009) or Carolyn Sorisio,"Playing the Indian Princess?: Sarah Winnemucca's
Newspaper Career and Performance of American Indian Identities" Studies in American Indian Literatures
(23, no. 1, 2011): 1-37.
200
Gertie, while clearly not a self-portrait, likely expressed certain aspects of Mirabal’s own
experience of military life. Since Native American men and women served alongside
Anglo service members rather than in segregated regiments, quiet assimilation, much like
the indoctrination at Indian Service boarding schools, was the expected behavior for
enlistees. At the same time that this was the prescribed culture of the military, as depicted
in G.I. Gertie, Mirabal herself was portrayed as simultaneously assimilated and Native in
two photographic portraits from her military service, likely created for military
publications. In these images Mirabal is shown in her WAC uniform with her hair set in
pincurls and in each she is presenting to the viewer a vest covered entirely with elaborate
quillwork, a technique not typically practiced at Taos Pueblo [Figures 3.25 and 3.25].
Mirabal is depicted in these images as a general place holder for Native identity, as
signified by the non-Pueblo quilled vest, and more specifically as a modern Native
woman who at once can consider the present and future. This is shown both through her
uniform and more explicitly in her contemplative gaze, held by a model airplane, in one
scene, while also embracing the noble warrior rhetoric of Native America through
holding the vest itself.
After the war Mirabal received a yearlong residency at the University of Southern
Illinois, Carbondale where she taught and furthered her own studies. At the conclusion of
this residency she returned to Taos and, through the G.I. Bill, studied at the Taos Valley
Art School under the husband and wife modernist painters Louis Ribak and Beatrice
Mandelman. Ribak and Mandelman had moved from New York to Taos in 1944, both
leaving behind established careers. Beatrice Mandelman had studied at the Art Students
League, worked through the WPA on murals and as a printmaker, and had shown at the
201
Chicago Art Institute, MoMA, and the National Gallery. Louis Ribak had also studied at
the Art Students League, under John Sloan, and showed alongside Stuart Davis, Reginald
Marsh, and Maurice Stern as part of An American Group, Inc. His work was regularly
shown in the Whitney’s Exhibition of American Art and in 1934 his work was shown at
the Venice Biennale. Encouraged by Sloan to visit New Mexico, Mandelman and Ribak
settled in Taos, leaving behind the bustling New York art scene that had left Ribak, in
particular, dissatisfied as a social realist with many abstract expressionist colleagues and
friends.
In 1947 Ribak founded the Taos Valley Art School, which, like the School for
American Craftsmen, originated largely from the prospect of serving veterans, and
benefiting from GI Bill funds. His intention was to create a school similar to the Art
Students League, with a certain degree of fluidity and openness even as it demanded
substantial studio time from its students. In the original Taos Valley Art School
informational pamphlet Ribak explains “It is the intention of the school to keep the
course of instruction flexible and free from any formalized or mathematical approach; to
point a direction and develop the individuality of the student.” [Figure 3.27]
235
In rather
stark contrast to the School for American Craftsmen with its near manifesto proclaiming
the necessity of sustainable careers in handcrafts in the postwar climate, the Taos Valley
Art School was created to support the slightly more esoteric experience of individual
creative exploration. Courses in Fine Arts were taught primarily by Ribak, with
occasional assistance provided by Mandelman or others in their Taos artistic cohort.

235
Taos Valley Art School pamphlet, Mandelman/Ribak Papers, UNM
202
Ribak sought to differentiate the program not through his methodological
approach but rather by monopolizing on the romantic appeal of the destination itself. The
school’s pamphlet concludes with an effusive and nostalgic proclamation on the
inspirational force of Taos and its living history:
To students of art seeking new inspirations, Taos Valley with its
mountains and vast desert spaces offers opportunities found nowhere else
in the country. One finds Indian and Spanish peoples with their primitive
adobe villages, their ancient cultures remaining unchanged. Here Nature
is, and will remain for a long time, a profoundly stirring and unforgettable
experience. Taos is still for the venturesome spirit.
236

From the beginning, the Taos Valley School did serve a surprisingly diverse student body
that was in many ways inclusive of the local population. Students included established
artists such as Edward Corbett and Oli Sihvonen along with village locals and members
of neighboring Taos Pueblo [Figures 3.28 and 3.29]. Amongst those students was Eva
Mirabal, who, using her GI Bill funds, enrolled in 1949 after her return from Carbondale.
Mirabal also had an established art career at this point, having been the only woman to
enter the First National Exhibition of Indian Painting at the Philbrook.
237
A review of her
work from a 1939 exhibition in Chicago suggests, “She expresses in every drawing – in
every line – a truly feminine tenderness and grace. The colors, simplicity and good taste
make this ageless art remarkably modern.”
238
While the gendered reading of her work
inevitably categorizes her work as non-confrontational, the acknowledgement of the
modernity of her style redresses the possible limitations implied by the words “feminine
tenderness and grace.” The remarkably modern tendencies of Mirabal’s output, evident at

236
Taos Valley Art School pamphlet, Mandelman/Ribak Papers, UNM
237
Jason Silverman, “Trailblazer: How Artist Eva Mirabal Broke the Mold,” Untold New Mexico: Stories
from a Hidden Past, Santa Fe: Sunstone Press, 2006, 114.
238
Ibid, 113
203
many levels in her war-time productions, only expanded when she began studying at the
Taos Valley Art School, where her work illustrates the direct influence of her teachers.
Louis Ribak, who had been a staunch social realist when he departed New York
for Taos, increasingly employed varying degrees of abstraction to express his experience
of the cultural and physical landscape of Taos [Figures 3.30 and 3.31]. Beatrice
Mandelman, while only an occasional faculty member, embraced abstract forms long
before her husband and her experimentation with painterly space and texture was a guide
to her husband, as he transitioned stylistically from his earlier social realism; his students,
and their fellow second-wave of Taos artists whose work went against the grain of the
established art community [Figures 3.32 and 3.33]. The Taos Society of Artists was long
renowned by the time Ribak and Mandelman settled there in 1944. Joseph Henry Sharp,
E. Irving Couse, Oscar E. Berninghaus, W. Herbert Dunton, Ernest Blumenschein, and
Bert Phillips produced romantic, academic paintings of Taos and its people, particularly
those from Taos Pueblo, that were emblematic of the small village’s established art
community in the teens and twenties [Figures 3.34 and 3.35]. As explained by curator
and art historian David L. Witt in Taos Moderns: Art of the New, “The academic
romanticism of the Taos Society has fluctuated in popularity, but the art market hungers
for bits of Americana. More than a generation after the deaths of the last Taos Society
members, the images they created continue to define what most people think of as Taos
art.”
239
Unlike the Taos Society painters, Ribak and Mandelman, along with a small cadre

239
David L. Witt, Taos Moderns: Art of the New, (Santa Fe: Red Crane Books, 1992), 6. For more on
modern artists in Taos see Lois Rudnick and MaLin Wilson-Powell, eds., Mabel Dodge Luhan and
Company: American Moderns and the West, (Santa Fe: Musuem of New Mexico Press, 2017), Flannery
Burke, From Greenwich Village to Taos: Primitivism and Place at Mabel Dodge Luhan's. (Lawrence, KS:
University Press of Kansas, 2008) and Lois Rudnick, Utopian Vistas: The Mabel Dodge Luhan House and
the American Counterculture, (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996).
204
of likeminded artists who primarily arrived in Taos throughout the 1940s and early
1950s, the “Taos Moderns” as they were first called in the 1952 exhibition Taos
Painting: Yesterday and Today, worked to sublimate the overly pastoral, romantic, and
academic style so strongly associated with the small mountain village, with a new,
abstracted vision of the land and its people.
240

The break from the Taos Society which Ribak and Mandelman sought to cement
through their own practice was also present in Ribak’s methodology at the Taos Valley
Art School. In theory he aimed to create an inclusive environment in which locals,
returning GIs seeking an alternative art education, and previously established artists could
work alongside each other in free-form creative exploration. There were a number of
local students who enrolled in courses alongside artists such as Edward Corbett, who had
worked with Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still, and Oli Sihvonen who had studied with
Joseph Albers at Black Mountain College.
241
Ribak, Mandelman and their students and
artist colleagues cemented the bohemian image of Taos that had been fomenting since
Mabel Dodge Luhan moved to the community and began beckoning to the leaders of
American modern painting, literature, and philosophy in 1919. Mabel Dodge’s visitors,
including Willa Cather, D.H. Lawrence, Ansel Adams, Andrew Dasburg, Marsden
Hartely, Edward Weston, Georgia O’Keeffe, John Collier and countless others, all
embraced a vision of the West, and Taos specifically, as an idyllic, wild land, where
utopian ideals could flourish. While most of her visitors only passed through Taos, either
returning to their urban lives or settling elsewhere in New Mexico, the handful that

240
Ibid, X.
241
Robert Hobbs, Beatrice Mandelman: Taos Modernist, (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,
1995), 37.
205
remained in the village were joined by Ribak and Mandelman who were among the first
of the younger generation of post-World War II artists to land in Taos. With them, and
perhaps even more so through their students, came an expanding sense of what American
modern painting was becoming. Increasingly influenced by Abstract Expressionism and
Color Field painting, these young artists furthered the nonconformist lifestyle of the
Anglo creative settlers of this rural enclave by opening alternative gallery spaces, hosting
elaborate parties and outings, and seizing upon the local press to present to the public art
work beyond that of the Taos Society.
In a seemingly clear embodiment of progressive, bohemian inclusiveness Taos
Valley School enrolled a number of non-Anglo students in its six years of operation.
In a 1948 Taos Valley Star article titled, “Fifty Years Ago Phillips Painted Taos Pueblo,
Indians Now Return Favor,” the unnamed author addresses this cultural diversity at the
Taos Valley Art School. In addressing the accompanying photographs of a class
sketching en plein air, the author suggests a reversal of historical artistic tropes: “Three
Taos Pueblo Indians are among the art students in a landscape course making notes in the
shadows of Bert Phillips’ famous studio,” thus suggesting that at the Taos Valley Art
School, Pueblo artists were now in the position of being the creative actors in creating
classic images of Taos culture [Figure 3.36].
242
By depicting the studio of Bert Phillips -
a central figure in the Taos Society of Artists renowned for his romanticizing, often
inaccurate, paintings of Pueblo Indians - George Keahbone, John W. Mirabal, and Don
Espinosa render Phillips, through the metonym of his studio, the subject of their artistic
agency. Yet beneath this charged reversal of artistic narrative remained a consistently

242
“Fifty Years Ago Phillips Painted Taos Pueblo, Indians Now Return Favor,” Taos Valley Star,
December 2, 1948, np. Mandelman/Ribak papers.
206
paternalistic view of the Native students revealed in the author’s statement that “Taos
Pueblo boys find the work especially stimulating…”
243
This contradictory perspective in
which active creative agency is simultaneously celebrated and undermined is replicated
in an undated image from National Geographic captioned “Red Man and White Man,
who met here on the battlefield in 1847, join in an art class below the Taos mountains.
Indian pageantry has lured to Taos a colony of artists. But centuries before, Pueblo
painters were adorning cliffs, kivas, and ceramics. Louis Ribak conducts this class”
[Figure 3.37].
244

The image depicts an outdoor lesson with diverse Taos Valley Art School
students sketching a Pueblo woman seated before a Pueblo-style adobe, accompanied by
two horses tied to a wooden ladder. The class, led by Mandelman, who is pictured upper
center in a bold red sweater and black hat and not by Ribak as the caption suggests, is
captured mid creation. They are variously standing, squatting, and sitting focused on their
sketches while the tall, brown weeds and scrub bushes threaten to overtake them, creating
a nearly seamless brown foreground of vegetation blended with adobe structures,
including the nearly hidden horno oven at the central point of the photograph’s frame.
Behind the grouping of students and model rise the dominant masses of the nearby
mountains. Again, the image calls into question who, or what, is subject and who is artist.
The class itself – the subject of the photograph - represents, as noted in the accompanying
text, a modern moment wherein Anglos and Indians, once enemies, are united through the
pacifying strength of art. The caption acknowledges a degree of historical irony in the
original artist colony of Taos, where centuries before “Pueblo painters were adorning

243
Ibid.
244
Undated image from National Geographic, Mandelman/Ribak Papers.
207
cliffs, kivas, and ceramics.” The fact that at the Taos Valley Art School Pueblo and
Anglo artists were working side-by-side in the midst of that fraught landscape implies the
enlightenment of teacher and students alike. Of course, what is neglected entirely by
these formulaic phrasings is the woman herself seated before the artists. Dressed
traditionally in a velvet shawl and dress and tall moccasins, this woman, in the role of
Indian model, undermines the entire reading of creative coexistence, a dynamic
supposedly attained through the embrace of modern art.
By the time Eva Mirabal enrolled at the Taos Valley Art School this mythology
was thoroughly cemented. Indeed, in the years that she attended, non-white students often
outnumbered Anglos. A 1951 attendance ledger includes the surnames Concha,
Hernandez, Lujan, A. Martinez, L.C. Martinez, Mondragon, Rivera, Romero, Bernal, and
Mirabal out of 19 students.
245
Nor was Mirabal the only woman, or even Pueblo woman,
to attend the Taos Valley Art School. A 1950 scrapbook photograph shows Mirabal along
with a cohort of fifteen students, including three other women, two of whom were likely
also from Taos Pueblo [Figure 3.38].
246
Mirabal’s presence thus would not have stood out
as that of the Lolomas did at the School for American Craftsmen. However, the influence
that Ribak and Mandelman had on Mirabal’s own work during her tenure at the Taos
Valley Art School is nonetheless striking. In an untitled still life, the thick impasto of her
paint and the simplified forms before bold swaths of solid color show a radical shift away
from her earlier Studio style paintings [Figure 3.39]. The vaguely flat and abstracted
rendering of the guitar, shown without any attempts at suggesting three-dimensionality or

