Feathers, Flags, and F*ck You: Native Painters Crash the Modernist Party
#nativeamericanheritagemonth
From the moment Oscar Howe begins to splinter ceremonial dancers into jagged shards of color, through Fritz Scholder’s slumped beer-drinker and T. C. Cannon’s violet-haired sitters holding bright blue pistols, it becomes clear that Native modernism is not an imitation of Euro-American style but a sovereign tactic. Modernist fracture, Pop color, and grotesque distortion are turned against the “tourist Indian,” the “noble savage,” and the “vanishing Indian” myths that long framed Native life as either quaint souvenir or tragic prelude to settler triumph. Rather than supplying images to satisfy tourist markets or ethnographic collectors, Howe, Scholder, and Cannon insist on Native contemporaneity and intellectual agency. Their work redefines “Indian art” from within and demands that modernism itself be rewritten to account for Indigenous strategies of resistance, satire, and survivance (Anthes; Vizenor).
For much of the twentieth century, non-Native audiences encountered “Indian art” first as souvenir. Roadside stands in the Black Hills, Wall Drug caricatures, motel lobby sculptures, and mail-order catalogues trafficked in the “tourist Indian”; a generic Plains figure in headdress, carved, printed, or cast into endlessly repeatable forms. Philip Deloria has shown how “playing Indian” became a foundational ritual of U.S. identity, from the Boston Tea Party through summer camps and roadside attractions; Native bodies and symbols were appropriated as props to authenticate white claims to the land (Deloria).
These tourist objects did not simply spring from nowhere. They crystallized older patterns in which ethnographic displays, Wild West shows, world’s fairs, and mass-produced images presented Native nations as picturesque remnants of a “frontier” safely past. Brian Dippie’s account of the “vanishing American” charts how literature, illustration, and policy rhetoric worked together to naturalize Native disappearance: Indians served as romantic foils in paintings, sentimental victims in novels, and doomed “tribes” in official discourse (Dippie). The souvenir image extended this logic into everyday consumption: the “Indian” became a trinket on the dashboard or mantelpiece, a portable emblem of a conquest imagined as complete.
By the 1930s–1950s, federal and private institutions had formalized a visual taste for “authentic” Indian painting that aligned neatly with souvenir expectations. The Studio program at the Santa Fe Indian School under Dorothy Dunn codified a pan-Pueblo watercolor style; flat, unmodeled figures on light grounds, shallow space, and carefully “correct” ceremonial detail. The Philbrook Indian Annual in Tulsa, founded in 1946, similarly rewarded scenes of dancers, hunters, and mythic episodes rendered in a sentimental “flatstyle” that provided ethnographically legible but politically neutral imagery. “Tradition” was defined as visual calm, timelessness, and sweet color; precisely the opposite of the upheavals Native communities were navigating through allotment, relocation, termination policy, and urbanization (Anthes; Ash-Milby and Anthes).
It is against this entrenched souvenir regime that Howe, Scholder, and Cannon revolt. Their paintings do not gently correct the “tourist Indian”; they dismantle him. Howe refuses to freeze Dakota ceremony into ethnographic still life. Scholder drags the Indian into the bar, the bus depot, and the Bicentennial. Cannon populates his canvases with Vietnam veterans, Anadarko princesses at bus stops, and families in beat-up cars. In each case, souvenir gives way to sovereignty: images cease to be trinkets for non-Native consumption and become assertions of Native presence and interiority.
The “tourist Indian” belongs to a larger family of settler fantasies: the noble savage, the Indian princess, the tragic last of the tribe. Dippie’s The Vanishing American details how, by the late nineteenth century, U.S. culture had developed a sentimental story in which Native people, “beautiful in decline,” were fated to disappear, making way for a civilized republic (Dippie). The White House Historical Association’s discussion of the “myth of the vanishing Indian” shows how this narrative helped rationalize allotment, broken treaties, and assimilation policy by framing violence as inevitability rather than choice.
Visual media were central to this myth. Ethnographic photographers such as Edward Curtis posed Native sitters as “last remnants,” often stripping away modern clothing or props to stage an imagined pre-contact past; his portfolio literally titled The Vanishing Race is emblematic. Painters and illustrators compounded the effect, populating canvases with solitary braves on ridgelines and grieving maidens at sunset. Even well-meaning Studio and Bacone painters could unintentionally echo this logic when juries and markets pushed them to avoid cars, highways, or political signs in favor of anonymous dancers and generic landscapes (Berlo and Phillips; Anthes).
