Art patrons tend to keep Indian artists in a cultural box that marginalizes their talents
By Pearl Tiresias | Photos by Brenda Kelley
Gregory Lomayesva remembers all too well the pain of his first show of contemporary paintings. In his late twenties and already a successful woodworking artist, Lomayesva was accustomed to selling out during a show’s opening night— to seeing a long row of red dots on the walls behind his masks and dolls. As a young artist, Lomayesva took the artistry of his Hispanic mother’s santera tradition and blended it with the iconography of his father’s Hopi tribe to make hybrid work that was at once traditional and unique. But while Lomayesva was making a fair chunk of change with these pieces, he wanted to break free from the role of Native American craftsman and make a name for himself as a contemporary fine artist. And that first show wasn’t the vote of confidence he was hoping for. “No one likes to lose,” says Lomayesva. “But when the night was over, nothing had sold. Nothing.”
Left: April Tsosie on campus of IAIA, where her contemporary work has blossomed. Right: Gregory Lomayesva’s work evinces both traditional and contemporary influences.
At the time, Lomayesva’s paintings were whimsical creations in a bright palette that generally featured stylized kachina dolls surrounded by silk-screened images from pop culture—anime figures or corporate logos like those of Ferrari and Chanel—to illustrate his own personal crossroads of cultural experience: Hopi cosmology on the one hand, MTV on the other. Having watched collectors snap up his more traditional works as soon as he could finish them, Lomayesva couldn’t understand what had happened. And then it occurred to him that it just might be that the hybridization he’d created for himself left him neither here nor there—a cipher in an in-between world where he wasn’t really a traditional artist, but he wasn’t truly a contemporary artist either.
Lomayesva’s experience isn’t unique. Even in a town like Santa Fe, where Native Americans of many tribes and artists of all stripes are ubiquitous, many art-world types can’t cite more than a handful of Native American contemporary artists. The well-known artists sometimes don’t advertise their ethnicity—or they have Anglo or Hispanic surnames that conceal their heritage. Mixed-media artist Michael Lujan falls into both these categories. A graduate of the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), Lujan, who is represented by the Turner Carroll Gallery, doesn’t address his heritage within his work at all, choosing to engage himself strictly in the dialogue of mainstream contemporary work.
Gregory Lomayesva’s untitled works, 2003, silver gelatin prints on canvas. The bottom image is a representation of Joan of Arc.
Abstract expressionist David Moreno transports his painting, Vines, mixed media on canvas, across the IAIA campus.
“When I was at IAIA, there was so much emphasis on traditional crafts—and I knew I wanted to do contemporary art,” says Lujan. “The attitude about contemporary art ran along the lines of ‘Why work on something risky that might not sell, when you could crank out one “woman-in-blanket” after another and make $20,000 in a weekend at Indian Market?’”
But the justifications for making traditional art objects aren’t always quite so crass: It’s important to remember that Native America comprises hundreds of cultures that were both conquered and oppressed for centuries, and that have used ancient crafts as a way to maintain group and tribal identities.
Contemporary Native American artists who incorporate traditional crafts often find themselves dismissed as “regional” artists, relegated to the fringes of a mainstream art world
On the other hand, contemporary aesthetics afford artists the opportunity to express themselves as individuals unbound by traditional rules. “What contemporary art really offers the maker is an individual voice that allows you to move beyond the tribe,” says Lomayesva. “As a Native artist, I’m proud of my heritage, and there’s no way I could have financed my fine-art work without my traditional work to fall back on. But, at some point, you really do want to leave behind the need to be a ‘Native artist’ and just be a person, with your own name and your own voice.”
Despite the fact that traditional Native art may be easier to bring to market, contemporary art is on the move at IAIA, with charismatic president Della Warrior leading the charge. If you were to walk the school’s hallways, you might see model dioramas of traditional village life vying for space with modern ceramic masks featuring the likenesses of Marilyn Manson and other iconic figures of the pop imagination, signaling that while traditional work is alive and well at the institute, contemporary expression is also edging its way to the forefront.
“There’s an evolving recognition here that we are the premier training ground for Native American contemporary art,” says John Villani, director of communications for IAIA. “We offer an environment where to be Native isn’t to be a minority, but in the mainstream.”
Indeed, during any given semester, up to 80 tribes might be represented at IAIA, which makes the campus feel like a kind of Native United Nations, where the differences in cultural traditions, customs, languages, geography, and, of course, art, are probed, discussed, written about, and explored in any number of media.
David Moreno is one artist who completely changed his approach to art as a result of attending the institute. A member of the Pascua Yaqui tribe, located near Tucson, Arizona, Moreno grew up steeped in the cultural context of his nation and learned many Native crafts, including beading, dancing, and instrument-making. A mature student of 37 years, Moreno chose to attend the institute after serving as an instructor in a tribal-arts program for youth.