245
1951 attendance ledger, Mandelman/Ribak Papers.
246
Scrapbook, Mandelman/Ribak Papers. “Fifty Years Ago Phillips Painted Taos Pueblo, Indians Now
Return Favor,” Taos Valley Star, also notes a young woman from Taos Pueblo enrolled in 1948.
208
functionality (it is devoid of depth and strings), contrasts with the bowl holding
anonymous pieces of fruit and the geranium’s terracotta pot, both of which show a
greater degree of depth and curvature through Mirabal’s use of modeling and textured
paint. While not a particularly experimental example of a modernist still life, this painting
is significant precisely because it reveals how Mirabal was grappling with new concepts
and the radically different medium of oil on canvas. Her manipulation of the paint’s
textural possibilities expresses her desire to invest fully in possibilities held in this
medium as opposed to the flatness of gauche, watercolor, ink, or even fresco, which had
been the focus of her work thus far. Additionally, the depiction of a simple still life, even
as it is likely a student’s fulfillment of a general assignment and would have been one of
many images of the same scene created by her peers, is a significant departure from her
earlier work which, aside from “G.I. Gertie” was typically infused with scenes of Indian
life. The westernized subject, guitar, plant, fruit, was one far from the model of the Studio
Style in which she had been initially instructed. Mirabal, in this painting, is grappling
with how to paint as a painter, rather than as a Pueblo Indian painter.
“Wild Deer,” also from the period, occupies an interstitial space between
traditional Indian painting and a modernist, slightly cubist paradigm [Figure 3.40]. Unlike
the still life, the subject of this painting was a familiar trope of the Studio Style from
Mirabal’s previous studies. The wild deer, so commonly portrayed in Studio Style
paintings that the genre came to be derisively referred to as the “Bambi School,” takes on
a dramatic revision in this painting. While a certain degree of saccharine charm could
perhaps be isolated in the two deer, the one in mid-prance and the other curled sweetly in
passive repose, the jagged angles and slightly jarring colors of their abstracted forms
209
undermine any truly Bambi-esque attributes latent in the work. The central, active deer is
little more than a series of angular planes conjoined resulting in a form much more in line
with a tangram puzzle than any natural animal. Heightening this unnatural effect is the
fact that this deer appears superimposed over the background, frozen in motion, hovering
over the landscape with none of its feet touching the surface below. The deer in the
foreground is no more realistic in its depiction, though its form is slightly more
naturalistic and softly curved. This deer, however, unsettles its supposedly natural status
most clearly in the palette Mirabal selected for this figure. The relatively familiar and
expected fawn-brown is layered below highlights of yellow, magenta, and turquoise and
is adorned by forms more resonant of floating, atmospheric orbs than spots in hide.
The somewhat cubist background of Wild Deer, reflecting most explicitly the
influence of Ribak’s interest in Cezanne and other European modernist painters, again
permutes the natural landscape through angular formations and disjointed color
selections. The possibility of disharmony, however, is assuaged by Mirabal’s playful
pairings of complimentary hues. As a practice in structure and color theory Wild Deer is
far more successful than Mirabal’s still life and suggests how the lessons taught at the
Taos Valley Art School did have a direct and evolving influence on her creative practice.
Mirabal’s experimentation in these two works, particularly when considered in line with
her earlier works including her more graphic paintings from the Blue Eagle collection
and even her “G.I. Gertie” cartoons, suggest her ongoing investment in pushing beyond
the categorical expectations of what an Indian artist, especially a female Indian artist,
should paint in the 1950s. These two works best express Mirabal’s own traversing of
space and identity in the post-war period as she was re-integrating herself back into the
210
traditional realm of her home at Taos Pueblo, while at the same time still attempting to
negotiate a space for herself in the broader art world.
Ribak himself was a keen supporter of Mirabal’s work, and increasingly came to
advocate for his Native students, even if he did so in a generally paternalistic manner
typical of the period. Ribak coordinated annual exhibitions of student work, many of
which were held at the Museum of New Mexico Art Gallery. In exhibition records from
1950 and 1951 these exhibitions included works by Mirabal and other Taos Pueblo
students shown alongside their Anglo peers. Their work was presented simply as
exceptional examples of student production, rather than showcased as Indian art. Yet,
even as the Taos Valley School was in many ways exemplary for its integrated
atmosphere, with Pueblo and Anglo student working alongside one another, studying the
same techniques and subjects, Ribak was not beyond presenting his Taos Pueblo students
as idealized others, and likely benefitting directly from these objectifying projections. In
a statement of “A Few Words about this Show of Taos Pueblo Art” written around 1950,
Ribak positions his view of Indian art in a decidedly postwar context, arguing
Of course, if an artist is to grow in these days (as an artist) he must look to
all and any sources for guidance and inspiration, until he finds himself
through that maze. That the Indian artist, to grow, has to do something
similar has become an obsession with me. At least for him to grasp the
basic strength of primitive Indian art, for I feel that [sic] has somewhat
been lost sight of. Instead, a sort of machine made formula has been taught
him in various Indian schools, to be turned out by the hundreds for tourists
as a souvenir, at souvenir prices. That Indian artists of the caliber of Pena,
Pablita [Velarde], Kabotie, and others have turned out work of merit, is
I’m sure due to a higher individualism and away from the mass production
idea.
247

247
Handwritten draft, “A Few Words about this Show of Taos Pueblo Art,” Mandelman/Ribak Papers,
UNM
211
He goes on to expound on the individual merits of each artist included in the show from
Alex Concha’s fine lines, to Juanito Concha’s intricate designs. Of Mirabal he states that
her work has a beautiful rhythm and shows the strength of a mature artist. His emphasis
on artistic individualism and critique of the established aesthetic system taught at Indian
schools at the time fits in with the general image of support for Native artists as espoused
by the media image of the Taos Valley Art School. Belying this progressive advocacy are
the historical inaccuracies present in Ribak’s statement. By suggesting that the success
achieved by Pablita Velarde, Fred Kabotie, and Tonita Pena, three of the most iconic
artists of the early Traditional Indian Painting style, was a result solely of their own
“higher individualism and away from the mass production idea” Ribak exposes his lack
of basic knowledge of, or perhaps interest in, the historic legacy of the Santa Fe Indian
School where both Velarde and Kabotie studied.
In an article from 1958, Ribak’s complicated relationship with his Native students
is further illustrated. The author, in discussing the legacy of the Taos Valley Art School
at a local level, sought Ribak’s assessment of indigenous arts as they stood in the
contemporary moment. Ribak explained that,
…the only native artist under his tutelage that is still working today is Luz
Martinez. He went on to lament the fact that there is no attempt on the part
of local educators or modern artists to encourage and develop the fine
native arts and traditions that are still a dynamic but unexpressed part of
local life. The symbols, thoughts and feelings, of Pueblo and Spanish-
American life should be put down and explained, as is going on in Africa
today; if coupled with a knowledge of modern art, this could be a powerful
American art and literary expression.
248

248
Author unknown, Unknown article about Ribaks, circa 1958, Mandelman/Ribak Papers, UNM
212
The elisions present in this statement are multilayered. Eva Mirabal, like Luz Martinez,
did in fact continue to work. However she did not continue to work in the Euro-American
modernist style that she had embraced while studying under Ribak. Rather, she devoted
the next phase of her life to raising her family, engaging actively in Pueblo life, and
painting the occasional watercolor or, at the end of her life, a final mural, in her original
Studio style [Figure 3.41]. The fact that Mirabal turned away from the formal
experimentation which is present in Wild Deer and the untitled still life, and returned to
her earlier style and medium as she more fully reintegrated herself into the community of
Taos Pueblo must have suggested to Ribak that she was no longer working as a (modern)
artist. Implicit in the absence of Mirabal in Ribak’s assessment of the current state of
Native art and in his assertion that “native arts and traditions […] are still a dynamic but
unexpressed part of local life” is a paternalistic, Euro-centric view of what modern art
could be.
Eva Mirabal’s career, and specifically her tenure at the Taos Valley Art School, is
central to understanding the complex place of the Native artist within the post-war
American art environment. While it is tempting to conclude that all Native artists who
used their GI Bill to study art at non-native institutions would adopt non-native practices,
Eva Mirabal complicates this assumption in a productive direction. Her experiences push
us to consider complexities including tribal and gender differences and see the
possibility, again, of a plurality of modernisms shaped by GI Bill educational
opportunities. Mirabal’s career was relatively short-lived. She passed away at the age of
48 in 1968 right as American Indian artists were receiving enthusiastic recognition from
the broader contemporary art world. If she had continued to produce works in the style to
213
which she returned in her later works she would have fitted firmly into the category of the
strictly traditional Indian artist, as the dichotomy between contemporary and traditional
Native art became firmly cemented. Yet her career trajectory and her formal experiments
are in fact thoroughly aligned with the broader experiences of her mid-century peers. In
contrast to the star-quality of Charles Loloma’s international success, which was defined
by his manipulations of traditional forms into new media and increasing abstraction,
neither Mirabal or Otellie Loloma were accorded such status. While Mirabal’s return to
the increasingly devalued traditional painting style near the end of her short career could
in part account for a lack of critical assessment of her art, Otellie Loloma continued to
explore and manipulate her medium, fluctuating in and out of abstraction, yet her career
remained overshadowed by Charles. The gendered nature both within the art world at
large and within their respective tribal communities cannot be ignored in tracing their
individual careers and the broader course of Native art at mid-century and beyond.
Despite the fact that Eva Mirabal and Otellie Loloma remain relatively
understudied in Native American art history, and even Charles Loloma, who is widely
recognized as a central figure in modern Native art, is neglected outside the narratives of
Indian art and, occasionally and more recently American craft, these three artists serve as
illuminating case studies. Each of these artists, while having engaged with the arts at a
young age, entered into a period of advanced experimentation directly through their G.I.
Bill sponsored educations. While other Native artists also studied art through the G.I.
Bill, most notably Carl N. Gorman (best known as a member of the Navajo Code Talkers
in WWII and father of the popular Navajo artist R.C. Gorman) and Joe H. Herrera
(Cochiti painter and son of early Pueblo painter Tonita Peña) the particular circumstances
214
surrounding the educations of Mirabal and the Lolomas stand out within this distinctive
group of modern artists. Many G.I.s, Native and Anglo, sought out established
institutions in which to study regardless of their field. In the realm of the arts there were
any number of well-respected and long-standing art departments and independent art
schools in which to study; Gorman and Herrera chose to study at Otis Art Institute and
the University of New Mexico, respectively. That the two institutions in which the
Lolomas and Mirabal sought their educations were created specifically in response to the
increased needs, and the correspondingly increased financial support, for returning
veterans resulted in a different methodological approach to art practice and a different
student environment, as well.
The students at the School for American Craftsmen and the Taos Valley Art
School were all active participants in educational experiments, as different as the two
systems were. Because of the experimental nature of these programs any distinctive
student representatives who could serve to heighten the narrative and attention given to
their endeavors were embraced fully. Even as Eva Mirabal and Charles and Otellie
Lolomoa were working with non-traditional, non-Native materials and techniques at the
Taos Valley Art School and the School for American Craftsmen, their position as Native
artists was focused on by the institutions themselves. For these two less-established,
relatively experimental programs the presence of Indian students was a coup. At a
moment when American modernism, at both the level of fine art and craft, was deeply
invested in a nativist, authentic image of American art deeply rooted in primitivism, a
student population that could directly embody such theories could only heighten an
institution’s position.
215
Much has been written on the cultural power of American primitivism,
particularly in the post-War climate of American-mythmaking and attempts at
constructing a native cultural hegemony in the face of the mounting Cold War.
249
As Bill
Anthes succinctly assesses, “American identity was thus redefined through its encounter
with the Primitive – as a generation of White ethnics acted as cultural brokers by
assimilating the Primitive into a new culture and identity that would mediate the modern
crises of nationalism.”
250
It is undeniable that such relationships with indigeneity, as seen
in Native Amerian traditional arts and cultural practices, as an anonymous cultural force
were at play in the pedagogical formations of the Taos Valley Art School and the School
for American Craftsmen. To return to the promotional materials from each school, central
tenets of their programs can only be read within this context. Luis Ribak’s description of
Taos as an artist’s ultimate destination that “offers opportunities found nowhere else in
the country. One finds Indian and Spanish peoples with their primitive adobe villages,
their ancient cultures remaining unchanged” as well as his exhibition statement on Indian
art directly illustrate this dynamic of modern Primitivism which was central to the
marketability of the Taos Valley Art School and Ribak himself as its leader.
251

The School for American Craftsmen had a slightly different, if no less
complicated, relationship with the role played by the Primitive in modern life and craft.
Seeking to position craftwork as a solution to the broad cultural dissatisfaction felt as a

249
See Rushing Native American Art and the New York Avant-Garde and Anthes, Native Moderns. On the
role of American modernism, and specifically Abstract Expressionism, as a cultural-political tool see Serge
Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold
War, Erika Doss, Benton, Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism: From Regionalism to Abstract
Expressionism, David Craven, “Abstract Expressionism and Third World Art: A Post-Colonial Approach to
‘American’ Art,” Oxford Art Journal 14:1 (1991), and Eva Cockcroft, “Abstract Expressionism: Weapon
of the Cold War,” Artforum 12:1 (June 1974).
250
Anthes, Native Moderns, 63.
251
Taos Valley Art School pamphlet, Mandelman/Ribak Papers, UNM
216
result of the mass-production of the machine age, the School for American Craftsmen
aimed to function in parallel to the authentic American Primitive, yet in a thoroughly
modern manner. As explained in a 1948/1949 catalog “Now…the place of machine is
being analyzed in relation to human happiness and found wanting in many respects. Men
again seek gainful occupations which will meet their creative instinct and give them
personal independence.”
252
Charles and Otellie were explicitly positioned as
representatives of this modernization of ancient, yet important, craftwork. In an article on
the young couple Charles is quoted as saying “our people have made pottery for
generations, but it is rather crude. It is merely clay, shaped and baked and doesn’t standup
like modern chinaware.” And the response from SAC was “Now, the school’s craftsmen-
teachers are showing the Hopi couple how to use a variety of clays for a stronger mixture
and up-to-date methods of forming and firing.”
253
Modernization of ancient art forms
thus resulted in stronger and more universally appealing products and could only further
the progress of Americans, in general, and the Hopi, specifically.
That Mirabal and the Lolomas were not the absent or lost indigenous past of
America, but were living and creating alongside Anglo students suggests that at these
institutions the primitive was not only useable as a romantic, symbolic past upon which
to construct a new, purely American culture, but rather was firmly present in the
construction of the modern/primitive symbiosis at both schools. Despite the fact that their
cultural heritage was generally being paternalistically co-opted by the dominant culture,
Mirabal and the Lolomas were able to construct mutually-beneficial environments in

252
The School for American Craftsmen, catalog edition 1948-49, p. 5. Alfred University Archives.
253
“Hopi Indians Come to Alfred to Learn Modern Pottery Methods,” Fiat Lux, Alfred University, Vol.
XXXV, No. 20, March 23, 1948, p. 1.
217
which they were able to profit from an experimental educational system that radically
differed from their earlier experiences at Bureau of Indian Affairs institutions. Mirabal
and the Lolomas actively worked within the structure of American modernist culture in
order to explore new creative and technical modalities. Ultimately the relative degrees of
mainstream success reached by these three artists, from Mirabal’s increasing invisibility
as she turned away from a modernist aesthetic and returned to the style of traditional
Indian painting, to Otellie Loloma whose continuing manipulations of a traditional craft
material were subsumed by her dual role as both woman and Native, to Charles Loloma’s
stardom as a radical (male) experimenter, belie a seismic shift within the Native art
world. This shift in Native art, and thus educational programming, increasingly favored
individualism, experimentation and modernist principles over what was seen as the rigid
restrictions of formal traditionalism and continued to expand exponentially in the
following decades.