Howe, Scholder, and Cannon deliberately puncture this iconography. Howe’s Ghost Dance (1960, Heard Museum) does not show a last, fading ceremony but a swarm of dancers enveloped in jagged red and blue flames. Heard Museum interpretation emphasizes that Howe conceived it as a response to the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre, a way of “bring[ing] forward the events of the past using his own painting style.” The piece refuses to elegize the Ghost Dance as a doomed cult; instead, it visualizes Dakota memory as ongoing, volatile, and spiritually charged.
Scholder flips the noble savage into an exhausted worker in Super Indian No. 2 (1971, Denver Art Museum): a buffalo-headdressed dancer slumps, holding a strawberry ice-cream cone. Critics have read this as capturing the fatigue of performing Indianness for tourist audiences; the cone drips with Pop irony, undermining any fantasy of pure, premodern nobility (Lukavic et al.).
Cannon’s Two Guns Arikara (1973–77, Museum of Modern Art) likewise refuses vanishing. MoMA describes the sitter as a man imagined by Cannon, seated in an armchair and gripping two bright blue pistols against a dense field of purple wallpaper and patterned floor. This figure is neither a nostalgic remnant nor a stereotype; he is a complex, modern subject in an interior humming with layered histories of cavalry uniforms, Plains regalia, and domestic decor (Kramer).
Together, these works dismantle both noble and vanishing scripts. Native figures appear as tired, witty, angry, stylish, wounded, and fully embedded in twentieth-century life.
The most explicit challenge to institutional control comes in Oscar Howe’s 1958 letter to the Philbrook Indian Annual. When the museum’s jury rejected his painting Umine Wacipi (War and Peace Dance) as “not traditional Indian painting,” Howe responded with a blistering statement. He insists that there is “much more to Indian art than pretty, stylized pictures” and condemns attempts to herd Native artists “like a bunch of sheep,” invoking the long history of paternalistic Indian policy (Ash-Milby and Anthes; Smith, “Who Gets to Define Native American Art”).
As Susannah Gardiner notes, Howe’s letter asks not a narrow procedural question but a conceptual one: who has the authority to declare what counts as “Indian art” (Gardiner)? The Philbrook panel, steeped in Studio-style aesthetics, implicitly assumed that authenticity meant flat figures, pastel palettes, and ethnographically descriptive subjects; innovation, abstraction, or personal style counted as contamination by European modernism. Howe refuses this binary. He claims both modernism and Dakota tradition as his ground, asserting that “individualism” is itself a Native right long denied by colonial institutions.
Dakota Modern: The Art of Oscar Howe, the 2022 NMAI retrospective and catalogue, makes this letter the hinge of its narrative. Editors Kathleen Ash-Milby and Bill Anthes frame Howe’s protest as a turning point in postwar Native painting, in which an artist trained within the Studio system publicly rejects its constraints and insists that tribal visual thought can generate its own modernist forms (Ash-Milby and Anthes). The letter’s question, who defines “Indian art”, everberates through later controversies over Scholder’s grotesques and Cannon’s Pop-inflected portraits, and continues to shadow contemporary curatorial practice.
Howe’s paintings of the 1950s–1970s embody what Anthes calls “native moderns,” artists whose work is simultaneously rooted in tribal visual systems and engaged with broader modernist debates (Anthes). Works such as Dance of the Heyoka (mid-1950s), Ghost Dance (1960, Heard Museum), and Sacro-Wi Dance (Sun Dance) (mid-1960s) share a distinctive vocabulary; serrated diagonals, interlocking planes, and saturated fields of red, blue, yellow, and black that compress bodies, regalia, and spiritual forces into crystalline structures.
Rather than adopting Cubism wholesale, Howe builds from Dakota design; geometric quillwork patterns, painted parfleche designs, and the linear energies of hide and ledger painting. His figures often retain Plains pictographic conventions (profile heads, schematic weapons), but they are stretched and reoriented into what he sometimes described as a spider-web structure, tohokmu, binding dancers and drums into a single energy field (Ash-Milby and Anthes). In Ghost Dance, the dancers’ red robes and limbs are engulfed in flame-like triangles, visually evoking both the ecstatic motion of the ceremony and the violence of Wounded Knee. The Heard Museum’s interpretive materials emphasize that Howe painted Ghost Dance as a conscious remembrance of that massacre and as a refusal to let it be buried in myth or policy jargon.