At IAIA, Moreno was exposed to a vast range of art-making possibilities, studying tribal traditions from around the nation as well as European art history. The method he ultimately embraced as his own was abstract expressionism. In his studio hang canvases holding rich textural layers of acrylic, as well as some figurative work depicting the deer dancers for which his tribe is known.
“The plan now is to go to graduate school,” Moreno says, “so I can further explore this particular method, and perhaps to teach again in the future.”
Left: April Tsosie’s The Audition, acrylic on canvas; right: David Moreno’s Existent, acrylic on canvas
Diné artist April Tsosie, 28, graduated from the University of New Mexico, then applied to IAIA at the suggestion of a family friend. “My earliest work at UNM contained Native imagery,” she says, “and I seemed to spend a lot of my time educating people about that, rather than getting the critiques I needed about the work itself. At IAIA, people are less concerned with the content and more interested in how the colors work, if the painting has any direction or completion. I get a real art critique instead of a critique of my cultural background.”
After three years at IAIA, Tsosie’s work has progressed to where she’s less inclined to make the “pretty pictures” that brought her there, with more of her work focusing on social commentary. For the past two years, Tsosie has successfully sold work at the Heard Museum Native American Student Art Show, and she’s been accepted at this summer’s Indian Market.
“For a Native artist, Indian Market is a really coveted show, a point of arrival,” she says. But while acceptance into Indian Market was a dream for Tsosie, she feels that what that venue wants from artists is a certain kind of work that may serve to perpetuate stereotypes about Native life.
Native America encompasses hundreds of tribes—each with its own tradition and culture— but governments and galleries attempt to lump this diversity into one neat category
“We hear concerns about everything at Indian Market,” counters Staci Golar, development assistant at the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts (SWAIA), the organization that stages the annual market, now in its 84th year. “Traditionalists complain that we’re showing too much contemporary work; contemporary artists think we don’t show enough. What we don’t do is segregate ‘contemporary’ work—it’s thrown into
the mix along with everything else, and we try to be inclusive about what gets shown.” Ultimately, however, the very nature of Indian Market—an open-air bazaar where artists display their pieces at little booths on the street—doesn’t lend itself to showing experiential, conceptual, or installation-type work. “The key word is market,” says Golar. “We’re here to provide a venue for Native artists to sell their work. It’s not that contemporary art doesn’t sell here. It does. But some contemporary work isn’t meant to be sold in the first place—installation art, for example.”
Works like installation or performance art, which are primarily conceptual in nature, aren’t on display in commercial galleries, either. So it falls to universities and museums to show such art, and Native Americans now have several museums of their own. Most of them, like the Heard Museum in Phoenix, the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe, and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in Washington, D.C., have exhibition agendas that extend beyond just the arts to include Native history and culture. “There’s a real commitment here at NMAI to present Native Americans as a living people, and that means a commitment to contemporary art and artistry,” says spokesperson Amy Drapeau.
NMAI exhibits reflecting that commitment include the recent “Reservation X: The Power of Place,” which featured seven Native artists examining the issues of place and identity. In summer 2005, performance and installation artist James Luna will represent the museum at the Venice Biennale. Luna, whose work has also been shown at the Whitney Museum, is perhaps best known for The Artifact Piece, in which he placed himself inside a glass-lined display case as a commentary on how Native Americans are put on display in anthropology museums.
Contemporary Native American artists who incorporate traditional crafts can often find themselves dismissed as “regional” or “outsider” artists, relegated to the margins of a mainstream art world dominated by Eurocentric symbolism. Within this European culture, the basic understanding that Native America encompasses hundreds of different tribes—each with its own distinct traditions and culture—is often lost, as entities ranging from governments to galleries attempt to lump this diversity into one neat category. To understand the problem in mainstream cultural terms, imagine that the French, Spanish, Finns, and Italians were told they were all “just Europeans,” and that their major cultural works—from Leonardo’s The Last Supper to Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights—were “regional” and “outsider” because they contained iconography of local religious rites rife with superstitious ideas. You can see the absurdity of such distinctions.
It’s not just artists who need to be concerned about the effects of such labeling. While Santa Fe may be one of the largest art markets in the world in terms of gross sales, the general perception of the art here is that it’s about as cutting-edge and compelling as Santa Fe style: rife with the kitschy, “Wild West” images of gunslingers, sunset-besotted landscapes, buffalo herds, cowboys, and, um, Indians. Santa Fe gallerists who want to identify themselves with the capital C, capital A Contemporary Art world may actually be going to great lengths to avoid Native works that incorporate cultural iconography. When this occurs with much frequency, it’s no leap to see that Native artists might more easily get their work into Chicago, Kansas City, or Dallas galleries.
That is, of course, unless Native Americans open their own Santa Fe venues. A few have done so, but they tend to be artists already enjoying successful careers. An upstart enterprise aligning itself with both Native and contemporary art risks marginalization—a frustrating outcome for an indigenous community whose artistic expression deserves to inhabit more than just the art scene’s fringes.
From the Summer/Fall 2005 issue