218
Chapter Three
IMAGES

Figure 3.1: Charles Loloma’s Hopi Katsinas in the Pueblo room at the Golden Gate
International Exposition, San Francisco, 1939

Figure 3.2: Charles Loloma at work at the Golden Gate International Exposition, San
Francisco, 1939
219

Figure 3.3: Charles Loloma, illustrations for Little Hopi by Edward Kennard & Albert
Yava, 1948

220

Figure 3.4: School for American Craftsmen catalogue 1948-1949
221

Figure 3.5: Linn Phelan, Trumpet Shell Bowl, 1946 (left) and Umbria/Orvieto, two-
handled bowl, circa 1300 — 1425 (right)

Figure 3.6: Linn Phelan, Bowl, c. 1930s (left) and Hispano-Moresque Albarello, Spain
15th century (right)
222

Figure 3.7: Charles and Otellie Loloma working at in School for American Craftsmen
ceramics studio, c. 1947
223

Figure 3.8: Linn Phelan instructing in kiln firing, c. 1940s
224

Figure 3.9: America House salesroom, Manhattan, c. 1940s
225

Figure 3.10: Peter Voulkos, Vase decorated with a “slip stencil” technique, 1957
226

Figure 3.11: Betty Woodman, Bowl, c. 1940s-1950s

Figure 3.12: Otellie Loloma, Untitled Pot w/ Lid, nd (left) and Charles Loloma, Untitled
Tumblers, 1953 (right)
227

Figure 3.13: Otellie Loloma, Bird Girl, 1969

228

Figure 3.14: Otellie Loloma, Pot with Handle, 1971
229

Figure 3.15: Linn Phelan, Folded Dish, 1950
230

Figure 3.16: Nampeyo, Jar/Olla, c. 1925
231

Figure 3.17: Otellie Loloma, Effigy Pot, 1972
232

Figure 3.18: Charles Loloma, student works, 1948
233

Figure 3.19: Unknown, Acoma Pot, early 20
th
century
234

Figure 3.20: Charles and Otellie Loloma at Kiva Craft Center shop, 1956

235

Figure 3.21: Eva Mirabal, Untitled mural at Santa Fe Indian School, c. 1935-1939

Figure 3.22: Eva Mirabal (Eah-Ha-Wa), Buy War Bonds, 1942

236

Figure 3.23: Eva Mirabal (Eah-Ha-Wa), Untitled, 1942

237

Figure 3.24: Eva Mirabal, G.I. Gertie, c. 1944

Figure 3.25: Unknown photographer, portrait of Eva Mirabal, c. 1944
238

Figure 3.26: Unknown photographer, portrait of Eva Mirabal, c. 1944
239

Figure 3.27: Taos Valley Art School pamphlet, 1947

Figure 3.28: Edward Corbett, Untitled #7, 1945
240

Figure 3.29: Oli Sihvonen, The Canyon, c. 1950
241

Figure 3.30: Louis Ribak, East Side New York, c. 1935
242

Figure 3.31: Louis Ribak, Rock Quarry with Nudes, c. 1950
243

Figure 3.32: Beatrice Mandelman, White Pitcher, c. 1949

Figure 3.33: Beatrice Mandelman, Morning Tide #7, c. late 1950s
244

Figure 3.34: Joseph Henry Sharp, The Stoic, 1914
245

Figure 3.35: E. Irving Couse, Taos Pueblo - Moonlight, 1914
246

Figure 3.36: “Fifty Years Ago Phillips Painted Taos Pueblo, Indians Now Return Favor,”
Taos Valley Star, 1948
247

Figure 3.37: “Red Man and White Man, who met here on the battlefield in 1847, join in
an art class below the Taos mountains. Indian pageantry has lured to Taos a colony of
artists. But centuries before, Pueblo painters were adorning cliffs, kivas, and ceramics.
Louis Ribak conducts this class,” National Geographic
248

Figure 3.38: Mandelman/Ribak scrapbook, 1950

249

Figure 3.39: Eva Mirabal (Eah-Ha-Wa), Untitled Still Life, c. 1950
250

Figure 3.40: Eva Mirabal (Eah-Ha-Wa), Wild Deer, c. 1950

251

Figure 3.41: Eva Mirabal (Eah-Ha-Wa), Prairie Fire, 1965

252
Chapter Four
Radical Institution: The Institute of American Indian Arts
and Contemporary Native American Art

In 1962 the United States’ Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and the Indian Arts and
Crafts Board (IACB) founded the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe,
New Mexico. The first Indian school devoted to the arts, IAIA’s founding constituted a
significant moment in the history of contemporary Native American art history and
practice. Institutionalized Indian art instruction in the first half of the twentieth century
was marked by a focus on craft production geared primarily toward tourist consumption;
by the specific painting style recognized by its flat surfaces, lack of perspective, solidly
outlined fields of color, and by narrative content depicting “traditional” Indian scenes led
by the Santa Fe Indian School artists, the Kiowa Painters, and subsequently the Bacone
school of painters.
254
The Institute of American Indian Arts, through its faculty and
curriculum, created an environment that fostered a period of rich artistic experimentation
that broke with earlier popular conceptions of Indian art. However, the origins and
ongoing legacy of IAIA represent a complicated tangle of cultural perceptions, debates
and struggles that in many ways were the direct result of the differing paths of Indian art
education traced within the earlier chapters. The particular pedagogical approaches taken
within the organization, and perceived by the public at large, do not so much radically
diverge from those of earlier models, but rather draw upon often conflicting views in the

254
For an introduction to early twentieth century Indian painting see: J.J. Brody, Indian Painters and White
Patrons, (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1971) and Bruce Bernstein and W. Jackson
Rushing, Modern by Tradition: American Indian Painting in the Studio Style, (Santa Fe: Museum of New
Mexico Press, 1995).
253
early 1960s of what Indian art should be, in order to create a new space of creative
dialogue.
The work undertaken by both the faculty and students during the early years of
the school reveals a new agency and politicization of Indian art that represents a radical
repositioning of the relationship between Native Americans and modern and post-modern
art. In examining the curriculum, public programming, and key members of the student
and faculty population, a rich image of the complex nature of the relationship between
IAIA and the broader contemporary art world will begin to emerge. However, that such
synthesis and debate could happen within the classrooms and studios of the Institute of
American Indian Arts is perhaps surprising in light of the fact that the school was
established by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and was ostensibly run in its early years as a
typical BIA boarding school of the 1960s.
255
Because of this paradoxical environment,
assessments of the work undertaken in the early years of IAIA tend to align with one of
two poles. On one side is the view, espoused most clearly by Joy Gritton in The Institute
of American Indian Arts: Modernism and U.S. Indian Policy that IAIA was driven at the
administrative level by a retrograde view of the role of Indians in 20
th
century America,
and on the other is the perspective that IAIA was the hotbed of radical artistic
experimentation – a view generally embraced by the popular media from the 1960s to
today.
256
The reality of the school in its early years likely fell solidly in both camps, with

255
The climate at BIA schools in the early 1960s was deeply rooted in the politics of termination. Contrary
to the progressive moment of the 1920s and 1930s led by John Collier in which Native arts and culture
were supported and taught at BIA schools, there had been a general return to overt assimilationist policies
including an emphasis on academics and acculturation. See Szasz and Gritton for more on the political
context in which IAIA emerged.
256
See for example Rick Hill, Creativity is Our Tradition: Three Decades of Contemporary Indian Art
(Santa Fe: Institute of American Indian Arts, 1992) and media responses to the IAIA 40
th
anniversary
254
the art program indeed embracing significant innovation in a wide range of media and
styles, while the administration and academics were significantly more conservative. This
is a clear reflection of the broader cultural and political context of both Native and non-
Native America.
The establishment of the Institute of American Indian Arts began to ferment years
before the opening of its doors. For decades prior, Anglo artists, scholars, collectors,
museum directors, and government officials debated over the relative value of Indian art
and crafts. In 1932 Dorothy Dunn, a young educator with the BIA, started the Studio
School at the Santa Fe Indian School. The Studio School was created in order to foster a
new form of art education for American Indian students. Drawing upon new shifts in
Indian education that moved away from earlier assimilationist agendas, Dunn sought to
create an environment supportive of “traditional” Indian painting, as opposed to one that
either enforced rigid Euro-American aesthetic values or limited production to “curios”
and crafts. In summarizing Dunn’s project, Bruce Bernstein explains,
Her stated objectives were transformational for their time: to foster
appreciation of Indian painting among students and the public, thus
helping to establish it in its rightful place as one of the fine arts of the
world…to study and explore traditional Indian art methods and production
in order to continue established basic painting forms, and to evolve new
motifs, styles, and techniques in character with the old and worthy of
supplementing them....
257

exhibition such as Dottie Indyke, “Institute of American Indian Arts: As the school celebrates its 40
th

anniversary,” Southwest Art (32.3 August 2002): 142-147 and Nancy Marie Mithlo ,”Exhibition Review,”
Museum Anthropology (Vol. 24, No. 2/3, 2002): 63-68.
257
Bruce Bernstein, “Art for the Sake of Life: Dorothy Dunn and a Story of American Indian Painting,” in
Modern by Tradition, 3.
255
Drawing upon the styles of the Kiowa Five and the San Ildefonso School, both developed
shortly prior to the founding of the Studio School, as well as on ancient practices and
motifs found on wall paintings and pottery, Dunn established an aesthetic defined by
flatness, bold colors, decorative patterns, and local narrative expressions [Figure 4.1].
258

The new appreciation for Indian painting that expressed local (primarily Pueblo)
tribal traditions presented by the teaching at the Studio School quickly spread to
collectors and supporters across the country. While this transition to viewing Indian art as
fine art, as opposed to either craft or artifact, had many positive results for working
Native American artists, it was not without its problems. Dunn, in aiming to create a new
art form that drew directly upon the innate creative spirit of her students, ultimately
created another system of paternalistic control, dictating what was and was not acceptable
as authentic Indian art. There was relatively little creative variation among the student
work at the Studio school. As Bernstein suggests, “Some believed that Dunn stifled her
students’ creativity by requiring them to paint in a manner which she, as well as other
Anglo patrons and appreciators, promoted as the only true style of Indian painting.”
259

Such criticism of the Studio Style increased through the 1950s, particularly around
discussions about the possibility of creating a new art program or school devoted to
Native arts.
Dunn’s Studio is of particular relevance to the history of IAIA in that the campus
of the Santa Fe Indian School would come to house IAIA for its first two decades.
However, the parallels in development traced through Bacone College and Lloyd New’s

258
See Brody and Bernstein and Rushing.
259
Bernstein, “Art for the Sake of Life: Dorothy Dunn and a Story of American Indian Painting,” 25.
256
tenure at the Phoenix Indian School are in many ways more pertinent to the actual
pedagogical practices of IAIA arts faculty. The creation of IAIA has been linked directly
to both inter-institutional debates at the BIA regarding the role of Indian arts and culture
in the face of termination policy at the bureaucratic level, and programming developed
through the support of the Rockefeller Foundation in Arizona, including the 1959
conference “Directions in Indian Art: A Conference on Arizona’s Position on Southwest
Indian Art Education” and the resulting educational program, The Southwestern Indian
Art Project, which was hosted by the University of Arizona, Tucson. Gritton goes into
great detail regarding the complexities of the political admixture between the cultural
denizens of the East Coast elite directed by the Rockefeller Foundation and René
d’Harnoncourt - who was then the director of MoMA, chairman of the Indian Arts and
Crafts Board, and vice president of Nelson Rockefeller’s Museum of Primitive Art - and
leaders at the Bureau of Indian Affairs Department of Education.
260
While the political
machinations behind these programs and the resulting resolution to open an Indian art
school in Santa Fe are revealing of how a universalizing primitivism met with
terminationist policy to produce this school, what has not been dealt with as explicitly is
how the artistic practices and pedagogy born from these two early programs fed directly
into the art department (if not so clearly into the administration and academics) of IAIA.