These “fractured forms” operate on multiple levels. Formally, they situate Howe within mid-century debates about abstraction and movement; conceptually, they insist that Dakota ritual and history are not topics for ethnographic illustration but engines of visual innovation. As a teacher at the University of South Dakota and as a WPA muralist, Howe also inserted this Dakota modernism into civic architecture and academic spaces, challenging the relegation of Native art to “tribal arts” rooms and anthropological museums (Anthes).
Anthes and W. Jackson Rushing both argue that mid-century Native painting must be understood as a transformation of modernism, not as its passive reception (Anthes; Rushing). The usual story casts modernism as a European/American invention that others either adopt or resist. Native moderns disrupt this narrative. They appropriate tools (fractured planes, subjective color, collage, Pop irony) but direct them toward histories that Cubism and Pop largely ignored: dispossession, boarding schools, urban relocation, treaty betrayal, forced military service.
The Institute of American Indian Arts, founded in 1962 in Santa Fe, became a crucial institutional site for this reorientation. As Winona Garmhausen documents, IAIA emerged out of the old Santa Fe Indian School but rejected its paternalistic Studio model in favor of a curriculum that combined tribal aesthetics with contemporary art movements. Students studied abstract expressionism, Pop, printmaking, and experimental media alongside courses on Native philosophies and design. The IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA), later established, now houses thousands of works that trace Indigenous engagements with modernism and contemporary art (Institute of American Indian Arts).
For Howe, modernist abstraction is a way to release Dakota ceremonial imagery from ethnographic policing; for Scholder and Cannon, both students and teachers at IAIA, modernist and Pop vocabularies provide tools to expose stereotyping, mass culture, and imperial war. Modernism becomes an Indigenous strategy; a flexible, contested set of devices that Native artists redeploy for their own intellectual and political ends. Vizenor’s term survivance captures this dynamic; these works are not laments for a lost world but active presences that overturn narratives of absence (Vizenor).
Luiseño painter Fritz Scholder stands at the center of this Indigenous modernism’s most contentious debates. Trained partly in Euro-American institutions and then hired to teach painting at IAIA, he initially resisted painting Indians at all, finding tourist art and ethnographic expectation suffocating. In 1967, however, he began the Indian Series, a body of work that he would later say he painted “because no one had done it honestly.” His canvases thrust images that had long circulated as stereotypes (drunk Indians, Indians with flags, Indians at bars and bus depots) onto large, expressionist surfaces (Lukavic et al.; Smith, “How Native American Artist Fritz Scholder Forever Changed the Art World”).
Super Indian No. 2 (1971, Denver Art Museum) has become the signature of this series. The painting depicts a seated man in a buffalo headdress and robe, slumped forward, holding a pink ice-cream cone against a flat orange ground. Denver Art Museum materials and John Lukavic’s catalogue text emphasize how the work juxtaposes ceremonial regalia, Pop color, and a mass-produced dessert in a way that many viewers initially found shocking or funny. Yet the humor is razor-edged; the painting captures the exhaustion of performing Indianness for tourists while also rendering the dancer as fully contemporary, equally at home with Thiebaud-like cones and highway billboards (Art & Antiques; Scholder).
Indian with Beer Can (1969, private collection), another key work, presents a man in cowboy hat and jacket, hunched over a bar, clutching a can of Coors. The palette is muddy (browns, grays, dull mauves) broken only by the stark white of the shirt and the metal glint of the can. Rather than romanticize alcoholism, Scholder forces viewers to confront the stereotype they bring to the image. Art-historical commentary has noted how this painting and others like Monster Indian and Indian After Bacon graft the gestural intensity of Abstract Expressionism and the psychological distortion of Francis Bacon onto Native subjects, breaking apart the noble savage into a bleak, confrontational grotesque (Lukavic et al.).
The National Museum of the American Indian’s retrospective Fritz Scholder: Indian/Not Indian and the catalog Super Indian: Fritz Scholder 1967–1980 frame these works as both breakthroughs and provocations, staging them within debates about who has the right to depict Native pain, vice, and disillusionment (Lukavic et al.; National Museum of the American Indian). Scholder’s Indians are not ethnographic types; they are damaged anti-heroes whose very ugliness indicts the visual regime that produced the stereotypes he magnifies.
