How Native American Artists Redefined Contemporary Art in the United States

From Santa Fe to the wider American art canon, a generation of Native American artists reclaimed Indigenous representation through colour, irony, memory and modernism. For the better part of a century, Native Americans existed in Western art largely as subjects rendered by outsiders. They were romantic archetypes frozen in a mythologised past, stripped of individuality and agency. Anglo-American painters depicted Indigenous life as scenery: noble warriors at sunset, stoic figures draped in buckskin, a vanishing people preserved in oil on […]

From Santa Fe to the wider American art canon, a generation of Native American artists reclaimed Indigenous representation through colour, irony, memory and modernism. For the better part of a century, Native Americans existed in Western art largely as subjects rendered by outsiders. They were romantic archetypes frozen in a mythologised past, stripped of individuality…

From Santa Fe to the wider American art canon, a generation of Native American artists reclaimed Indigenous representation through colour, irony, memory and modernism. For the better part of a century, Native Americans existed in Western art largely as subjects rendered by outsiders. They were romantic archetypes frozen in a mythologised past, stripped of individuality and agency. Anglo-American painters depicted Indigenous life as scenery: noble warriors at sunset, stoic figures draped in buckskin, a vanishing people preserved in oil on […]