260
Gritton explains in detail how Charles B. Fahs, the director of humanities for the Rockefeller
Foundation, was instructed to investigate the “problem” of Indian arts and crafts, particularly in the
Southwest. In part this was to expand the Rockefeller’s engagement with indigenous cultures at the North
American level and in part this was to address the issues of marketing, sales, and authenticity that were the
focus of the IACB. Gritton suggests that d’Harnoncourt’s influence clearly inspired this new interest in
Native American arts, which is likely quite true. Gritton also astutely points out that a degree of political
motivation, in light of the Cold War and broader cultural bolstering of American art at the international
level, was behind this engagement as well. Fahs was sent to the Southwest, where he was introduced to
New and Loloma, who first presented to him their plans for creating an Indian arts school in Scottsdale, as
mentioned in an earlier chapter. This meeting was fortuitous, and likely was largely influential in
cementing New and Loloma’s roles at the Southwestern Indian Art Project and then at IAIA.
257
The Rockefeller sponsored conference on Directions in Indian Art held over two
days in March of 1959 at the University of Arizona, Tucson, gathered together a select
group of experts in Indian art including Anglo educators, dealers, museum officials, and
university professors, as well as a selection of leading Native artists of the time, including
Lloyd (Kiva) New, Charles Loloma, Fred Kabotie, Alan Houser, Joe Herrera and Pablita
Velarde. The conference, intended to address Indian art education, ultimately revolved
around issues of collecting and marketing. Education was barely addressed and often was
focused on how to “educate” Anglo collectors about quality and authenticity in Indian
arts, particularly in guiding collectors to embrace new adaptations of art forms and
traditions in order for art to move forward. Dorothy Dunn, who was in attendance and
spoke of the necessity of continuing to guide students in the arts at Indian Schools, was
disparaged as creating a system in which “in the process of producing an Indian artist,
actually taught him a style a of painting derived from Persian miniatures. At best this
style is an unwarranted eclecticism and at worst it is a fraud.” Professor of art Robert
Quinn, who made this pronouncement, went on to assert, not realizing his own irony, “It
seems to me that the real problem the Indian artist faces is the insistence that he be an
Indian… He has to realize that he is an artist first and an Indian second if his art and the
tradition it represents are to grow.”
261
Such a statement did stand out from the others
noted from the conference summary, yet it was more in degree than in sentiment. Overall
many of the commentators, both Anglo and Native, expressed their beliefs that in order

261
Robert M. Quinn, Associate Professor of Art, University of Arizona in Directions in Indian Art: The
Report of a Conference Held at the University of Arizona on March Twentieth and Twenty First, Nineteen
Hundred and Fifty Nine, Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1959 in Lloyd H. New Papers, Institute of
American Indian Arts.
258
for Indian arts to thrive in the modern day, artists must work to adapt their traditions
rather than be stymied by them.
In correspondence between Lloyd New and Charles B. Fahs of the Rockefeller
Foundation, New expressed his own response to the conference, claiming to Fahs how
the event only cemented his desire to establish a new kind of Indian art program that
would educate young artists in order to create a new generation of economically and
creatively successful Indian artists. As he declared,
Someway, somehow, and soon, we intend to do something specific about
setting up a special Indian School, with the avowed purpose of giving
young talented kids a chance to see what they can do in a special setting
where they will be steeped in the beauties of their own traditions, where
their creative talents can be awakened, where their individual taste levels
will be raised and adapted to the world into which they ultimately must fit.
Where they can learn the essentials of economics surrounding the pursuit
of their talents, such as production, cost accounting, finance, and sales
presentation. And where they can avail themselves in their last year at
school of a marketing plan to assure themselves of working capital when
they leave the school.
262

New’s vision for a special Indian school was a melding of his own earlier teaching
practice at the Phoenix Indian School and his experience as a successful creative
entrepreneur, drawing upon as well the educational experiences of his friends and
collaborators Charles and Otellie Loloma, whose instruction while at the School for
American Craftsmen was grounded in the belief that craft students should be well versed
in the practical elements of running a successful business in order to succeed as artists
and as progenitors of a new American craft revival.

262
Letter from Lloyd New to Charles B. Fahs, September 28, 1959 in Correspondence I – Charles B. Fahs
(1958-1963), (Box 5/Folder 1), Lloyd H. New Papers, Institute of American Indian Arts.
259
The immediate result of the conference on Directions in Indian Art was a summer
arts school supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and held at the University of
Arizona. New was selected to codirect the program, alongside the chair of the art
department at the University of Arizona, and teach textiles at this new program. The
Southwest Indian Art Project was intended as a pilot program serving college age Indian
student through six-week long intensive workshops on the Tucson campus. The original
proposal for the project introduced a series of questions which were meant to drive the
agenda of the sessions. The questions centered around how this selective group of
artistically talented Native students would “adapt” to the inclusion of “contemporary
forms, media, and methods” alongside “traditional Indian cultural concepts;” “Does
lecture material on traditional culture and archaeology, plus work in design principles,
serve as a point of departure for creative work?” and finally “Does this type of student
group adjust to academic learning and still produce personally created work of
quality?”
263
These questions, particularly the last, belie the university’s position in
relation to the future possibilities of integrating Native students, and a degree of Native-
focused curriculum, into the regular academic year. However, New’s voice is apparent in
the other questions as evidenced in the focus on how to best merge traditional Indian
concepts with contemporary art practice, an issue familiar to him as both an artist and an
educator.
The faculty of the Southwest Indian Art Project was nearly equally divided
between Anglo and Native instructors and included a familiar roster of New, the

263
“A Proposal for An Exploratory Workshop in Art for Talented Younger Indians,” October 15, 1959,
(Series IV, Box 5/Folder 2), Lloyd H. New Papers, Institute of American Indian Arts.
260
Lolomas, and Joe Herrera. New’s end of term assessment of the first year is revealing in
how the Indianness of the students and the arts was approached by various faculty. He
explained “…I will say here that Indian Art, whatever its variations from art in its multi-
argumentative broad sense, is the very core of this project. It may be a craft-art, folk art,
primitive art, call it any or all of these things, whatever it is, it should be honored and
accepted as it is, and used as a firm basis for all the artistic experiences of these Indian
youngsters.”
264
New believed that this was not successfully accomplished in the first year
of the project due to lack of support across the faculty; the implication behind this
assertion was that the Native faculty understood this approach, whereas the Anglo faculty
were more aligned with the assimilationist view expressed at the conference by Robert
Quinn. Perhaps most conspicuous in his assessment is his statement on the role of
Traditional Indian Painting in this program: “An acceptance of this promise would
include an acceptance of the popular two dimensional style of painting done by many
Indian people today. Whatever its beginnings, and whatever its good or bad qualities it
has become part of the scene, and is as much a part of Indian art as pottery or
basketry.”
265
New’s surprisingly vocal support for this standardized style, one which
came to be seen as the apotheosis of IAIA, only strengthens the boldness of his argument
for an Indian emphasis to the art instruction at the Southwestern Indian Art Project.
By the time the project completed its second summer, talks had solidified the
prospects of the creation of new Indian arts school, ultimately leading New and the
Lolomas to Santa Fe. After considerable debate featuring both Anglo and Native

264
Report of the First Six Weeks of the Southwest Indian Arts and Crafts Workshop by Lloyd Kiva, July
28, 1960, (Box 5/Folder 2), Lloyd H. New Papers, Institute of American Indian Arts.
265
Ibid.
261
American voices, the Bureau of Indian Affairs agreed to open a new art school on the
grounds of the Santa Fe Indian School.
266
The Institute of American Indian Arts began as
a high school with an additional post-graduate advanced arts program. Both components
of the educational programming sought to prepare students either to continue their studies
at another art school or college or to enter the art world as professional artists. Lloyd
Kiva New was hired as the first arts director and Charles Loloma was appointed the
department head of Plastic Arts. Significantly, New and Loloma were not the only Indian
artists hired to complete the new arts faculty of IAIA. Well-known faculty members
included Loloma’s wife, the ceramist Otellie Loloma; painter and sculptor Allan Houser;
musician and composer Louis Ballard, and, in 1964, painter Fritz Scholder who had met
New and Loloma when he attended the Southwest Indian Art Project in 1961.
267
The
faculty of IAIA thus consisted of many of the most recognized names in modern Native
American art at the time. This represents a radical break from earlier BIA institutions
where the primary instructors were Anglo artists trained by the BIA.
When IAIA opened its doors in 1962 it gathered a population of 130 students
from sixty-nine tribes across nineteen states.
268
This number would quickly grow to
nearly 300 students from over eighty-eight tribes.
269
Within the classrooms and studios
students were introduced to academic courses including English, mathematics, history,
and home economics and to art courses that included painting and sculpture as well as

266
For an extensive discussion of the debate surrounding the opening of IAIA see Joy L. Gritton, The
Institute of American Indian Arts: Modernism and U.S. Indian Policy, 2000 and Winona Garmhausen
History of Indian Arts Education in Santa Fe: The Institute of American Indian Arts with Historical
Background, 1890 to 1962, 1988.
267
For more information on Scholder see recent exhbition catalogs John Lukavic, et al., Super Indian: Fritz
Scholder, 1967-1980, (Denver, CO;: Denver Art Museum, 2015) and Truman Lowe, Paul Chaat Smith, and
Lowery Stokes Sims, Fritz Scholder: Indian Not Indian, (Munich: Prestel, 2008).
268
Gritton, 103.
269
Meryle Secrest, “Indian Arts Are Finding New Directions,” The Washington Post: Jun 1, 1966.
262
traditional Native American fields such as pottery, weaving, and jewelry. In addition to
these courses students were also offered classes in “The Artist in Business,”
“Production,” “Sales,” and “Advertising Promotion.”
270
The influence of New and
Loloma is clear in these courses, even as the influence of the BIA appointed director
George Boyce, who had come to IAIA from the Intermountain Indian School in Brigham
City, Utah, was evident in academic and extracurricular activities that emphasized social
adaptations to mainstream American culture, described as “home living activities.”
271

George Boyce, who had been selected by the BIA as director of IAIA due to his success
at the Intermountain School in running the special programming directed at transitioning
older Navajo students into an academic environment, was not particularly versed in the
arts. This is clearly apparent in the language in IAIA statements on academics and
student life compared to the arts-oriented texts, which were either drafted or at least
influenced by New as the art director.
The conflict inherent in the dual identities of the Institute of American Indian
Arts, within the institution itself and in the eyes of scholars and the public continues to
drive interpretations of the early years of this project. The first director of the school, Dr.
George A. Boyce, was deeply imbedded in the pedagogical structure of the Bureau of
Indian Affairs and saw IAIA as a school dedicated to educating young Native students as
successful individuals, not necessarily as successful artists. As a result, his comments on
the school tended to deemphasize the significance of the arts programming. As Winona
Garmhausen explained, “Instruction in the arts was to be used as a tool in this

270
Gritton, 2.
271
George Boyce, For The Record Memorandum, March 14, 1962. (Series V, Box 6/Folder 1), Lloyd H.
New Papers, Institute of American Indian Arts.
263
developmental process. One of Boyce’s repeated sayings to his friends and colleagues
was that given a well-rounded education, the Indian student who wished to become an
artist ‘would find his art.’”
272
In contrast to this perspective was the theoretical approach
brought to the institute by Lloyd Kiva New, who drafted numerous key programmatic
texts devoted to the profound significance of an art education to a population of young
Indian students. Garmhausen herself tends to emphasize the perspective of Boyce, even
attributing New’s views on how the arts should be taught and who should be hired to
teach them to Boyce and as being shared by New as well.
273

Part of New’s influence on IAIA policy lay in his unflagging support for the arts
faculty. He saw it as an absolute necessity to hire artists with successful professional
careers beyond teaching, particularly beyond teaching at BIA institutions. He succeeded
on this front. However, his desire to engage professional artists was not as resolutely
supported by school and BIA policy. In 1962 Boyce wrote a letter to the BIA
commissioner regarding a memorandum to be sent to all employees, especially
concerning the fact that according to BIA policy, instructors in the art department would
be permitted to produce occasional works of art, sometimes for sale, and sometimes to
be entered into special exhibits for occasional awards. Boyce wrote for clarification
because the school was actively seeking producing artists for faculty but it was unclear as
to how much artists could pursue their own careers after joining faculty. Boyce
explained, “In organizing and staffing the Institute, the key staff members here on the
local scene feel it is extremely important for us to seek artists and craftsmen who are

272
Garmhausen, 67.
273
Garmhausen, 75.
264
producing artists with a high degree of recognized national reputation. Producing artists
as instructors keep up their contacts with the market, with style, economics, changes in
fashion and many other insights of importance in their vocation.” He continued in a
charged statement against the possibly constraining federal policy, explaining, “In fact,
we have found that some very excellent artists will not consider employment here for fear
that they will be too rigidly restricted in continuing in their creative activities. Many
artists claim that in universities and private art institutes they find maximum freedom, but
fear Government restrictions on such activity.”
274

Boyce went on to cite New’s circumstances explicitly, asserting that, as a leader
in the field of textile and fashion design, Lloyd Kiva desired to continue to pursue his
creative and professional activities beyond teaching. Explaining this further, Boyce
stated,
The field of textile and fashion design, which is the field in which our
present Art Director, Mr. Lloyd New, is engaged, is probably a field which
would, by its nature, involve maximum economic participation outside of
Government hours and facilities. Therefore, we cite for clarification the
interests and applied questions of Mr. New rather fully as follows… The
position taken by New is one commonly taken by many successful artists
and craftsmen of the caliber we feel important in staffing the Institute for
its vocational training goals.
275

That the agenda behind this letter came primarily from New, filtered by Boyce, is
evident. New, who had left behind his highly successful fashion and textile design
business in Scottsdale, was actively seeking to establish an outpost in Santa Fe in order to

274
Letter from George A. Boyce, School Superintendent, to Commissioner, BIA, dated July 2, 1962 (Box
6/Folder 1), Lloyd H. New Papers, Institute of American Indian Arts.
275
Ibid.
265
maintain both his position within this field and his financial status. The fact that Boyce
was willing to question BIA policy towards his faculty exhibits a degree of support, even
as he was generally unfamiliar with the machinations of a successful practicing artist’s
career.
This commitment to pursue high-caliber artists as faculty members, even in the
face of restrictive federal policy, served the institute and its students well. While the first
year of operations was relatively tumultuous, with faculty who had been retained from
the former Santa Fe Indian School either leaving or providing differing approaches to
students and curriculum, and major facilities still under construction, student enrollment
continued to grow, as did public and media attention. The courses provided at IAIA in the
first years express some of this confusion, but also identify the degree to which a serious
engagement in the arts was available, if not necessarily required. As a high school with a
post-graduate arts curriculum, IAIA stood out from either academic or vocational BIA
school and from area public high schools. The basis for the high school academic
program, however, was within the state and federal educational guidelines with
instructional texts coming from the State of New Mexico and considerable hours being
devoted to standard academic coursework. Art classes, at the lower grades, took up
typically only two of eight periods in a given day; however, post-secondary students were
able to reverse this structure devoting the vast majority of their day to their art studies.
The required arts curriculum, together with elective courses, was detailed in the
IAIA Basic Statement of Purpose from 1962.
276
The three required areas of coursework

276
Institute of American Indian Arts: A Basic Statement of Purpose. Santa Fe: Institute of American Indian
Arts, 1962.
266
were “Aesthetic Survey of Indian Arts and Culture,” “Elements of Design and Principles
of Art,” and “Exploratory Experience.” The exploratory experience was required for all
entering students and was an introduction to the seven major art areas offered at IAIA
including Music and Performing Arts; Painting; Sculpture; Ceramics; Textiles, woven
and decorated; Jewelry and Metals; and Creative Writing. From this introduction students
were then expected to focus on one of those major fields, although coursework in other
art areas could continue as well. The “Aesthetic Survey of Indian Arts and Culture” and
“Elements of Design and Principles of Art” can clearly be traced directly to the
experimental curriculum of the Southwest Indian Art Project. The course on elements of
design and principles of art presented a more theoretical introduction to the arts,
“branching out from a close look at design as used by Indians to design in the universal
sense.”
277
It is critical to note the distinct course dedicated to Indian arts and culture in
which students explored “Indian expression, historical and contemporary, North and
South American continents, in areas of philosophy, literature, dance, costume, music, and
visual arts.”
278