Central to Scholder’s strategy is irony. He neither simply rejects kitsch nor uncritically reproduces it; instead, he inhabits it and twists it into critique. Feathers, flags, and tomahawks appear, but at odd angles, rendered in bruised colors or garish Pop hues. Bicentennial Indian and American Portrait with Flag drape Native figures in U.S. flags, their bodies sagging under the weight of patriotic cloth. The irony lies in the dissonance: the nation that imagines itself as both savior and inheritor of Native land literally covers the Indian body, converting it into a prop for self-congratulation (Lukavic et al.; Smith, “How Native American Artist…”).
Lucy Lippard’s Mixed Blessings offers a framework for understanding this as “critical kitsch.” She argues that many artists of color in the late twentieth century deployed mass-culture imagery not to celebrate it but to lay bare the racial and colonial fantasies it carries (Lippard). Scholder’s serial Indians with ice-cream cones, beer cans, and flags operate precisely in this mode: they depend on the recognizability of kitsch in order to expose its violence. When viewers laugh at the pink cone in Super Indian No. 2, they are also laughing at their own investment in a mythic, timeless Indian broken by an incongruous snack.
Curators such as Lowery Stokes Sims and Paul Chaat Smith have noted that this irony is double-edged. For some Native viewers, Scholder’s grotesques risk confirming stereotypes rather than dismantling them, particularly when removed from context in commercial reproductions. Yet this ambivalence is part of their power: they refuse the comfort of clear moral positions and instead stage the messy entanglement of Native self-representation and non-Native desire (National Museum of the American Indian; Smith, “How Native American Artist…”).
T. C. Cannon (Caddo/Kiowa) offers a different, though related, set of interventions. An IAIA alumnus and Vietnam veteran, Cannon blended Southern Plains graphic traditions, Japanese woodblock influences, European post-impressionism, and American Pop into a luminous, pattern-saturated style. Karen Kramer’s catalogue T. C. Cannon: At the Edge of America and the National Museum of the American Indian’s coverage of the exhibition stress how Cannon’s work captures the simultaneity of powwow regalia, rock music, Catholic imagery, and military gear in late twentieth-century Native life (Kramer; “An Art Revolution”).
Two Guns Arikara, now in MoMA’s collection, is perhaps his most widely cited painting. The museum describes the work as an acrylic and oil canvas in which Cannon “painted a person that he imagined,” seated in an armchair, holding two cocked bright-blue pistols, surrounded by purple, polka-dotted wallpaper and patterned floor. The sitter wears an amalgam of Plains regalia, cavalry-style pants, and silver jewelry, his puffed violet hair haloing his head. Critics have read this as a portrait of a modern warrior whose authority derives not from romantic primitivism but from his command of multiple visual codes; Native, military, domestic, Pop (Harvard Magazine; Kramer).
Other works extend this layering. Mama and Papa Have the Going Home Shiprock Blues (1966) places a Diné couple and a car before the sacred mesa Shiprock, bathed in saturated reds and blues, simultaneously evoking road-trip Americana and the strains of relocation and poverty (Kramer). Waiting for the Bus (Anadarko Princess) seats a woman in a bus depot, her clothing a hybrid of powwow finery and contemporary fashion, framed by patterned planes that oscillate between textile design and Op Art. Self-Portrait in the Studio pictures Cannon lounging in sunglasses and boots, cigarettes and paintbrushes scattered, asserting his place in the lineage of modern “artist portraits” historically dominated by European men.
Throughout, Cannon’s color is electric; oranges, magentas, deep blues, lime greens, and hot yellows jostle in patterns that recall Kiowa calendar painting and 1960s psychedelia. The effect, as Peabody Essex Museum materials note, is a visual “noise” that renders Native presence impossible to ignore within galleries often designed to neutralize difference (Kramer). This is Cannon’s “we are still here” painted into every square inch of canvas.
Institutionally, the 1972 exhibition Two American Painters: Fritz Scholder and T. C. Cannon at the National Collection of Fine Arts (now Smithsonian American Art Museum) marked a watershed. Curator Adelyn Breeskin’s catalogue presented Scholder and Cannon not as ethnographic case studies but as American painters whose work addressed national issues (war, patriotism, race, stereotype).through bold color and figuration (Breeskin).
The choice of title matters: “Two American Painters” rather than “Two Indian Painters.” While their Indigeneity remained central, the exhibition insisted that Native artists belong within the same modernist field as their non-Native contemporaries. This positioning helped pave the way for later acquisitions, such as MoMA’s purchase of Two Guns Arikara and major museum holdings of Scholder’s Indian Series (MoMA; American Indian Magazine).