New, as arts director, clearly took to heart his admonishment from his time at the
Southwest project to ingrain deeply in his curriculum an engagement with Indian arts and
cultural practice from historic to contemporary times, as a critical element of supporting
his students’ emotional and creative growth. Interesting to note is the inclusion of the
North and South American continents. While students from IAIA did arrive from across
the United States, “American Indian” as applied to student enrollment was not inclusive

277
Ibid.
278
Ibid.
267
of the indigenous peoples of Central and South America. However, this does express a
general view of the universality of indigeneity as espoused by many at IAIA, particularly
Lloyd Kiva New who had long be interested in experimental educational programs across
Latin America.
279
This pan-Indianism was an expansion of that which had been espoused
in the earlier decades of the twentieth century by artists like Blue Eagle, and provided a
strong link between contemporary Native artists and a universal view of modern art in a
post-war global world. Jackson Rushing explains this view of Indian art, “The first was a
nationalistic recognition of the essential Americanness of Indian art. The second,
conversely, was the perception that Indian art sprang from deeply rooted ancient
traditions that made manifest a universal collective unconscious.”
280
This view was
popular with IAIA’s supporter and boosters at the national and international level, even if
it might not have been particularly relevant to the student body who over the course of
the 1960s came to be increasingly, and politically, invested in their own particular
indigenous identities rather than a global one.
A 1965 feature on the American Indian student in Craft Horizons explained in
detail what “Aesthetic Survey of Indian Arts and Culture” looked like throughout a
semester. In the course, described in the article as “Indian Aesthetics,”
the student is exposed not only to the history of his own culture but also to
the histories of many others, both Indian and non-Indian. He participates

279
In his early correspondence with Charles Fahs, New wrote of the need to investigate other educational
models, in particular Truman Bailey in the Peruvian venture, which was a program created by Bailey, an
American, to support local indigenous artisans through a school and marketplace in Peru. (See Letter from
Lloyd New to Charles B. Fahs, September 28, 1959 in Correspondence I – Charles B. Fahs (1958-1963),
(Box 5/Folder 1), Lloyd H. New Papers, Institute of American Indian Arts and D.L.W., “Artist at Work,”
Women’s Wear Daily 93.95 (Nov 14, 1956): 2, 70.) In 1961, before arriving at IAIA New went on survey
tour of Peru, Ecuador, Columbia, Panama, Guatemala, and Mexico to study cultural arts programs (see
Lloyd H. New Papers, Institute of American Indian Arts and Garmhausen, p. 96).
280
Rushing, 121.
268
in re-creating his own historical background; beginning with assigned
research, he works toward preparation of a script, construction of authentic
costumes, and, finally, the creative staging of these events for his own
edifications as well as for public presentation. He practices the songs and
the dances of his forebears and retells their legends. He studies their art
and architecture, until, finally, he knows who he is. Then, and only then,
can he speak for himself, in pride and with meaning in a contemporary
sense.
281

This assessment of Native youth, presumably alienated from their ancestral heritage, who
are able to rediscover a cultural lineage through research and practice is presented as a
thoroughly contemporary experience fostered innovatively by the environment and
education at IAIA (and presumably contingent upon the cultural rupture brought about by
post-war relocation and termination). Yet this idea of the rediscovery of a powerful and
creatively inspiring cultural source is so profoundly in line with the personal and
pedagogical approach of Acee Blue Eagle and Bacone College that it is surprising that
this connection is not consistently as pronounced. The fact that Blue Eagle as an artist
and teacher embraced the retrograde style of Traditional Indian Painting is clearly the
primary reason for this omission, for by 1965, when this assessment was published, his
style and identity were seen as unforgivably outmoded and representative of what IAIA
was seen, particularly by local and national popular magazines and newspapers such as
the Santa Fe New Mexican or Life magazine, as actively working against.
The elective arts courses that were offered beyond these introductory
requirements were varied and read more like a typical art school, aside from the one
course listed as “Traditional Indian Techniques.” The classes included professional and
creative writing, museum and gallery techniques and display, music and performing arts

281
Azalea Thorpe, “The American Indian Student: Two Educational Programs, Institute of American
Indian Arts, Santa Fe,” Craft Horizons (July/August 1965): 12-13, 40.
269
course like harmony, composition, drama and dance, business principles such as
advertising, sales and production, as well as printing, painting, fashion, textiles, sculpture
(in metal and clay), jewelry, and architectural drafting. The desire to foster well-rounded
artists prepared for a successful career in the market appeared to be the intention of the
art department at IAIA. Within the studio classrooms students were instructed in art
forms that drew upon Euro-American traditions, but the ideological focus revolved
around the creation of works that expressed both individual and tribal identities. Students
were encouraged to seek a visual language that would best convey what it meant to be
Indian in the mid-twentieth century. Art historian J.J. Brody wrote of the significance of
the merging of two worlds, “Easel painting was a White art medium; it was given to the
Indians, and the result for fifty years was meek acceptance. Now the Indians have taken
it… The forms may be quite un-Indian but they merely reflect radical changes in the
purposes of Indian art… The death of Indian painting is accompanied by the birth of
Indian painters.”
282

It is significant that this birth of Indian painters on the grounds of IAIA took
place in the early to mid 1960s. At a moment when questions of equality and identity
were being negotiated across the nation, IAIA opened its doors to the possibility of
individual and group agency that its young students and faculty could possess. As Brody
suggests, the works of art produced by this new generation of Indian artists reflected a
radical rethinking not only of the “purposes of Indian art” but of the intention behind its
production. While it is possible to see this embrace of Western art forms as either explicit
or implicit assimilation, it is critical to attempt to view these shifts from the perspective

282
Brody, 205-206.
270
of IAIA’s Native American population. The conscious employment of White art practices
marks a moment when Native American artists chose to participate as modern artists
within the larger American art world, rather than passively accepting a secondary or
outsider position.
This appropriation of “White” art mediums by the faculty and students of IAIA
did in many ways represent the death, at least temporarily, of what had come to be
considered as traditional Indian painting, and inspired the rise of individually recognized
Native American artists. Yet the intention behind the programming of IAIA was not
simply to have young Indian students become Westernized artists. Rather, the goal was to
create a space in which tribal culture could meet and merge with Euro-American culture
in a manner that would reflect what it meant to be Native American in the mid-twentieth
century. This cross-cultural interaction can be traced in a 1968 photograph of two
painting students at work in the studio [Figure 4.2]. On the left a young man is seen
working on a canvas clearly inspired by Abstract Expressionist painting. In such work the
appropriation of Abstract Expressionist forms and practices can be seen as more of an act
of re-appropriation whereby young Native artists reclaimed an active sense of agency in
the history of this movement that had been so indebted to what it considered to be
“primitive” and “primal” Native forms and practices. As Bill Anthes argues, “Ultimately,
Primitivism entailed a violent misreading of Native American culture as undifferentiated
and ahistorical – existing beyond time and space as a preserve of universal creative
spirit.”
283
It was against this misreading that young artists were self-positioning. On the
right is another student at work on a canvas that presents a striking fusion of elements

283
Anthes, 88.
271
drawn from Cubism and Geometric Abstraction and identifiably Native visual motifs
such as bear prints and rainbow patterns. Centered between the two young artists is a
slightly curved panel painted with a larger than life Expressionistic rendering of a katsina.
As seen here, an evident and thoughtful exchange of visual languages was of primary
concern in the instruction and production at IAIA.
As the educational programming at IAIA continued to expand after its initial
years of success, a further commitment to educating the Institute’s students in a manner
that reflected the contemporary moment grew. By the end of the 1960s IAIA’s
curriculum included courses and workshops focused on new media, including
silkscreening [Figure 4.3] and audio-visual production. Gritton argued that by offering
courses that can be construed as being geared exclusively toward commercial success
IAIA perpetuated a long history of cultural imperialism. She suggests,
While the school carefully constructed a public image of unfettered,
culturally pluralistic arts training, the institute’s curriculum and the reward
system initiated through selective exhibitions, special events, and
publications favored a Western, modern aesthetic dominated by
individualism and commercial success in the non-Indian art market over
indigenous aesthetics distinguished by concern for communal welfare,
social mores, and religious proscriptions and practices.
284

Gritton’s analysis of IAIA’s curriculum, in an ironic turn, creates a romanticized and
static image of Indian art in the twentieth century. While it may be true that IAIA and
popular media publicly favored modern over traditional artistic practices (although not
necessarily aesthetic forms), courses that offered exposure to new media forms such as

284
Gritton, 2.
272
audio-visual production provided an innovative and politicized new mode of self and
tribal expression.
As seen in the image documenting a 1971 audio-visual workshop that resulted in
the production and screening of twenty-two films, students at IAIA might have been
offered exposure to “Western” media, but the outcome of such exposure was greater
investigation into their own cultural world [Figure 4.4]. In the series of production
screens examined by the students one sees images reaching from archival photographs
documenting how Native Americans had been represented by the Western eye, an
illustration of a “typical” American exchange of greeting or goods, and finally an image
of JFK. This wide ranging selection of visual sources illustrates immediately the visual
claims that young Native American artists were attempting to make regarding their own
individual and group identities as both (and perhaps at times neither) Indians and
Americans.
As Gritton notes, the incorporation of a “Western, modern aesthetic” was not
limited to art instruction at IAIA. Indeed, such cross-cultural exchange was found in
activities and projects that extended beyond the student population. From the first years
of IAIA the exhibition of student and faculty work locally, nationally, and internationally
represented a significant element of the institution’s attempts to court support for its
programming and to introduce to students to the experience of profiting from the sale of
their own art. By 1964 IAIA had its first national exhibition, a traveling show that opened
at the offices of the Department of the Interior in Washington, D.C. As Gritton explains,
“it was here for the first time in the school’s exhibition history that emphasis was placed
273
on the experimental new forms, with which the institute was now being credited.”
285
The
image that the Institute of American Indian Arts was attempting to convey was indeed
decidedly experimental, but this experimentation was far from limited to the individual
works displayed, nor was it a limitation as Gritton seems to suggest.
This exhibition was composed of two sections – an open invitational of 88 works
highlighting mostly IAIA students and faculty and a smaller selection of paintings on
loan from the Philbrook Annual. As explained in the exhibition catalog “The invitational
section of the exhibition, which includes the work of several recent Institute students,
vividly reflects the new spirit of experimentation and invention which has resulted in a
wide latitude of styles and media now at the command of Native American artists.”
286

Artists selected ranged from Larry Littlebird (Laguna/Santo Domingo), who created
expressionist paintings often depicting vaguely mythical animals or distorted figures to
Ernest Whitehead (tribal affiliation unknown) who drafted Studio-influenced paintings of
ceremonial life. The catalog concludes by contemplating the future of Native American
art, proclaiming,
…through the evidence of an adventurous spirit, a natural inquisitiveness
on the part of the artist with his adaptability to new technical knowledge,
and above all, his innate abilities for invention and creativity, the
contemporary Native American artist is assured a vital and unbroken
tradition of fine arts expression with unlimited and rapidly expanding
horizons.
287

285
Griton, 111.
286
Introduction to the Catalogue, 'First Annual Invitational Exhibition of American Indian Paintings,' 1964,
IAIA Archives, RG02.1964.01
287
Ibid.
274
These words directly recall the narrative of the unbroken tradition of Native arts
as espoused by both New and Blue Eagle. Situating young artists firmly within
the boundaries of a continuous heritage of art production assures the public that
such works, whether they resembled the Traditional Indian Painting images
borrowed from the Philbrook, or seemed to evoke in the viewer’s mind Francis
Bacon or even Edvard Munch, these artists and their artwork were all
unquestionably and authentically Indian.
In an image of an exhibition labeled as an “early ethnographic exhibition” that
was displayed on the IAIA campus a striking co-presence of old and new is visible
[Figure 4.5]. Unlike the first Department of the Interior exhibition that presented works
described as formally experimental, one sees here works that appear to closely resemble
styles reminiscent of the earlier Studio School style of painting. What is particularly
striking about this image is thus not the “experimental” forms of the paintings, but the
blending of an older sense of ethnographic display presented in a raw and self-critical
manner, as if parodying how the dominant culture had represented Indian arts for decades
prior. Presented in the student-run gallery on the school’s Santa Fe campus, the
exhibition would have been open to any and all curious visitors that at times included
Vincent Price, Senator Stewart Udall and his wife Lee, and even Peggy Guggenheim, as
well as family members and local artists, collectors, and educators. The crudely
constructed “frames” of pine and rope in which the paintings are hung recall displays of
Indian artifacts set in recreated scenes of the past found in ethnographic museums across
the country. Yet the paintings themselves are decidedly not ancient artifacts drawn from
275
a dying or dead past. These images, whether or not they are read as formally modern, are
from the today of this photograph.
What the exhibition display here is attempting to do is create a dialogue around
the expectations of what Indian art is and how it is presented to the public. Lloyd Kiva
New believed that it was impossible “for anyone to live realistically while shut in by
outmoded tradition” and that Native American artists should not depend on the “hopeless
prospect of mere remanipulation of the past.”
288
Visible in this image of an early
exhibition is this belief that mere remanipulation of the past would lead to a stagnant art,
void of the realities of contemporary experience. While the past is evoked here it is not
presented in order to use it as a creative model, but rather as a critical lens through which
the students could examine how they had been represented and how they might go
forward to represent themselves.
In keeping with the principle of bridging traditional and contemporary
perspectives for audiences within and beyond the Institute, in 1964 Lloyd Kiva New
commissioned the architect and urban planner Paolo Soleri to construct a three-hundred
seat open-air theater on the IAIA campus [Figure 4.6]. In line with Soleri’s theory of
“arcology,” architecture in harmony with ecology, the IAIA theater (now know as the
Paolo Soleri theater) was constructed using Soleri’s own earth-casting technique. Soleri
worked directly with IAIA students in the planning and design of the theater, aiming to
create an environment in which the stage performers and the audience could interact, an

288
Kiva New in Gritton, 2.
276
environment that would also “frame the moon and sun” [Figures 4.7 and 4.8].
289
This
project can be seen as the practical application of cultural exchange through its
interactive construction and function. The Paolo Soleri theater physically expresses the
cross-pollination between traditional Pueblo style architecture of adobe and modernist
architectural aesthetics.
The interactive nature of the Paolo Soleri theater, beginning with the design
process and continuing through construction and use, stands out as a particularly
provocative moment in how IAIA, specifically through the vision of Kiva New, sought to
project itself not as an isolated Indian school but as an institution engaged directly with
the larger art world. Significantly, Soleri himself is better known as an urban planner than
as the architect of individual building projects. His utopian vision of arcology, defined as
the “City made in the image of man, and therefore three-dimensional, complex, and
miniaturized. Arcology is architecture as the materialization of the human environment,
and it is ecology as the physical, biological, and psychological balance of all aspects of a
specific place and its existence overall,” was the guiding force behind his many design
projects.
290
For the IAIA theater project Soleri and the students took his theory of the city
as a complex and miniaturized image of man and the environment and miniaturized it
once again from the city to the performance space. Even as this project was a relative
departure for Soleri away from his larger vision of a new city-space, the complex
merging of environment and culture, as well as tribal and Euro-American aesthetics,
seems to be a clear expression of arcology.

289
Antonietta Iolanda Lima, Soleri: Architecture as Human Ecology, (New York: The Monacelli Press,
2000) 193.
290
Ibid, 65.
277
It is generally apparent how the Paolo Soleri theater fits into the architect’s larger
project, but it is also crucial to consider how the theater was significant to the illustration
and development of IAIA’s own self-image as well. While bringing in Soleri, whose
status as a radically innovative designer was already established at this point, was a
decision that can be seen as cementing the impression of IAIA as an equally innovative
institution to the outside viewer, the theater was intended to serve first and foremost the
students and faculty of the school. The theater was created in order to host the
performance of a wide range of activities that reflected the two-sided approach to Indian
identity espoused by the institute. Thus the venue would host both modern dance and
theater productions as well as traditional tribal dances and storytelling – and such
institutional ceremonies as graduation. Bruce King, a former IAIA student, recently
recounted his view of the significance of the theater, suggesting, “the facility was meant
as an instrument to present Native American theater… when functioning at full capacity,
the structure comes alive and we understand the artistic and creative equity that this
facility houses. The Soleri speaks to the birthplace of Native American theater, and to
disregard that is to disregard the historical and cultural integrity of the art movement of
the past four decades.”
291
In this history of the Paolo Soleri, its presence on the grounds
of IAIA serves as a point of origin for creative explorations in the performing arts and
inter-cultural exchange much like the studio courses provided a forum for visual
experimentation and dialogue.

291
Bruce King, “Paolo Soleri’s real intention never realized,” editorial, The New Mexican: June 12, 2010
(online: http://www.santafenewmexican.com/opinion/My-View-Paolo-Soleri-s-real-purpose-never-
realized)
278
While the design and construction of the Paolo Soleri marked 1964 as a significant
moment in IAIA’s interaction with members of the outside arts community, that year was
also critical within the student and faculty population of the institute. The painter Fritz
Scholder (Luiseño), who had recently completed his MFA at the University of Arizona
after studying in California with the proto-Pop painter Wayne Thiebaud, arrived at IAIA
as a painting instructor. Shortly thereafter a young student by the name of T.C. Cannon
(Kiowa/Caddo/Choctaw) came to study under Scholder and other artists at the Institute.
Scholder and Cannon, perhaps more than other figures related to IAIA radically
transformed the position and style of contemporary Native American art. In a 1970 article
from the Christian Science Monitor entitled “’Pop Indian’ Emerges from a New
Renaissance,” the author opens with the statement “It has been said of Fritz Scholder that
he has singlehandedly ‘messed up’ Indian art. To this Mr. Scholder – the leading
American Indian painter in the country today and the tradition-breaking originator and
prime mover in the so-called ‘new Indian art’ – nods and smiles and agrees.”
292
Scholder
was viewed by the mainstream media and Anglo collectors as the most famous Indian
artist of his time. Interestingly, Scholder himself had a highly conflicted relationship with
his own Indian identity, more often than not reminding his viewers that he was only one
quarter Luiseño and had not been raised as an Indian, but rather that his parents went to
great lengths to assimilate their family into the Anglo-American mainstream.
It was not until Scholder arrived at IAIA and saw how his own students were
portraying Native Americans that he first created an “Indian” painting. Scholder’s student

292
John C. Waugh, “’Pop Indian’ Emerges from a New Renaissance,” The Christian Science Monitor,
(Sept 11, 1970): 13.
279
T. C. Cannon also began to create works with Native American subject matter around the
same moment. Cannon, unlike Scholder, was raised within Native American culture,
growing up surrounded by his father’s Kiowa and his mother’s Caddo worlds. Despite
their relative differences, Scholder and Cannon came to share a similar sense of the need
to express Native American identity in a manner that would directly challenge popular
conceptions of what this identity was [Figure 4.9]. In a review of Cannon and Scholder’s
two-man exhibition of 1972 at the Smithsonian’s National Collection of Fine Arts, The
Washington Post declared “Their paintings are at once an indictment of Western
‘civilization,’ and an assertion of Indian pride. But they are, most of all, an almost
desperate search of a new identity. On all counts, they are deeply disturbing, even when
Scholder depicts the Indian warrior as grotesquely comic. That makes the tragedy even
more poignant.”
293
Whether or not one chooses to view Cannon and Scholder’s paintings
as tragic, it is true that there is something “disturbing” or disruptive done to the image of
the Indian in these works.
Scholder’s style of painting is marked by a decidedly expressionistic influence. In
his images of Native Americans, figures are marked by the erasure of individual identity
through the smearing or streaking of layers of paint across the face and body. In his
painting Indian No. 16 from 1967 [Figure 4.10] one sees this loss or destruction of
identity most explicitly. While the image as a whole evokes both Pop and Expressionism,
the figure centered in the orange canvas is specific to Scholder’s own vision of Native
American identity during this period of social and cultural upheaval. This figure of an
Indian in traditional regalia mounted atop an equally adorned horse is the outline of a

293
“Two American Painters,” The Washington Post, (March 27, 1972): A22.
280
stereotypical Indian warrior culled from the pages of dime-store paperbacks and the reels
of countless Westerns devoted to the seemingly unending battles between cowboys and
Indians. Yet the figure himself is made up of simple swatches of color, nearly
indistinguishable from the bold orange background, with no distinguishing features
visible on either man or horse. Particularly unsettling is the orange orb of the face marked
only by streaks of slashing blue and off-white, outlined by a nearly putrid dark green.
Hovering above this figure’s head is a bold black question mark, explicitly reaffirming
the ambiguity of the man below. One must wonder at the effacement of this man. Was it
designed to be understood as emanating from the hand of Scholder alone, or might it be
read as predating the artist’s own rendering of the image? Did the effacement begin with
the first popular image of an Indian warrior on horseback? Or did it begin in a more
recent moment, perhaps embodied by the opening of IAIA, when the Native American
chose to confront his position as both Indian and American, a confrontation that may
have left the figure with an identity not grounded in either but instead floating in the haze
between the two.
In contrast to Scholder’s Expressionist swaths of color and blurred details, T. C.
Cannon’s style was more directly influenced by Pop, with its bold, bright colors and
comic-like figures. In Collector #5 (Osage with Van Gogh), 1975 [Figure 4.11] Cannon
created a detailed portrayal of an Osage tribal leader seated in a stylized interior space.
This scene humorously captures the complicated status of the modern American Indian in
relation to the Western art world. The collector here is a figure who, to most Anglo
viewers’ minds, would more likely be cast as the collected. The Osage man in his
traditional ceremonial attire could easily be found represented in an ethnographic
281
museum, his clothing and accessories categorized as authentic artifacts of tribal culture.
Yet Cannon has repositioned him into a decidedly Western interior space, with its wicker
chair, wallpapered walls, and, most importantly, the small Van Gogh landscape hung
squarely above his head. Whereas in Scholder’s Indian No. 16 an anonymous Native
American figure is crowned by an ominous question mark, in Collector #5 Cannon has
created a direct link between the Osage man’s head and a masterpiece of modern
European art. As much as Scholder’s personage is ambiguous and unidentifiable,
Cannon’s subject is a very specific character that seamlessly blends the Indian of the past
with his increasing cultural power in the present. Yet, in both images one can locate
something of what The Wall Street Journal described as “deeply disturbing,” that is, the
radical appropriation and disruption of Euro-American cultural practices and beliefs and
the interjection of a new identity into this world.
The paintings of Scholder and Cannon offered images of Native Americans that
uprooted the stronghold of the Noble Savage that had so long dominated representations
of the Indian in Western art. But these images offered more than a new view of the Indian
as Other. Rather, these works, in line with the larger agenda espoused by IAIA, created a
view of Native Americans as active agents in the creation of their own contemporary
image. This contemporary picture of the Native American was rooted in tribal heritage,
but firmly laid claim to Euro-American traditions as equally, if at times problematically,
formative. As art historian W. Jackson Rushing argues,
[Cannon and Scholder’s] radical solutions to the problem of representing
Native American subjectivity constituted an implicit rejection of a
historically constructed artifice: an ahistorical Indian reality that embodied
Euro-America’s colorful Other…If, as Yves-Alain Bois suggests, ‘form is
always ideological,’ then a stylistic rupture, especially one that challenges
282
so directly the stereotypes produced by the politically dominant culture, is
not merely an aspect of art history. Such risk-taking, with its potential for
either productive intervention of critical marginalization, must be seen as
central to the history of Native American resistance to Euro-American
hegemony.
294

This quote is particularly evocative of the politically charged nature that the act of art
making came to have in the hands of Native American artists during the 1960s and 1970s.
Yet, in a manner similar to the public image of IAIA, Scholder positioned himself in
direct opposition to overtly political art, stating in 1971, “I don’t dig Red Power and I
don’t identify with protest Indian art,” and T. C. Cannon dropped out of art school at the
San Francisco Art Institute to serve as a paratrooper in the Vietnam War. All the same.
the nature of their work and its relationship to the dominant culture provoked a powerful,
and politicized, cultural shift.
295

There is a tendency to read the student work produced at IAIA throughout the
1960s as the Indian version of Pop or Expressionism or Hard Edge or whatever other art
world ism or school comes to mind, or conversely to try to see this work as pure
innovation untouched by these visual tropes but instead as representing the natural
evolution of indigenous art in isolation.
296
These narratives are amplified by the general

294
W. Jackson Rushing, “Authenticity and Subjectivity in Post-War Painting: Concerning Herrera,
Scholder, and Cannon,” in Margaret Archuleta and Rennard Strickland, Shared Visions: Native American
Painters and Sculptors in the Twentieth Century, (Phoenix, AZ: The Heard Museum, 1991) 19.
295
Paul Chaat Smith, “Monster Love,” in Fritz Scholder: Indian Not Indian (Washington, D.C.: National
Museum of the American Indian, 2008) 34.
296
A recent public talk given by art historian Kristine Ronan at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research
Center in Santa Fe illustrated this interpretive divide. The premise Ronan’s talk, “Indian–Pop–Politics: The
Rise and Fall of a Native American Art,” was that “Indian Pop” was an international art movement of the
1960s and 1970s that began at the Institute of American Indian Arts and was clearly identifiable based on
the formal and theoretical similarities in the works of Indian artists at IAIA and their clear precedents in the
leading artists of Pop such as Warhol, Johns, and Lichtenstein. Ronan’s argument was that these artists saw
Pop art in their classes and directly adapted its tactics to a Native platform. Audience members challenged
her assertion, suggesting that these artists were working uninfluenced and unencumbered by any outside
influences. The reality of the stylistic experimentations and developments on site at IAIA, again, lies in the
283
focus on the “stars” of IAIA, especially T. C. Cannon and Fritz Scholder, who remain in
the minds of the mainstream art public indisputably the most (in)famous artists associated
with the Institute. The limiting association of these two artists and the styles with which
they were associated in contemporaneous writings on their work with IAIA effaces the
countless other styles and artists at play in this period.
In a review of the 2001 exhibition IAIA Rocks the Sixties at the Institute of
American Indian Art Museum, Nancy Marie Mithlo questions these tendencies, arguing
“The ‘as good as’ argument found throughout [the exhibition] text denies the self-
validating attributes of the works, which should more appropriately be interpreted not
within the categories … ‘Abstract Expressionism’ and ‘Innovative Figuration’ but as
distinct personal examples of individual growth and tribal self-empowerment.”
297
The
students at IAIA were certainly exposed to and critically aware of other artistic styles
and, as at any art school, they sought to both replicate and manipulate these styles. IAIA
students were, through their “Elements of Design and Principles of Art” course, shown
slides and films provided by the Museum of Modern Art just as the students at the
Southwest Indian Art Project were.
298
Yet, students were also equally encouraged to
engage in deep research in their own specific cultural heritage, not only through
coursework, but also through collections research at Santa Fe museums. A 1964 article in
the IAIA student paper Indian Artist News explains, “With the approval of the institute

middle ground. (Kristine Ronan, “Indian–Pop–Politics: The Rise and Fall of a Native American Art,” was
that “Indian Pop,” April 11, 2017, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, NM)
297
Nancy Marie Mithlo, “Exhibition Review: IAIA Rocks the Sixties,” Museum Anthropology (Vol 24, No.
2/3, 2001): 68.
298
“The Institute of American Indian Arts Design Syllabus,” n.d., Institute of American Indian Arts
Archives, Santa Fe, NM and Report of the First Six Weeks of the Southwest Indian Arts and Crafts
Workshop by Lloyd Kiva, July 28, 1960, (Box 5/Folder 2), Lloyd H. New Papers, Institute of American
Indian Arts.
284
directors several students will do personal, documentary research at the museum of
Navajo Ceremonial Art [now the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian]…Dr.
Foster will be on hand to assist with all research projects. The students are: Alfred Clah,
Dave Martinez, Robert Montoya, Betty Nilchee, Alberta Nofchissey, Roberta Tallsalt,
and Andy Tohtsoni.”
299

The student work that was produced through these processes thus represented a
spectrum of visual modes. It is difficult to not find visual similarities between the Hard
Edge paintings of Frank Stella or Ellsworth Kelly, say, when considering works like
Crow Parfleches (oil on canvas) by Connie Red Star (Apsáalooke (Crow)) from 1967
[Figure 4.12]. However, it is also impossible to ignore the visual significance of the
Apsáalooke parfleches depicted in this work. Parfleches, the rawhide containers used
across Plains tribes, are recognizable tribe by tribe through the painted decorations on
their surfaces [Figure 4.13]. The parfleches patterns in Red Star’s paintings directly recall
the bold geometric patterns and colors of Apsáalooke parfleches which are traditionally
painted by female family members for protection for the men in their lives. The flat
surface and the extreme symmetry of the pattern quote the form of the painted hide,
which is scraped smooth and adorned, in Apsáalooke forms, with triangles, rectangles
and squares of typically reds, yellows, greens, and blues, specific to a given family.
300
In
Red Star’s painting these details are further abstracted, extended to the outer boundaries
of the canvas, as if portraying an up-close image of the pattern absent of the
dimensionality, folds, and function of a typical parfleche envelope which her pattern most

299
“Art Research,” Indian Artist News, Vol. 1, Issue 11, Institute of American Indian Arts, March 5, 1964.
300
In conversation with Nina Sanders, an Apsáalooke cultural researcher, it was suggested that the browns
in Red Star’s painting could refer to earlier (pre-contact) parfleches and that the pattern could be specific to
Red Star’s family.
285
closely recalls. This close focus on the visual power of the pattern heightens the effect of
the rhythm of the forms.
In contrast to this image is another Apsáalooke parfleche painting created by
Connie Red Star’s brother, Kevin Red Star (Apsáalooke), Crow Parfleche (oil and fabric
on canvas) 1966 [Figure 4.14]. This image, which in its very essence challenges tribal
traditions as Crow men were never the painters of parfleches, is more visceral and
gestural. The surface is layered and textured and the colors suggest pigments darkened
with age or use. While the hourglass, triangle, and rectangle shapes are still present, the
thick black outlines here increasingly distance the image from the bright patterns
typically outlined, if at all, by delicate blue or green lines. While the central break in the
pattern suggests the fold of a hide envelope, this image is intentionally a step away from
didactic representation and toward abstracted interpretation, as if Kevin Red Star was
here painting a memory of a parfleche, rather than a study of a pattern. Perhaps the
differences between these two images serve as a formal acknowledgement of the
traditional gender roles in object making. Particularly interesting is the fact that Kevin
Red Star went on to receive a scholarship post-IAIA to study painting at the San
Francisco Art Institute and then Montana State University, while Connie, who legally
changed her name to simply Red Star, shifted away from painting and is now known as a
highly accomplished beadworker.
301
These differing career paths are certainly based on
personal and cultural decisions; however, the question of gender at IAIA in this period
needs to be addressed further.