Rushing has argued that such exhibitions contributed to a conceptual “re-mapping” of Native art; away from the ethnographic and regional and toward a recognition of Native modernism as central to twentieth-century art history (Rushing). Two American Painters is emblematic of that shift, even as the broader museum world has been slow to follow its implications.
In Howe, Scholder, and Cannon alike, color functions as revolt against the naturalizing sepias and earth tones long associated with “authentic Indian art.” Howe’s Ghost Dance wraps figures in red and orange flames against cool blue and black, visually enacting both spiritual intensity and historical violence. The Heard’s description emphasizes his use of “flames” to simultaneously recall prophecy and massacre. In Sun Dance compositions, yellows and whites radiate from the central pole while blues and blacks carve dancers into angular silhouettes, emphasizing Dakota cosmology rather than ethnographic detail (Ash-Milby and Anthes).
Scholder’s palette often courts ugliness; sludge greens, overripe oranges, bruised purples. In Super Indian No. 2, the flat burnt-orange field flattens depth, while the blanket’s bilious greens and purples work against any romanticization of the figure; the pink cone becomes an almost obscene highlight (Denver Art Museum; Smith, “How Native American Artist…”). Indian with Beer Can swallows the subject in muddy browns and grays, such that the metallic beer can and white shirt become visual punctures in a field of malaise.
Cannon’s color, by contrast, dazzles. The purple-polka-dot background and teal pistols in Two Guns Arikara, the crimson car and cobalt mesa in Mama and Papa Have the Going Home Shiprock Blues, and the patterned ground and walls of Self-Portrait in the Studio all create what critics have called “optical noise”; densely patterned, high-contrast surfaces that refuse to recede into neutral backdrop (Kramer; Harvard Magazine). Color, here, is not merely decorative; it is epistemic. It insists on Indigenous presence as something saturated, complex, and visually commanding.
Although modernist narratives often privilege heroic male figures, these artists also register gendered labor and everyday life in ways that complicate stereotypes of the Indian maiden or stoic warrior. Cannon, especially, brings women and domestic scenes into view. Mama and Papa Have the Going Home Shiprock Blues centers a Diné couple whose tired bodies and worn car bear the marks of economic strain and long journeys; the title’s “blues” suggests both musical idiom and emotional weight (Kramer). Waiting for the Bus (Anadarko Princess) shows a young woman in a bus depot, her regalia-inflected dress colliding with the institutional space of public transit, quietly refusing both the pin-up “princess” trope and the invisibility of Native women in urban environments.
Scholder’s bodies, male and female, are imperfect by design; hunched, overweight, smoking, drinking, slouched in chairs. In a culture that expects Indians to be either statuesque or invisible, his figures expose the cumulative toll of poverty, racism, and addiction. Art and Antiques and other commentators underline that works like Indian with Beer Can addressed alcoholism in Indian Country at a time when such topics were rarely acknowledged in fine art (Art & Antiques; Artsy).
Howe, while less overtly concerned with individual psychology, nonetheless includes works that attend to women’s labor and adornment; pieces such as Sioux Women Grooming, in which female figures occupy central compositional roles rather than functioning as mere background decoration (Ash-Milby and Anthes). Berlo and Phillips note that such images contribute to a larger move in Native art since mid-century to represent women as active cultural agents rather than static symbols (Berlo and Phillips).
Across these bodies of work, we see a consistent refusal of idealization: bodies are tired, flawed, bored, burdened. They register the gendered realities of survivance under modern colonial conditions.
Self-portraiture and self-fashioning offer key sites where these artists grapple with the very stereotypes they contest. Cannon’s Self-Portrait in the Studio places him inside the bohemian myth of the modern artist (sunglasses, boots, cigarette, patterned shirt) yet he remains unmistakably Kiowa/Caddo, surrounded by paintings whose subjects are Native people. The portrait implicitly asks whether the role of “modern artist,” historically racialized as white and male, can be inhabited on Native terms (Kramer; Harvard Magazine).
Scholder’s self-representation is more oblique, operating through interviews and public persona. In Smithsonian Magazine’s profile, he is quoted reflecting on his discomfort with the label “Indian artist,” noting that his ancestry, upbringing, and subject matter complicate simple ethnic categorization (Smith, “How Native American Artist Fritz Scholder Forever Changed the Art World”). His repeated depiction of Indians in poses and settings that echo his own lifestyle (bars, studios, highways) blurs the line between self and subject, turning the series into a kind of extended, indirect self-portrait in which the artist is both inside and outside the stereotype.
Howe’s self-fashioning takes the form of public statements and institutional roles: his letter to the Philbrook, his insistence on teaching modernist painting at a state university, his mural commissions in civic spaces. In each case, he positions himself as a Dakota intellectual and modern artist, pushing against images of the Native artist as either anonymous “craftsperson” or naïve primitive (Ash-Milby and Anthes; Anthes).
Vizenor’s notion of survivance emphasizes that Native narratives often deploy trickster tactics (humor, inversion, self-satire) to upend dominant stories (Vizenor). Scholder’s ice-cream cones and beer cans, Cannon’s sunglasses and patterned pants, Howe’s acerbic letter all operate in this trickster register, turning the stereotypes they inherit into tools for self-definition rather than passive labels.
The trajectories of Howe, Scholder, and Cannon cannot be separated from institutional and market structures. Howe’s struggle with the Philbrook Indian Annual dramatizes how competitions and juries defined “traditional Indian painting” according to non-Native expectations. Only decades later, with Dakota Modern and related exhibitions, did major institutions fully embrace his abstract ceremonial canvases as foundational to American modernism (Ash-Milby and Anthes; Smithsonian “Dakota Modern”).
Scholder, for his part, benefited from and critiqued both Native and mainstream institutions. IAIA provided a platform for experimentation; Denver Art Museum and the National Museum of the American Indian later consolidated his reputation through Super Indian and Indian/Not Indian (Lukavic et al.; National Museum of the American Indian). Yet his work also circulated in commercial galleries and prints, sometimes stripped of critical context, feeding the very market appetite for “edgy Indian images” that he sought to trouble.
Cannon’s legacy has been shaped by collaboration between Peabody Essex Museum, NMAI, Heard Museum, and other institutions in the traveling At the Edge of America exhibition, as well as by MoMA’s recent acquisition of Two Guns Arikara (Kramer; “An Art Revolution”; MoMA). These moves signal a shift from viewing Native painters as regional specialists to acknowledging them as central to narratives of American art.
At the same time, the rise of “contemporary Native art” as a curatorial label has created new tensions. Exhibitions like Art for a New Understanding: Native Voices, 1950s to Now and IAIA MoCNA’s collection have been crucial in mapping Indigenous modernisms across media and regions, but such shows can also inadvertently re-ghettoize Native work, keeping it in separate ethnic or “tribal arts” sections rather than fully integrating it into global contemporary art discourses (Besaw et al.; Institute of American Indian Arts). Howe’s question, who defines Indian art?, remains alive wherever labels and gallery layouts are decided.
Pedagogy is where these aesthetic and institutional questions crystallize into long-term effects. Garmhausen’s history of Indian arts education in Santa Fe traces the evolution from the vocationally oriented United States Indian Industrial School, through the Santa Fe Indian School Studio program, to the founding of IAIA in 1962. IAIA explicitly broke with assimilationist goals, fostering Native self-determination and artistic experimentation (Garmhausen).
Howe’s insistence on individualism influenced students and younger artists across the Plains. Scholder, teaching at IAIA, directly mentored Cannon and others, modeling how one might wield modernist and Pop languages without surrendering Native specificity. Cannon’s example, in turn, has been central for later Indigenous artists (from Jaune Quick-to-See Smith to Jeffrey Gibson) who incorporate neon palettes, text, and mass-culture references into critiques of U.S. nationalism, resource extraction, and gendered violence (Besaw et al.; Lippard).
IAIA’s Museum of Contemporary Native Arts and Research Center for Contemporary Native Arts continue this pedagogical work, supporting residencies, exhibitions, and archives that position Indigenous modernisms as central to the study of contemporary art. This institutional infrastructure, unimaginable in Howe’s day, is itself part of the legacy of his letter, Scholder’s provocations, and Cannon’s brilliance.
It would be easy to box Howe, Scholder, and Cannon into regional categories. Howe as a Dakota painter of Plains ceremonies; Scholder as a Southwestern provocateur; Cannon as an Oklahoma or Southwest figure. Yet as Anthes, Ash-Milby, Rushing, Kramer, and others insist, their work forces us to recalibrate modernism as a global, contested field rather than a one-way export from Paris and New York (Anthes; Ash-Milby and Anthes; Rushing; Kramer).
Howe’s fractured dancers speak to questions of movement, simultaneity, and spiritual embodiment that modernists worldwide have grappled with, except that here, the central referent is Dakota cosmology and the trauma of Wounded Knee rather than European urban life. Scholder’s Pop grotesques echo and challenge contemporaneous uses of kitsch and expressionist distortion in global art, inserting Indigenous bodies into conversations about mass media, identity, and state violence. Cannon’s patterned, saturated portraits join diasporic and postcolonial painters across the world in claiming modernist languages for colonized subjects.
From souvenir to sovereignty, from noble savage to survivance, from segregated “Indian sections” to major retrospectives at national museums, the story traced here is neither linear nor complete. Tourist Indians still stand outside gas stations; caricatures still appear on sports uniforms and political cartoons. But the work of Howe, Scholder, and Cannon ensures that any serious account of twentieth-century modernism must contend with Indigenous artists who refused to vanish and instead turned modernist form itself into a site of Native intellectual and political struggle. Their paintings ask us, relentlessly, to reconsider not only who is represented, but who has the power to picture modernity in the first place.
References:
Anthes, Bill. Native Moderns: American Indian Painting, 1940–1960. Duke University Press, 2006.
Ash-Milby, Kathleen, and Bill Anthes, editors. Dakota Modern: The Art of Oscar Howe. National Museum of the American Indian in association with University of Oklahoma Press, 2022.
Berlo, Janet Catherine, and Ruth B. Phillips. Native North American Art. Second edition. Oxford University Press, 2014.
Besaw, Mindy, Candice Hopkins, and Manuela Well-Off-Man, editors. Art for a New Understanding: Native Voices, 1950s to Now. University of Arkansas Press, 2018.
Breeskin, Adelyn Dohme. Two American Painters: Fritz Scholder and T. C. Cannon. Smithsonian Institution Press, 1972.
Deloria, Philip J. Playing Indian. Yale University Press, 1998.
Dippie, Brian W. The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy. Wesleyan University Press, 1982.
Garmhausen, Winona. History of Indian Arts Education in Santa Fe: The Institute of American Indian Arts with Historical Background, 1890 to 1962. Sunstone Press, 1988.
Harvard Magazine. T. C. Cannon at the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem. Harvard Magazine, 2018.
Heard Museum. Remembering the Future: 100 Years of Inspiring Art. Heard Museum, 2021.
Institute of American Indian Arts. Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), 2024.
Kramer, Karen, editor. T. C. Cannon: At the Edge of America. Peabody Essex Museum, 2018.
Lukavic, John, et al. Super Indian: Fritz Scholder, 1967–1980. Denver Art Museum and DelMonico Books Prestel, 2015.
Lippard, Lucy R. Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America. Pantheon Books, 1990.
MoMA. T. C. Cannon, Two Guns Arikara, 1973–77. The Museum of Modern Art collection online, 2020.
National Museum of the American Indian. Fritz Scholder: Indian Not Indian. Exhibition and catalogue information. National Museum of the American Indian, 2008.
National Museum of the American Indian. An Art Revolution: T. C. Cannon Shows Native Life at the Edge of America. American Indian Magazine, National Museum of the American Indian, 2019.
Rushing, W. Jackson, editor. Native American Art in the Twentieth Century: Makers, Meanings, Histories. Routledge, 1999.
Smith, Paul Chaat. Who Gets to Define Native American Art. Smithsonian Magazine, 2022.
Smith, Paul Chaat. How Native American Artist Fritz Scholder Forever Changed the Art World. Smithsonian Magazine, 2015.
Vizenor, Gerald. Native Liberty: Natural Reason and Cultural Survivance. University of Nebraska Press, 2009.
White House Historical Association. Myth of the Vanishing Indian. White House Historical Association, n.d.
Denver Art Museum. Highlighting Native Artist Fritz Scholder. Denver Art Museum, 2015.
Art and Antiques. Fritz Scholder: On Native Grounds. Art and Antiques Magazine, 2014.
what an amazing piece! it’s so surreal to hear you talk about my school, you sometimes forget how important places are when you’re there every day. for anyone who makes it through this piece, please look more into IAIA! it’s currently facing funding cuts that may close the school permanently, coverage and acknowledgment of it’s importance will be crucial in the fight for the university’s survival!!