301
Daniel Gibson, “Kevin Red Star: Crow Indian Artist,” Big Sky Journal, July 2014 (online at
http://bigskyjournal.com/Features/Story/kevin-red-star-crow-indian-artist).
286
Most of the artists most frequently associated with the early years of IAIA are
now seen as stars of the Native art world and most of that small cadre of artists are men.
The individual paths that students took after their studies at IAIA varied widely, with
many students, like (Connie) Red Star, choosing to leave behind their media or their art
altogether. However, in considering the works of the students when they were still at
IAIA rather than their practice later in their lives, it is notable that while artists were often
clearly grappling with similar formal issues, the female art students at IAIA have
received considerably less attention. The works of T. C. Cannon (Kiowa/Caddo) and
Alfred Young Man (Cree) are often noted as central to the radical visual experimentation
of IAIA students. The work of these two artists from this period share formal attributes of
graphic, simplified if representational figures and a politicized subject matter focused on
Native identity in contemporary life. Young Man’s 1968 oil and acrylic on canvas I’d
Love My Mother if She Was Black, Brown, or White presents three repetitive female
figures textually labeled “mom a, mom b, mom c” with the central mom c the only fully
rendered option [Figure 4.15]. Each woman is clothed in the same simplified, blocked
garment, hat, and shoes, and they are differentiated solely through their skin tone and
label alone.
Parallel to this work are Alice Loiselle’s (Chippewa) Untitled (Family Portrait)
1969 and Family of Four 1968, both oil on canvas. In Untitled (Family Portrait) Loiselle
rendered a classically posed family portrait of an indigenous family of father, mother and
infant [Figure 4.16]. The figures recall early 20
th
century studio photographs of Native
American families, as well as boarding school students, situated in Euro-American attire
and poses [Figure 4.17]. Such images, often used to illustrate the civilizing effects of
287
federal Indian policy and BIA educational indoctrination, are the visual and structural
counterpoint to images of Native families or individuals in traditional regalia, such as
those of Edward Curtis and other photographers working from the perspective of the
salvage paradigm. Loiselle rendered this family in varying degrees of anonymity through
the increasing erasure of their facial features, from the mother who looks out at the
viewer from blurred eyes, to the child with only shadows suggesting eyes, nose, and
mouth, to the father whose features have been obliterated through a solid wash of brown.
This gradation of identifiable features serves as a conceptual nod to the erasure of tribal
and individual identities through forced assimilation.
The visual similitudes between Young Man’s I’d Love My Mother if She Was
Black, Brown, or White and Loiselle’s Untitled (Family Portrait) are undeniable. From
the ambiguous identities captured through abstraction, erasure, and repetition, to blank
backgrounds emphasized by an upper border of vertical black bands, these two images
form an artistic conversation in which issues of race, cultural integrity, and self-identity
are explored through the same formal language. As explicit commentary on racial
identity, bloodlines, and equity, both of these images are key examples of how powerful
the student work at IAIA could be even as the artists were emerging artists rather than
established career practitioners. Despite these striking similarities, Loiselle remains
relatively unknown and it is unclear whether she continued to paint after her tenure at
IAIA, while Young Man went on to receive a B.F.A. from Slade School of Fine Arts in
London, a M.A. from University of Montana and a PhD from Rutgers. Certainly these
disparate career paths are largely attributable to personal choices and opportunities.
However, a bold image of the implicit gender divide in the iconography of IAIA in its
288
earlier years can be isolated in the pages of the IAIA Museum publication Creativity is
our Tradition: Three Decades of Contemporary Indian Art at the Institute of American
Indian Arts (1992). The chapter titled “Innovators of Indian Art at IAIA” highlights ten
artists through multiple images, quotes and full biographical descriptions; of these ten
only one artist, Laura Fragua, is a woman. The book as a whole is structured around
similar highlighting of artists, with additional supplementary texts and images and
illustrative portfolios. Out of the thirty artists selected for detailed discussion only four
were women.
302
This skewed representation, only further amplified by the fact the
Cannon received a full six pages of text and images while nearly every other artist
garnered a page or less, is emblematic of the constructed, and eliding, narrative
surrounding the first decade of IAIA.
Stylistic variation in artists’ work at IAIA has equally been elided. In discussing
the exhibition IAIA Rocks the Sixties, Mithlo questions, “What are the implications of
tribal people establishing ownership over both the production of traditional arts and
works that may be defined as modern and why are these categories so often seen as
mutually exclusive?’
303
The role of traditional arts in the conversations surrounding the
influence of IAIA is rarely included. Even on the schools website today a statement
reads:

302
The four female artists highlighted are Rose Kerstetter (Oneida), Merle Thundershawk (Sioux), Phyllis
Fife (Creek), and Laura Fragua (Jemez Pueblo). Thunderhawk and Fife attended in the late 1960s and have
paintings reproduced in the book, while Kerstetter and Fragua attending in the 1980s and 1990s and both
have ceramics included. Garmhausen did note that in the first three years enrollment at IAIA was “male
dominated” however, beyond that, no statistics on gender divides in classes was readily available,
Garmhausen, 83.
303
Mithlo, 64-65
289
Many of the country’s most illustrious contemporary American Indian
artists, poets, writers, musicians and cultural leaders are IAIA alumni,
while others are affiliated with IAIA as faculty, staff, visiting artists, and
scholars. Among these are Dan Namingha, Fritz Scholder, David Bradley,
Doug Hyde, Allan Houser, Charles Loloma, Otellie Loloma, Earl Biss,
T.C. Cannon, Sheldon Peters Wolfchild, Darren Vigil Gray, Sherwin
Bitsui, Rose Simpson, Patty Harjo, Bill Prokopiof, Kevin Red Star, Joy
Harjo, Irvin Morris, Char Teters, Lloyd Kiva New, Nocona Burgess,
Sherman Alexie, and many more!
304

Of these artists, writers, and filmmakers none of them create work that would be
considered among the traditional or cultural arts. While there are ceramists, painters, and
sculptors included in this list, they are not recognized for their creation of Pueblo-style
coiled pots or jars, Studio-style paintings, beadwork, or fetish or katsina carving, for
example. However, these art forms were actively being taught and practiced at IAIA
throughout the 1960s and 1970s, even as students and faculty were also employing oil
paints, mixed media, silkscreening, video, and large-scale metal sculptures among many
other media. Thus, within IAIA’s present-day promotional material there remains a
conscious avoidance of the ambiguous and contradictory role played by traditional arts
throughout the history of IAIA.
While the mythologized antagonism between Traditional Indian Painting and the
so-called innovators, as expressed by Robert Quinn at the New Directions in Indian Art
conference or by J. J. Brody in his writings on contemporary Native American art, is
intrinsically associated with IAIA, this divide was far less clearly defined within the halls
of the school itself. In a 1965 article in Drum Beats, another student paper at IAIA, the
author describes how students in a beginning painting course were asked by Louis

304
Institute of American Indian Arts History on https://iaia.edu/about/history/
290
Ballard, the music and composition instructor to create paintings based on the ceremonies
of the Peyote cult:
The best Peyote paintings are being used by the chorus in their
performance before the Ethno-Musicology Conference this month. When
the students were first assigned to the project they had no background in
Peyote beliefs. The student painters had to do research…The students
started painting from the impressions they got out of their reading. Some
of the students became very interested in the subject, and started finding
out more about the ceremonies…When asked for his [student Curtis Link]
opinion on the Peyote assignment in painting and music, his reply was: ‘I
consider the subject sacred. Before I was assigned to the project, I had
never given it a thought. I never knew that Indians still had something that
they held on to that was still Indian.
305

This process is strikingly similar to that encouraged by Blue Eagle and Bacone College,
with an emphasis on the power of research-based practice when it comes to encouraging
both compelling artworks and self-awareness. Reflecting the status of many students at
IAIA who were less than familiar either with any tribal traditions beyond their own
communities, or any tribal traditions at all as their families had relocated to urban locales,
Link notes the power of discovering a living legacy.
While it is not known what the final works of art created by these beginning
painting students looked like, it is likely that they represented an array of styles,
particularly given their given subject matter. While artworks such as those described
above, which can be formally linked to Euro-American art styles such as Pop, Hard Edge,
or Expressionism, were common creations of IAIA students, other works that were more
aligned with defined “traditional” art forms were simultaneously being crafted. Angelo

305
“Music and Art Students Combine Peyote Studies,” Drum Beats, Vol. One, No. 2, U.S. Institute of
American Indian Arts, 11/19/65: p. 4.
291
John’s (Navajo) Deer and the Antelope, a casein on board painting from 1965, explicitly
recalls Studio style paintings from a generation before [Figure 4.18]. In this scene Bambi-
style deer and antelope are shown leaping across a wave-like abstracted landscape of
purple and gray mesas and desert scrubs. Rather than marking a radical departure from
earlier painters John here is creating a direct line from them to his practice, even as the
colors and forms of his landscape are slightly more abstracted than earlier models.
Similarly, George Flett (Spokane) created a casein on board piece of a Kiowa and Bacone
influenced fancy dancer in his 1965 Untitled work [Figure 4.19]. This painting could
easily have been created by any of the Kiowa artists a few decades earlier, aside perhaps
from the bold green background and the use of casein rather than watercolor, although
many other earlier painters including Pablita Velarde and Oscar Howe regularly used the
milk-based paint.
Students were clearly certainly allowed to include a degree of formal
traditionalism in their artistic experimentation. Even New explicitly wrote of the value of
“traditional Indian art” which he saw as “not merely a repository for past ideas and
images, rather it existed as a foundation for creating new, ever-changing expressions of a
vital culture.”
306
The ambiguity of New’s statement in regard to traditional arts, however,
does imply that while such forms were appreciated and supported, perhaps this was
intended as more supplementary to the regular, and more experimental arts curriculum.
This is emphasized by the fact that no traditional arts were in actuality offered as a major
field; rather they were offered as special courses or even simply as workshops [Figure

306
Lloyd Kiva New, “The Institute of American Indian Arts and its Significance in the Development of
Modern Indian Art,” c. 1984: pg 11
292
4.20]. Again, the nature of inherent contradictions within the philosophy of IAIA is
apparent. In this case it is less connected to the contrast between the administrative and
arts departments, but rather within the very definition of Indian art as constructed by the
faculty.
Gritton points to the fact that exhibitions and promotional material circulated by
IAIA throughout the 1960s privileged the modernist or experimental artists over their
more traditional peers. In discussing the first national exhibition of work from IAIA, held
in 1965 at the Riverside Museum in New York, Gritton explains that it was an exhibition
“dominated by abstraction,” and “not indicative of the wide range of styles, media, and
subject matter the students were exploring.”
307
While students were actively creating a
variety of artworks, the newness of abstract paintings and sculptures that could be read as
Indian versions of Pollock, Motherwell, or Pop artists, as was suggested in a review of
the exhibition, was undeniably tantalizing both for the faculty who tended to largely work
in such styles themselves and for the public at large.
308
A direct illustration of the role for
traditional arts adopted by this perspective can be found in an internationally traveling
student exhibition that began in 1966. In installation images from Edinburgh, student
works including selections by Carl Tubby, Ted Palmanteer, and Larry Bird, among
others, are paired with historic objects like a Pueblo bird effigy water jar or a Yakima
parfleche [Figures 4.21 and 4.22]. Here it is clear that such traditional art forms are
intended to function as formal inspiration rather than as providing contemporaneously
practiced styles and techniques.

307
Gritton, 119.
308
Harvey Stahl, “Recent Exhibitions,” Arts Magazine (40, no. 4): 52-54.
293
All the same, while art historians and artists alike are positioned to view the work
that emerged from the Institute of American Indian Arts as representative of a post-
modernist appropriation of modernist practices that resulted in a critical engagement with
the creation of a new Native American subject, it is unclear whether or not this attack on
the mainstream was understood as such at the time. While there were moments when the
mainstream press seemed to begin to grasp this, as seen clearly in the statements from
The Washington Post regarding Scholder and Cannon’s “indictment of Western
‘civilization,’” many other moments in the broader reception of IAIA and the artists who
began their practice there simply reified stereotypical representations of American
Indians. In a particularly striking example from a 1967 cover story from Life magazine
titled “Rediscovery of the Redman,” the author proclaims of the student work at IAIA,
In the painting classes, students who have been scarcely exposed to the
Western tradition of realistic representation turn out to be naturally gifted
abstractionists. This is hardly surprising, considering that Indians have a
centuries-old tradition of geometric art. What is surprising is how rapidly
Indian students apply their hereditary talents for abstraction to advanced,
hard-edged styles.
309

This statement seems to reconfirm the view that Native Americans are innate, naïve
artists whose cultural traditions have predestined them for creative expression. The fact
that these students could work in such profoundly modernist styles as hard-edge painting
astounds the author. Even in articles that attempt to express a greater level of criticality
than this Life spread, the undercurrent of the Indian’s natural-born talent remains. In a
Washington Post article entitled “Pop & Op Seep Into Indians’ Artistry” on the 1965
IAIA exhibition at the Interior Department, Elizabeth Stevens suggests “The fund of

309
Robin Richman, “Rediscovery of the Redman,” Life (December 1, 1967): 64.
294
Indian traditions merges successfully with contemporary influences, which have seeped
through somehow, and the result is an art that is not pale reflection of either the Indian
past or the American present but a strong expression in its own right.”
310
On many levels
Ms. Stevens expresses the basic intentions of IAIA to merge traditional Native American
and contemporary Euro-American art forms, but the inclusion in her statement that
contemporary art has “seeped through somehow” reconstructs the problematic view that
this contemporary influence could not have been consciously and analytically
appropriated by the young artists from IAIA.
The conclusion reached through an examination of the implementation and
reception of IAIA’s new vision for Native American art and artists is solidly
contradictory. While Lloyd Kiva New and the other founders of the Institute of American
Indian Arts hoped to create a supportive environment in which students could learn how
to be and to picture twentieth-century Indians, the dominant culture still wanted to hold
on to romantic images from the past. It is precisely for this reason that Fritz Scholder and
T. C. Cannon have consistently been known solely as Native American artists, their
works segregated to retrospectives, as powerful and critically engaged as they may be,
that have been staged at the National Museum of the American Indian rather than the
Whitney Museum of American Art. Even with the most recent exhibition of Fritz
Scholder, Super Indian: Fritz Scholder 1967-1980, at the Denver Art Museum in 2015-
2016 his work as an Indian artist depicting Indian subjects was curated by John P.
Lukavic the associate curator of Native Arts even as it was far-reaching in its assessment
of the power of Scholder’s influence beyond the one field. This is not to suggest that such

310
Elizabeth Stevens, “Pop & Op Seep Into Indians' Artistry,” The Washington Post (Apr 25, 1965): G10.
295
attempts to create a new artistic agency were failures, however, for in fact the legacy of
the work begun in the early years of IAIA continues to ripple out as younger Native
American artists gain increasing international exposure as important contemporary artists
who are identified as artists before they are identified as Indian. Importantly, as Nancy
Mithlo asserts, “The objects, the physical reminders of the student’s accomplishments at
the school, are simply examples of student work, students who were kids when they
produced the paintings, students who are now largely not painters, but used to paint to
explore their identity as native people. As student work they cannot be and should not be
the self-proclaimed ‘Native American Fine Art Movement.’”
311
All the same, it is
essential to engage with this history critically in order to examine the slippage between
explicit and coded intentionality and the reception that these artists have, to date,
received.

311
Mithlo, 67.
296
Chapter Four
IMAGES

Figure 4.1: Example of the Santa Fe Studio School Style: Pablita Velarde, Rabbit Dance,
ca. 1940

297

Figure 4.2: IAIA painting students in studio, 1968

Figure 4.3: IAIA Silkscreen workshop, 1971
298

Figure 4.4: Audio-visual workshop, 1971

299

Figure 4.5: IAIA “ethnographic” exhibition, 1960s

300

Figure 4.6: Paolo Soleri theater, IAIA campus

Figure 4.7: Paolo Soleri with IAIA students and faculty, 1964

301

Figure 4.8: Paolo Soleri performance, 1965

302

Figure 4.9: T.C. Cannon, Fritz Scholder, and Earl Biss 1976

303

Figure 4.10: Fritz Scholder, Indian No. 16, 1967

304

Figure 4.11: T.C. Cannon, Collector #5 (or Osage with Van Gogh), 1975

305

Figure 4.12: Connie Red Star, Crow Parfleches, 1967

306

Figure 4.13: Uknown, Apsáalooke parfleche, 19
th
c.

307

Figure 4.14: Kevin Red Star, Crow Parfleche, 1966

308

Figure 4.15: Alfred Young Man, I’d Love My Mother if She Was Black, Brown, or White,
1968
309

Figure 4.16: Alice Loiselle, Untitled (Family Portrait), 1969

310

Figure 4.17: Peabody's Studio in Lyons, Nebraska, Unknown Family, c. 1890s-1910s

311

Figure 4.18: Angelo John, Deer and the Antelope, 1965

312

Figure 4.19: George Flett, Untitled, 1965

313

Figure 4.20: Traditional techniques classroom, c. 1966

314

Figure 4.21: Detail of exhibit at 1966 Edinburgh Festival. Upper right: Carl Tubby, Nez
Pierce, Lower Right: Ted Palmanteer, Parfleche No. 6, Left Case: Nez Pierce corn husk
bag, left; Yakima parfleche, right

315

Figure 4.22: Detail of exhibit at 1966 Edinburgh Festival, View of Ceramic and Sculpture
Area; Far left case: Pueblo bird effigy water jar, Pottery and Sculpture left to right: Karita
Coffey, Pot; Arden Hosetosavit, Stone Fish; Johnny Romero, Bowl; Joyce Sisneros, Vase
with handle; Christine Nofehissey, Vase; John Vandall, Vase; Larry Bird, From the Earth
and From the Sun

316
Conclusion
At the time of writing this conclusion one of the former homes of the Institute of
American Indian Arts is consumed by flames. IAIA existed on the campus of the Santa
Fe Indian School, the same site as Dorothy Dunn’s Studio program through 1980 when
that campus was returned to the pueblos of New Mexico by the B.I.A. and returned to a
boarding middle and high school. At this time IAIA relocated to former army barracks
housed on the campus of the College of Santa Fe, and it is one of these buildings that is
burning to the ground. These barracks were woefully unsuitable for any student activity
much less the creation of vibrant arts in all media. The 1980s and 1990s, while IAIA
shared the College of Santa Fe campus, was a time of turmoil and even great
contradictions at the institute.
312
While identity politics, ethnic studies, and expanding
space for art rooted in otherness that challenged the dominant culture at every turn were
becoming intractable forces in the cultural landscape of America, the artists at IAIA were
struggling to stay warm in their federally funded studios.
What became a systemic institutional pathos, even as student and faculty artists
continued to create significant works of art, was propelled through IAIA’s various
campuses and the subsequent status of each one. IAIA’s original home on the former site
of the BIA boarding school was transformed into a new iteration of the Santa Fe Indian
School, now governed by the Eight Northern Pueblos. The Paolo Soleri theater, once the
embodiment of much of the philosophical drive of IAIA, sits condemned surrounded by
new, state-of-the-art academic and extracurricular facilities. The Paolo Soleri is stuck in

312
In 2001 IAIA moved to its current location south of Santa Fe on 140 acres of donated land. See Ryan S.
Flahive, ed. Celebrating Difference: Fifty Years of Contemporary Native Arts at IAIA, 1962-2012 (Santa
Fe: Sunstone Press and the Institute of American Indian Arts, 2012) for more information on these moves
and different campuses.
317
limbo, slowly deteriorating from neglect, while the campus’s original BIA buildings, and
the murals that they housed, were all demolished in what was both an attempt to create a
psychological cleansing of the trauma associated with that previous boarding school, and
likely also an attempt to make way for even greater expansion in the future. Current
students at the Santa Fe Indian school with whom I have had the privilege to work do not
know who Dorothy Dunn, or her students, were, do not know that IAIA was once on their
campus and are not familiar with the art of Scholder, Cannon, or any of the other IAIA
students and faculty. The confusion of status is a part of the legacy of these institutions
and the art education that was central to them.
IAIA represents the culmination of the educational and artistic models presented
throughout the case studies of this project: fostering research based art practice, practical
skills in the marketing and management of successful art careers, and a reinvigoration
and reinvestment in the power of indigenously sourced art making. But it also reveals the
inherent contradictions and complications that traverse all of these examples of art
education and development. While the individual artists considered here sought to
develop their own art practice in order to satisfy personal desires for creative satisfaction
and success, they were all also functioning within markets driven by non-Natives. The
challenges presented for these artists, particularly New, Blue Eagle, and Mirabal, to
simultaneously be innovative and to satisfy stereotypical views of what a Native artist
should and could be resulted in work that, from the perspective of today, can variously be
interpreted as retrograde or problematic.
From Lloyd Kiva New’s appropriation of sacred Pueblo sites for his own name
and artist/entrepreneur identity to Acee Blue Eagle’s performative enactment of the
318
peaceful Indian chief in full regalia, these case studies expose how fraught self-
identification could be for Native Americans seeking fame and success throughout the
early twentieth century. While New and Blue Eagle used their acclaim and largely
constructed personae to advocate for their own specific visions of what art education
should look like in Native-led programs, Charles and Otellie Loloma and Eva Mirabal all
were part of educational experiments in which they functioned as token students
representing the merger of modern American art and craft and the indigenous in general.
Such experiences were not limited to these specific artists, however their careers function
as ideal illustrations of shifts in pedagogy and art making and ultimately served as
prototypes for what would eventually come to fruition at the Institute of American Indian
Arts.
Consideration of each of these artists’ careers adds complexity to the story of
American art. The ideological function of indigenous art as found in the words and
images of artists such as Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, John Sloan, and others were
long predominant in this narrative.
313
The artists in this study were actively constructing
new spaces for Native arts for themselves and future generations, but the significance of
their actions was only partially understood while they were working. New’s contribution
to the establishment and success of IAIA was affirmed (and self-affirmed) while he was
director of the school, but the role of the Lolomas, Blue Eagle, and Mirabal in creating
new approaches to art education for Native American students as both educators and
students themselves was unfortunately under appreciated.

313
See Rushing (1995) and Anthes (2006) for discussion of how such artists employed visual and
philosophical references from Native American art and culture in their practice. Direct sources can be
found in Jackson Pollock, “Questionnaire,” Arts and Architecture, LXI (February 1944) or Barnett
Newman, “The Ideographic Picture,” The Ideographic Picture (New York: Betty Parsons Gallery
exhibition catalog, January 20 – February 8, 1947).
319
The landscape today is shifting dramatically with Native American artists gaining
increasing attention at mainstream museums and galleries across the United States. From
the #nodapl protests and the accompanying protest art in the forms of silkscreen,
performance, video and more, to the recent announcement that works from a major
Native American collection will be integrated into the galleries of the American wing at
the Metropolitan Museum, Native arts are beginning to be seen as central to the narrative
of American art and culture rather than exotic and other.
314
At this moment indigenous art
collective Postcommodity is represented in the Whitney Biennial and Documenta 14 and,
in Santa Fe, Gerald Peters Gallery a bastion of Western art, which for decades has built
its reputation on the sale of Santa Fe and Taos colony painters and others who specialized
in romanticized images of Indians and the Western landscape now features prominent
Native artists such as Sonya Kelliher-Combs, Will Wilson, Kent Monkman, and Christine
Nofchissey McHorse at its edgy outpost Peters Projects.
315

These artists, and many others, are activating the new avant-garde, infusing it
with their own indigeneity. Addressing issues of materiality, identity, blood-quantum, the
borderlands, gender, the environment and other postmodern issues they are continuing
the dialogues forged by the earliest students of IAIA and their predecessors and mentors.
Increasingly, young Native American artists and scholars are pursuing higher degrees

314
See recent articles such as: Carolina A. Miranda, “Q&A The artist who made protesters' mirrored shields
says the 'struggle porn' media miss point of Standing Rock,” Los Angeles Times, Jan. 12, 2017, online at
(http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/miranda/la-et-cam-cannupa-hanska-luger-20170112-
story.html); Randy Kennedy, “Native American Treasures Head to the Met, This Time as American Art,”
New York Times, April 6, 2017, online at (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/06/arts/design/native-
american-treasures-head-to-the-met-this-time-as-american-art.html)
315
Risa Puleo, “Artist Collective Postcommodity on Recovering Knowledge and Making Border
Metaphors,” Hyperallergic, (https://hyperallergic.com/376729/artist-collective-postcommodity-on-
recovering-knowledge-and-making-border-metaphors/) and Peters Projects
(http://www.petersprojects.com/artists-index/#artists).
320
with artists and curators emerging on the field from Yale just as often as IAIA. This is
resulting in a profound shift in how Native American art is created, studied, and
displayed. Yet, artists such as the ones considered here created the groundwork for a
space for individual agency, the artists who were actively engaged in the project of
creating a forward-looking art that was always, quite necessarily, deeply rooted in their
own sense of Indianness.

321
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract In 1962 the Institute of American Indian Arts opened in Santa Fe. This school sought to establish an academic and creative destination for aspiring Native American artists. Often read as radical departure from earlier models of art education in Native schools, IAIA actually brought to fruition experimentation that had been fomenting for decades in classrooms and studios of Native American artists all dedicated to addressing the role of Indian art in modern America. The individual histories and relationships that helped guide the creation of IAIA as a site for relatively free-from artistic exploration have long been left in background of the story of this institution, and more broadly, the rise of modern Native artists throughout this period. ❧ This dissertation traces key case studies of individual artists who throughout their careers as students, teachers, artists, researchers, and culture-makers all struggled with how to be “authentic.” For some, such as Acee Blue Eagle and Lloyd Kiva New this meant the creation of a performative Native identity that was at times cosmopolitan and at other times bordered on charlatanism. For others, including Charles and Otellie Loloma and Eva Mirabal this meant a continuous shifting in and out of tribal communities that remain even today deeply grounded in traditionalism and ceremony. Thus “authenticity” comes to be a fluid term, shaped more by each individual than by the federal government, the art market, or tribal affiliations. The complexities surrounding authenticity and modernism are the dual prongs that drive this dissertation through the various iterations of art education and production focused upon here, resulting in new narratives within American art at large.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Murphy, Elizabeth Prairie Belle (author)

Core Title A forward looking art: education, creative exchange, & the rise of modern Native American artists

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Art History

Publication Date 07/16/2019

Defense Date 06/07/2017

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Acee Blue Eagle,American art,art,Bacone College,Charles Loloma,education,Eva Mirabal,G.I. Bill,Institute of American Indian Art,Lloyd Kiva New,Modern,modernism,Native American,OAI-PMH Harvest,Otellie Loloma

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Flint, Kate (committee chair)

Creator Email bessmurphy@gmail.com,epmurphy@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-404980

Unique identifier UC11265064

Identifier etd-MurphyEliz-5552.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-404980 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-MurphyEliz-5552.pdf

Dmrecord 404980

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Murphy, Elizabeth Prairie Belle

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA