0 I EDITED BY HEATHER FRYER MCMULLEN MUSEUM OF ART BOSTON COLLEGE ' COWBOYS, INDIANS. AND THE BIG PICTURE EDITED BY HEATHER FRYER MCMULLEN MUSEUM OF ART BOSTON COLLEGE DISTRIBUTED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS SflDTDIl SIS 3HT HU 41AI011 .2Y0BW00 aaTicia TflA 30 MU32UM VI3JJUM:)M aOHvIJOD V10T20S tnn* I 00*01 M3 U) TTItMVIM'J IH1 Y8 <1 4TU«tJITtia This publication is issued in conjunction with the exhibition Cowboys, Indians, and the Big Picture, organized by the Charles S. and Isabella V. McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College. Principal curator: Heather Fryer; co-curators: Eva Garroutte, and Marilynn Johnson. October 6 to December 8, 2002 Copyright © 2002 by the Charles S. and Isabella V. McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467. Library of Congress Control Number 2002 105537 ISBN 1-892850-04-4 Distributed by the University of Chicago Press Exhibition and Publication Coordination by Naomi Blumberg and Thea Keith-Lucas Copyediting by Naomi Blumberg and Thea Keith-Lucas Designer: Keith Ake, Art director: Andrew Capitos, Office of Marketing and Communications, Boston College OMC# 2093 Printed by Reynolds-DeWalt Printing, Inc. Title page: William Robinson Leigh (1866-1955) The Gambler: End of the Play, 1892 (detail) Oil on Canvas, 38 x 50 in. Collection of John J. McMullen Support for this exhibition and catalogue was provided by Boston College and the Patrons of the McMullen Museum of Art. THIS PROJECT IS FUNDED IN PART BY For John andjacquie TABLE OF CONTENTS 9 Director’s Preface Nancy Netzer 11 Introduction: Cowboys, Indians, and the Big Picture Heather Fryer 21 Forward and Back Again: Artistic Pioneers of the American West Kate Bonansinga 33 Enduring Icons, Changing Realities: The Westward Trail of the Cowboy in American Art Marilynn S. Johnson 45 Art and Authenticity: American Indian Creativity and Identity Eva M. Garroutte 51 Contributors to the Catalogue 53 Plates and Entries ofWorks in the Exhibition 55 Western Realism 73 Contemporary Landscapes 85 Contemporary Cowboys 101 Contemporary Native Americans director’s preface FEW YEARS AFTER I became director of what was then the Boston College Museum of Art, the President of the University, J. Donald Monan, S.J., arranged for me to meet one of his most valued friends, a trustee associate of the University, former commander in the U.S. Navy with a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering, celebrated businessman, owner of professional sports teams, and a dedicated collector of works of art. It was the last of these designations that had inspired Father Monan to bringjohn McMullen and me together that day. The engaging conversation about the role of the visual arts within the academy that began that afternoon became the inspiration not only of this exhibition, but also of the Museum’s unique contribu- tion to the life of the University. The exchange of ideas also moved John in 1996 to name the Museum in honor of his parents, Charles S. and Isabella V. McMullen. The Museum thereby became an expression of gratitude to those closest to him in his past as well as a means of communicating some of his own enriching interests to new generations of students. John’s creative mind, boundless energy, and passionate support for innovation in exhibitions, acquisitions, and gallery renovations continue to inform all the Museum’s successes. From our first encounter, John, who began collecting the art of the American West in 1982 soon after he purchased the Houston Astros baseball team, was eager to share the genre, so little known locally with a New England audience, and especially with university students. Following his lead, we gathered a group of professors from the faculty who specialize in the art, history, culture, and sociology of the West to generate new questions such an exhibition might pose. The ideas embodied in this exhi- bition and catalogue developed from the dialogue among these Boston College faculty members; they became the co-curators of the exhibition, with Heather Fryer playing the principal role among them in selecting the works of art and editing the cata- logue. The result, the present exhibition, is the first of its kind to explore the interrelationships among a multitude of Wests, as envisioned by various groups, including women, Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans. Here, Western Realism and Western Modernism unite, forging an alternative to the ongoing debate among artists about which images and styles portray the West as it was and is. This complex undertaking could not have been achieved without the tireless work of the curators and contributors to the catalogue. Professor Heather Fryer of the history department bore the primary burden of organizing this project. She con- ceived its “big picture,” i.e., to define the underlying commonal- ity among a diverse group of visual images of the American West 9 that span the last one hundred years. Co-curators Professors Marih nn Johnson, ot the history department, and Eva Garroutte, of the sociology department, brought cowboys and Indians into the “big picture.” I hev raise questions in their respective essays about the significance ot the iconic cowboy in American culture and about what it means to produce and evaluate the work of Nath e American artists. In her essay, Kate Bonansinga, Director of the University Galleries at the University of Texas at El Paso, situates the curators' “big picture” within the larger context of art historical movements in America, Europe, and Asia. The start of the McMullen Museum and others from across the University have contributed to this project at various stages. In particular, our curator Alston Conley designed the installation to c\ oke the spirit of the various Wests. Our exhibition coordina- tors Naomi Blumbcrg, and before her, Thea Keith-Lucas, played invaluable roles in the editing and production of the catalogue and in the exhibition’s overall organization, and assistants John McCoy and I Iclen Swartz, provided assistance with numerous details. Ml were aided ably by student interns Kelly Bloom, Kathrvn Chambers, Erin McCutcheon, Anne I lanrahan, Kathryn Park. Luchelelv Penka, and Matilda West. We are grateful, as well, to Steven Vedder and Garv Gilbert for photography, to Rosanne Pellegrini for publicity; and to the members of our Development Ortice, especially Marianne Lord, Mary Lou Crane, and Gemma Dorsey, who aided our funding efforts. In designing the catalogue, Keith Ake, under the supervision of Andrew Capitos of the Office of Marketing Communications, has captured the “big picture” of the American West that emerges from the accompanying text. The circle of those involved in the exhibition has extended in numerous directions and drawn on the expertise and generos- ity of many beyond our campus. Special thanks are due collectors, artists, and colleagues at other institutions: Peter Mexander, Elissa Arons, Dotty Attie, Michael Brophy, Sidonie Caron, Alec Petro, Karen Rice, Joe Cantrell, Toni Matlock, Liz Lerma, Harry Fonseca, Peter Jemison, Robert Buitron, Greg Brown, Roy Thompson, Amy Bogran, Linda Burrows, Kimi Kodani Hill, Eugene and Yuri Kodani;Jane Ivy, Linda Mendez, Patricia Caliguire, and Ronald Miller (McMullen Collection); Patterson Sims Iwigjohnson, Renee Powley, and Toni Liquori (Montclair Art Museum); Charles Froelick, Sarah Taylor, and Sarah I lorowitz (Froelick Gallery); Brian Gross (Brian Gross Fine Art); Margo Leavin anti Ariana Johnson (Margo Leavin Gallery); Ann Silverman 'National Museum of the American Indian);Tom Watson (Cowboy Artists of America); Kay Richards (Ikon Gallery); Curt Klebaum (Peter Alexander’s Studio); Cherese Crockett (PPOW Gallery); Laura Russo and Katrina Gilkey (Laura Russo Gallery); Darlene Dueck (Anschutz Collection); Ann Sinfield (University of Michigan Museum of Art); Monica Petraglia (The Newberry Library); Motrja Fedorko (Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art); Courtney DeAngelis (Amon Carter Museum); Kathleen P. O’Malley (I loot! Museum ot Art); Marlene R. Miller (Arlington Gallery); Ron Aday (Cowboy Artists of America Museum); Walt Amacker (Keep America Beautiful); Ann Marie Donoghue (Buffalo Bill I Iistorical Center); Malcolm Rogers, Eliot Bostwick Davis, Patricia Loiko, Kim Pashko, and Lizabeth Dion (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). Sincere gratitude is extended to the administration of Boston College. We especially thank President William P. Leahy, S. J., Chancellor J. Donald Monan, S.J., Senior Vice President James Me I ntvre. Academic Vice-President John J. Neuhauser, Associate Dean of Faculties Patricia DeLeeuw, and Dean of Arts and Sciences Joseph Quinn. Support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Patrons of the McMullen Museum, chaired by C. Michael Daley, has made this catalogue possible. Finally, we wish to thank John and Jacqueline McMullen, to whom we dedicate the book. Their generosity, encouragement, and unfailing optimism inspired this original, composite picture ot the American West and the “big picture” for this Museum. What we owe to them we can never adequately express. Nancy Netzer Director unci Professor of/lrt History i<> COWBOYS. INDIANS. ANB THE EIO PICTURE Heather Fryer W HY IS William Leigh’s End of the Play (no. 7) a quintes- sential image of the American West? Western art is distinctive for its majestic landscapes; lush prairie greens lead to pink and yellow cliffs washed in rich, golden light. Leigh, however, paints a dark interior scene. Instead of nostalgic figures of cowboys, buffalo, and plumed and painted Indians, we see a well-dressed man picking himself up from a litter of splintered chairs, shattered bottles, and strewn cards. He has just shot an opponent at the gambling table, putting a tense issue to rest. Although Leigh presents a gambler in the aftermath of a successful gunfight, the viewer instantly re-stages the preceding moments. In our imaginations, the contestants take their aim, knowing that once the smoke clears, only one man will prevail. The showdown has become a symbol of the mythic western past. Before institutional law enforcement came to the frontier, individuals resorted to violent confrontations to resolve their differences quickly and permanently. Western history is full of showdowns, from individual gunfights to larger political conflicts between the United States, Mexico, and Native nations over who owns the West. More recently, the states and the federal govern- ment have battled over who controls public lands, while long-time settlers and new arrivals skirmish over who really belongs there. A similar dynamic drives the history of western art. Questions of what the region really looks like, who is fit to render its image, and who counts as a bona-fide westerner perpetuate heated ideological and aesthetic showdowns. Over the last twenty years, exhibitions of western art have favored specific contestants in this struggle. Some curators focus exclusively on realist works, either glorifying the nineteenth-century version of western history or illuminating the tensions between myth and reality by placing traditional Old-Western imagery in the context of America’s heritage, or as part of its legacy of conquest. Exhibitions ofWestern Modernists tend to place their work in the narrow context of abstract and conceptual art movements, ignoring the artists’ regional ties. Many curators highlight the kitschy political commentary of California artists, or showcase the work of Chicano and Native American Postmodernists. These postmodern exhibitions often treat the artists’ connec- tions to the West as incidental or even irrelevant. 1 The thirty-eight works in Cowboys , Indians, and the Big Picture bring competing western images together to explore the breadth of contemporary western visual culture. They range from Frederic Remington’s historic The Bronco Buster (no. 6) to recent work from Cherokee artist Joe Cantrell, who literally shoots holes in popular conceptions of western history (no. 37) In bring- Fig. 1 Charles Wimar (1828-1862), The Attack on an Emigrant Train, 1856. Oil on canvas. 5^ x -9 in. I niversitx ot Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, Michigan. Bequest of Henry C. Lewis. 1895.80 mg old and new cowboy and Indian images together, a bigger, more complex picture ot the West emerges. Cowboys of all hinds — symbolic and earthly, multi-ethnic and masculine— do everything from branding cattle to selling cigarettes to putting the patriarchy on the run. Indians wear everything from moccasins to high-tops and appear in a variety of guises, from ethnographic curiosities to tempestuous existentialists to rough- and-readv cowboys. Together, they represent the rich diversity and spirited debate one experiences while browsing galleries west of the Mississippi. All of the images in Cowboys, Indians, and the Big Picture address America’s uncertainty about the meaning of the West to the nation as a whole. Since the early days of the frontier, images of "A merica’s Eden” have been Integral to the processes of acquir ing western land and incorporating the new territory into the Euro-American East. In the nineteenth century, members of the viewing public wrangled over which artists could best depict the terrain that embodied America’s future, while in the twentieth century they wrangled over who most faithfully represented its past. Artists and critics continue to argue over the best way to depict the relationship between the western past and the present circumstances of its diverse population. For traditionalists the W est never changes, while for Modernists and Postmodernists it is always changing. While every regional genre has its own style and subjects, the western art world particularly insists on establishing which ipproach is more correct. Artists, collectors, and critics fight over erything from subject to style to content to practitioners’ cre- dentials. Out of these struggles comes a vibrant visual heritage, in which this volume’s essayist Kate Bonansinga finds synergistic relationships between western art and Premodern, Modern, and Postmodern movements in Europe and New York. She finds that while western artists are clearly influenced by Romanticism, Figurative Realism, Abstract Expressionism, Conceptualism, and Pop Art, they have pioneered “new twists on old masters” that are as politically charged as they are visually vital. Western art not only explores what it means to be western, but makes strong assertions about what it means to be American. The ensuing showdowns between trained and untrained artists in the nine- teenth century, the confrontations between Realists and Modernists at mid-century, and current stand-offs between Anglo traditionalists and multi-ethnic Postmodernists give west- ern art its challenging content and enduring spiritedness that resonates in westerners and non-westerners alike. The First Showdown: The Trained and The Earnest From the early days of the frontier, the West has been America’s palimpsest. Nineteenth-century artists such as Albert Bierstadt, Karl Bodmer, and Frederic Remington were among the first to inscribe images upon it. Western artists sought to make accurate visual records of the new territory, but for many, the enterprise involved more than making photographically precise canyons, war bonnets, and broncos. Their earnest desire for Americans to experience the West inspired interpretive flour- ishes like higher mountains, fiercer Indians, and horsemen who defied gravity Most Americans first saw the West through the artists’ lens of enhanced, romanticized landscapes, exoti- cized Indian life, and the adrenaline-fueled drama of breaking horses and running cattle . 2 The American public clamored for thrilling western scenes. At the same time, the government and press called on artists to provide accurate depictions of the West. As artists became known specialists in certain western subjects, they had to choose between these competing demands for drama and authenticity . 3 Dueling pairs emerged: the formally trained versus the impas- sioned self-taught artist, the photographic Realist versus the Romantic, and the Easterner who observed the West versus the cowboy who lived it. Each artist struggled for recognition as the most authoritative painter of western landscapes, Native Americans, or cowboys. Landscape painters Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902) and Thomas Moran (1837-1926) are among the rare nineteenth- century western artists who enjoyed fame and fortune in their life- times. The two painters’ admirers did not battle over what the West should look like, but dueled over who could render it more authentically. German-born Bierstadt grew up in New Bedford, Massachusetts and returned to Germany in 1834 to study painting at the Diisseldorf Academy The young artist fell into a circle of illustrious contemporary German painters acclaimed for their heroic landscape compositions including Emanuel Leutze (1816-1868), Worthington Whittredge (1820-1910), and Charles Wimar (1828-1862), who would also make his name as an artist of the American West (fig. 1). Bierstadt, however, became the fore- most practitioner of the Diisseldorf style in American painting. 4 Bierstadt began his travels to the West when he joined an overland expedition led by Colonel Frederick W. Lander in the spring of 1859. Captivated by the vast mountains, canyons, and prairies, Bierstadt made countless sketches that he used for panoramic western landscapes (nos. 1 & 2). He returned to his New York studio to paint grand-scale, light-bathed oil paintings that found buyers from the White House to the royal houses of Russia. Drawn to the consistently dramatic quality of the works, collec- tors paid handsomely for a view of the mysterious West. 5 His new works sold quickly at astonishingly high prices, with The Rocky Mountains breaking all records when it sold for $20,000 in 1864. 6 When a visit to Puget Sound in 1870 was rerouted southward, Bierstadt painted an energetic view of waves crashing against the unseen land. His image is more luminous and enclosed than the real sound, but bears some resemblance to the Mediterranean locales Bierstadt visited as a young painter. To Bierstadt, the west- ern landscapes were evocative rather than documentary 7 The son of immigrant workers, Thomas Moran could not afford formal training in art. The spirit of Romanticism that drove Moran to defy reason and make his living as a painter is evident in his picturesque western landscapes. Although he did not share Bierstadt’s commercial success, Moran was commis- sioned by the United States Geological Survey in 1871 to paint Yellowstone. The government hoped his work would entice tourists westward, which would, in turn, support plans by the Northern Pacific Railroad to build a line through the area. Moran’s eight-by-fourteen-foot canvas, Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone , persuaded President Grant to designate the area a national park. 8 Competing for patronage and public recogni- Fig. 2 George Catlin (1796-1872), Gatlin Painting the Portrait of Mah-to- toh-pa , Mandan , 1861-69. Oil on cardboard, 18.5 x 24 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Paul Mellon Collection. 1965.16.184 tion, Bierstadt ventured to Yellowstone himself in an effort to outpaint Moran. Their rivalry was intense; it was difficult for critics to decide whether Bierstadt’s more-romantic-than-real works in oil were technically superior to Moran’s partially- invented vistas in dazzling watercolors. In the end, however, Bierstadt’s credentials as a European-trained artist and his wider variety of subjects made him the premier painter of the American West. Moran received widspread acclaim but second billing throughout his career. 9 Karl Bodmer (1809-1893, nos. 3 & 4) became the premier painter of ethnographic portraits of Indians. Like Bierstadt, Bodmer enjoyed royal patronage. Prince Maximilian ofWied- Neuwied summoned the highly reputed draftsman to make an illustrated record of his second expedition to study indigenous American peoples. The expedition departed from Boston in 1832 and traveled as far as Montana, with extended stays in Indian vil- lages along the way. Maximilian produced a lavishly expensive folio that included his notes and reproductions of Bodmer’s eighty-one paintings. Due to its exorbitant price, it sold few copies, but Bodmer’s detailed renderings and the Prince’s meticu- lous field notes garnered admiration in scholarly circles. 10 Bodmer may have earned the most recognition from the academic elite, but he was not the first painter to make an exten- sive visual study of Native American life. Two years prior to Maximilian’s party, George Catlin (1796-1872, fig. 2) set out to capture the images of “a dying nation, who have no historians and biographers of their own. ..thus snatching from approaching oblivion what could be saved for the benefit of posterity” 11 13 Catlin spent eight wars observing approximately fifty Indian tribe-, sometimes participating in Indian ceremonies, games, and the daily routines of the tribe. 1 lis 320 oil paintings were lauded for their roughness and energy, but dismissed by curators and col- lectors who preferred polished, dispassionate works. Catlin’s touring exhibition, w hich he called his “Indian Gallery,” was pop- ular among European view ers but aroused very little interest in the United States, w here even Congress refused to purchase his record of Indian life. 12 Bodmer contributed to Catlin’s difficulties by penning an article blasting the self-taught painter for weaving fantasies rather than gathering solid data. The adversarial relationship betw een the two artists highlights the tension between delivering an evocative, mvtluc West and providing an unimpeachably accu- rate West that remains at the heart of the controversy over what constitutes authentic western art. 13 Conflict and controversy arose again in the late nineteenth centurv as cowbov artists Frederic Remington (1861-1909) and Charles Russell (1864-1926) grappled with the authenticity question. Remington began his legendary career as a restless Yale student who headed west to live among cowboys, Indians, homesteaders, saloonkeepers, and the star of the Wild West shows, Buffalo Bill Codv. Fascinated by the vigor of western life, Remington used his inheritance to purchase a ranch in Kansas. It was a sheep ranch and Remington departed after only a year, yet he considered himself a westerner. Popular magazines, like Harper's Weekly and Collier’s , regularly printed Remington’s renderings of cowpunchers and Indian fighters, which were most often drawn from imagination instead of observation. 14 Remington developed increasingly detailed renderings of his western subjects in order to document the fast action of roping, riding, and conquering the great western frontier. This turn toward precision drew' Remington toward sculpture. The Bronco Buster (no. 6) was his earliest and most popular bronze. In spite of its gravity defying composition, the piece reveals Remington’s heightened concern with the intricacies of the horse’s muscula- ture. and the details of the cowboy’s saddle, spurs, hat, boots, and facial expression. Remington’s imaginativeness and painstaking precision won over curators and collectors, and his ability to suspend dramatic action in time and space made Remington’s cowboy sculpture iconic in American visual culture. 15 Charles Russell, by contrast, was a product of the American West ffigs. 8, i'j & 12). The St. Louis native migrated to the gold mines of Montana at age sixteen. Coming of age in the region, Russell lacked both Remington’s effete manners and his Ivy League credentials. I lis study of Indians and cavalrymen came from gambling, drinking, and hunting with them. I le did not learn about the work of ranch hands and trail drivers from obser- vation, but from his long experience as a cowhand. Interestingly, the question of authenticity plagued Russell as it did Catlin, and as a self-taught artist he was fated to work in Remington’s shadow. Russell did have a faithful following in his lifetime, but not among Remington’s moneyed, eastern admirers. Instead, Russell’s fans hailed from the West’s rising aristocracy of self- made oilmen and I Iollywood celebrities like William S. I lart, Douglas Fairbanks, and Will Rogers. While the American art establishment lauded Remington’s technical virtuosity and his skill as a documentarian, Russell’s fans held that Remington was too remote from the land and people of the West. Although the two never met, the newspapers made frequent mention of a rivalry between the two cowboy artists. 16 The images that Bierstadt, Bodmer, Remington, and their counterparts created were often didactic, romantic, propagandis- ts, or strongly nationalist. They increasingly appeared in govern- ment studies and tourist industry ads, and they were caricatured on tobacco labels and boxes of cornstarch. Nevertheless, the work inspired younger painters to venture west themselves. Artists continued to depict the Old West despite the region’s increasing urbanization and industrialization. Even when the frontier reached its ultimate endpoint, Americans held fast to old Western Realist imagery, because it fused the best of European high culture with the promises for America’s future embodied in the untamed landscape. The Second Showdown: The Realists and The Modernists The passing of Bierstadt, Bodmer, Remington, and their follow- ers heralded an uncertain future for western art. Bierstadt was dismayed in his last years to see American tastes turning toward French Modernism. Leigh railed against the prevalence of frivolous foreign work, a practice for which he was ultimately branded a provincial. The New Mexico desert drew leading Modernist painters like Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986), Marsden I lartley (1877— 1943), and Agnes Martin (b. 1912, no. 13) who made stunning visual explorations of the light, colors, shapes, and M exotic features of their new surroundings. Their interest, how- ever, was not in the region and its past. American Modernists worked in the context of their own heated showdown with Parisian Modernists who claimed Americans incapable of origi- nality or significant invention. The Taos Modernists used the distinctive surroundings to give their experiments with abstrac- tion the advantage of an inherent uniqueness of subject matter. Concerned with individualism, the Taos artists also developed highly personalized, idiosyncratic images of the West. Rejecting the Romanticism and storytelling of the Western Realists, O’Keeffe’s symbolist west was white skulls and desert blooms, while Hartley’s was cubist mesas and Cezanne-influenced adobe churches, and Martin’s was minimal, evoking a sense of place from meticulously pencilled bands of subtle color. 17 As the Taos artists and other Modernists in the emerging Los Angeles and Northwest schools garnered the attention of New York curators and collectors, Western Realist work fell into the shadows. Increasingly, the West looked as much like an O’Keeffe as a Remington in America’s imagination. The threat posed by eastern interlopers to the western visual tradition intensified as New Mexico became America’s second art center. Devotees of western genre painting saw the American art world’s scorn for heroic western imagery as a threat not only to their artistic sensibilities, but also to American patriotism. 18 A new showdown began over whether Modernists— with their foreign sensibilities— could really be western. As the region modernized, the West took on a new role in the American imagination. Instead of being the wide-open terrain of the future, it became the font of sacred historical memory. Just as western paintings shaped America’s view of the future in the fron- tier era, new images of the region’s past helped the nation form its identity in the industrial age. In her essay in this volume on the iconic cowboy, Marilynn Johnson shows how traditional western imagery asserted traditional American values during the turbulent decades of the twentieth century, including the revolutionary six- ties. As the definition of American values became more flexible in the late twentieth century, cowboys appeared everywhere from Hollywood Westerns to the Reagan White House, invoking patri- otic unity through images of rugged individualism. Although Western Realism retained its popularity through- out the twentieth century, the preeminence of abstraction and conceptual art threatened to relegate it to a second-class regional style. Refusing to ride off into the sunset, Western Realists staged a revival in the 1960s. A group of Western Realists, representing the most accomplished among their peers, gathered in Sedona, Arizona in 1965 to discuss the future of the genre. The five princi- pal founders declared their mission to “perpetuate the memory of the Old West, as typified by Frederic Remington, Charles Russell, and others.” 19 They formed the Cowboy Artists of America (CAA), whose governing body holds members to high technical standards in a style they call Western f igurative Realism (see nos. 9-12). 20 To be inducted into the society, artists must consistently produce “authentic representations of life in the West, as it was and is.” 21 The CAA compares its practice to that of the recent phe- nomenon of historical reenactment. These artists “travel” to the past by conducting extensive archival research and learn about western life as Charles Russell did — through trailriding, stock raising, and spending time in Indian communities. Artists who put cowboys on anachronistic saddles, adorn warriors with eagle feathers when they really wear turkey plumes, or locate a famous trapper in a place he never visited are not considered Western Figurative Realists. Although CAA members, artists, and judges name Remington and Russell as their artistic standard bearers, they revere Bodmer’s precision and Catlin’s passion in rendering Native Americans, as well as the grandeur of Bierstadt and Moran’s western landscapes. Drawing on these nineteenth-cen- tury traditions, CAA artists attempt to preserve a particular view of history and elevate the stature of the genre. 22 John Clymer (1907-1989, nos. 9-10), Frank McCarthy (b. 1924, no. 1 1), and Howard Terpning(b. 1927, no. 12) are the three CAA artists who have enjoyed the greatest critical and commercial success. Unlike their nineteenth-century Western Realist predecessors, each of the three has benefited from both formal art training and the rough-and-tumble adven- ture of western outdoor life. Interestingly, these artists began their careers as illustrators, rather than painters. Their interest in western subjects evolved from drawing action scenes for west- ern pulp novels, magazine illustrations and, in the case of Terpning, Hollywood movie posters {Lawrence of Arabia and the re-release of Gone With the Wind being perhaps his best known). The leading lights of the CAA fuse all of the contested elements of early Western Realism in their artistic practice. They are both the trained and the earnest, bringing the drama of Hollywood’s Technicolor palette and the intensity of an action film storyboard to carefully wrought renderings of the historical 5 West Although rhey eschew change, C A A artists have their feet in mam cultural camps. ;md combine techniques from mass media and tine art traditions to heighten the sensation of their premodem imagery. The C A. Vs institutional supervision of artmaking was not entirely new in the region. Native artists have negotiated the restrictions of the Indian Arts and Crafts Act since the 1930s. Part of New Deal legislation, the Act was designed to help Native people retain their corner on the Indian art market by allowing onlv certified Indian artists to sell objects in indigenous styles. Until 1003. the law gave the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) the sole authorin' to determine who was a legitimate Indian artist Artists w ere required to establish membership in a feder- ally recognized Indian tribe and prove a certified degree of Indian blood. 23 Joe Cantrell (b. 1945) satirizes this system in his work. Authentic Indian ID Card (no. 36). In this Postmodernist’s call for self-determination, Cantrell creates his own wall-sized identification card using a staged self-portrait in the style of photographer Edward S. Curtis (1868-1952). By certifying him- self. Cantrell wrests the power to determine his legitimacy as an Indian artist away from the federal government. Today, the Act has been amended to allow tribal authorities to certify Indian artists, but as Eva Garroutte illustrates in her essay in this volume on the relationship between Indian art and identity, the puzzles surrounding definitions of Native authenticity are nowhere close to being solved. 24 The Indian Arts and Crafts Act enshrined the idea that Native artists would produce traditional images in the manner of their ancestors. The Indian art market had little place for the innovations of an emerging generation of Indian Modernists. One of the great showdowns over ethnic Modernism took place, most appropriately, between an Anglo institution and an Indian artist in 1958, when the Philbrook Art Center disqualified Oscar 1 lowe (1915-1983) from its annual exhibition of American Indian painting. Howe encountered Cubism, Expressionism, and Conceptualism during his military service in Europe during World War 1 1 . When he returned to the United States, he adopted these forms to more fully explore traditional Native life in its modern context. In one of the few instances in which Indians were discouraged from cultural assimilation, the curator of the Philbrook Art Center rejected I lowe’s work as inauthen- tu l~hc artist wrote a powerful letter in reply, calling on the insti- tution to recognize Indian artists’ right to express their creativity according to their individual visions and concerns. After all, I lowe convincingly argued, non Indian artists received praise every day for challenging their traditional ideal of art with their Abstract Expressionist works. 25 I lowe’s letter became the manifesto for the Native American Fine Arts movement. I Iis protest paved the way for the founding of the Institute of American Indian Art in Santa Ee in 1962, which trains Native American students in traditional Native and contemporary European styles. 26 John Nieto (b. 1936) and Rick Bartow (b. 1946) are inheritors of Howe’s merger of European forms and Indian subject matter. Nieto’s Fauvist Snake Dance (no. 32) renders a distinctively tribal figure in a recognizable European idiom to reflect on the possibilities of pan- Indian iden- tity, while Bartow’s self-portrait Die Altersschwache (no. 34) draws on Expressionist language to convey the inner state of an individ- ual who happens to be Native. Although the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Cowboy Artists of America had different reasons for requiring artists to adhere to nineteenth-century traditions, both were engaged in a showdown against Modernism’s encroachment on western forms and subject matter. For the BIA, the opponent was inauthentic Indians, and for the CAA, it was inauthentic representations of western images. Because traditionalists identified the region by the greatness of its past, rather than its possibilities for the future, they resisted any expansion of the f rontiers of Indian art and Euro-American visual language. Showdown Number Three: Nostalgic Visions and Emerging Voices If William Leigh’s gunfighting gambler is unquestionably western, why would viewers debate whether Frank Romero’s (b. 1941) Freeway Wars (no. 30) is a western image? The outdoor setting is clearly Los Angeles on the west coast. The showdown is also in keeping with western motifs. However, the image is modern and urban; the trails are curved, the shooters wear baseball caps, and the horses have four wheels. The combatants arc not Anglo American cowboys, but Latino youth. The incident could be road rage, or a shootout between rival gang members. In both cases, the summary justice of the street has replaced the frontier show- downs in a West where car culture has replaced cattle culture. The conflict over whether Romero’s work is truly western mirrors the nineteenth-century wars over possession of the West. As the victors of that struggle, Anglo Americans assert their cultural hegemony by declaring that Romero’s vision of the West is “Latino” and thus separate from the larger tradition of western American art. In contrast, Postmodernists claim that Latino artists can ignore the expectations of the white mainstream cul ture and create their own definitions of western art. The show- down between Western Figurative Realists and Postmodernists is an ongoing contest over who belongs in the picture. While the Realists attempt to shore up the nineteenth-century ideal ot Anglo Americans taming the frontier, the Postmodernists try to deconstruct it entirely. The CAA’s vigilance in preserving a specific, Old-Western past is a strong indicator of how much the region has changed in the postwar era. Collectors of Western Figurative Realism tend to be men like Bierstadt, Bodmer, and Remington. They are edu- cated and cultivated, with an appreciation for European and American masters and an impassioned pride in the success of the American experiment, which come together in the genre’s high- est-caliber works. As the dominant culture in the region, Anglo Americans’ view of the West went unchallenged for decades. In the face of rising interest in western-themed Modernism in the early twentieth century, the Western Realists defended the rele- vance of frontier history to western art. Western Postmodernism presented a new challenge by attacking the fundamental prem- ises that underpinned Anglo understandings of the western past. Westerners ot color shed new light on the Anglo American conquest of the West by claiming their own place in the region’s history. Traditional histories of the West ignored the vaqueros , or Hispanic cattlehands (see no. 29), who retained their Mexican identity a century after the United States annexed their home- land in the Mexican War (1846-48). Despite numerous attempts to eradicate them, Indians continued to populate the West’s numerous reservations. Similarly, Chinatowns and Nihonmachi (Japanese urban enclaves) infused Asian influences into western cultural life, despite the legal and social barriers that kept Asians from becoming American citizens. Westerners’ histories took on a new importance during the political and social upheavals of the 1960s, when ethnic commu- nities looked to the past to stake claims to America’s future. While rooted in southerners’ struggle against segregation, the Civil Rights movement also had centers in western cities. The Bay Area was home to the Black Panther Party, the Free Speech Movement, and the American counterculture. Activists from the Red Power movement occupied Alcatraz Island in 1969 to draw attention to the federal government’s refusal to honor treaty pro- visions that would turn over unused federal land to the tribes. In naming their community “Indians of All Tribes,” they were creating a space “not just for dancing but for building an Indian future.” From this point in the Pacific Ocean, their movement swept eastward. 27 Native artists blend traditional imagery and modern forms to create powerful images ol their struggle for civil rights. While these works may fall short of outsiders’ standards for authentic Indian art, they are impassioned expressions of Indians’ present concerns and desires for the future. Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (b. 1940) documents the everyday battles of Indians of all tribes in War Shirt (no. 38). Like traditional ornamentation and body art, Smith’s shirt tells the history of the warrior who wears it. In this case, the absence of a human form suggests that the shirt is worn by every Indian. The product labels, cartoonish stereo- types, newspaper shreds, and f ragment of an American flag that adorn the shirt reveal the cultural and political battles that Indians confront every day. Native Americans were not the only westerners battling for political and cultural equality. In 1969, Asian students joined with Indian, Latino, and African American students in “seizing the time” and demanding that San Francisco State LIniversity imple- ment an ethnic studies program. For Asian American students, participation in the successful strike was not only an assertion ot their presence in a multicultural society, but also the starting point in the process of shedding the silence surrounding the history of Asians in America. They began to investigate the exploitation of Chinese railroad workers in the nineteenth cen- tury and the all-but-forgotten internment ofjapanese Americans during World War II. The artists among them rediscovered eld- ers like Chiura Obata (1885-1975, nos. 14 and 15), who painted throughout his internment and opened a makeshift art school in the camp to raise the spirits of his fellow internees. Believing that an artist’s purpose was to find beauty in the world, he kept his eye on the landscape beyond the barbed wire. The scenes he painted testify to the strength of his spirit as much as to the subtle shapes and hues of the landscape. Obata was no rabble- rouser, but his artistic practice was a powerful form of activism in the face of absolute racial oppression. 28 Further south, outside the barrios of Los Angeles, Chicano artists also used images of the western past to redress current 17 social injustices. M.inv joined Cesar Chavez’s campaign to organ- ize Mexican field laborers. As the Chicano movement grew, it extended its agenda f ront fair wages and safe conditions for grape pickers to asserting pride in their Mexican heritage. Chicano artists celebrated their cultural roots anti exposed the injustices the\ endured while working the western lands. Like the Indian activists at Alcatraz. Chicanos claimed their place in the West, demanding recognition both as full citizens and as members of a distinct culture with its own history and artistic traditions. fig. 3 'Pollution, it's a c) ing shame “Vtom the campaign, “People start pollu- tion People can stop it ” Photo appears courtesy of Keep America Beautiful, Inc. Although Anglos see them as an immigrant group, Chicanos have lived in the Southwest for centuries. Chicano activists laid claim to the land, arguing that Mexicans had prior claim to the lands we call the American Southwest. They also declared the creation of Atzlan, or the diasporic Chicano home- land, where Mexican people were unified by a shared identity that transcended systems of oppression, national borders, and personal differences. Chicano artists used murals as a public forum for Atzlan, allowing their images to speak to the broader community. By 1968, murals became integral to Mexican American politics and culture, as well as to the Los Angeles art scene In 19-4, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhib- ited installations by Los Four, the 1 lispanic arts collective founded by Frank Romero and three collaborators, making them the first Chicano artists exhibited by a major museum. 29 By revealing the hidden histories of their communities on the grand scale of a Bierstadt and the energy of a Remington, ethnic Postmodernists brought new voices into the story of the West. Now, westerners from all backgrounds, not just Anglo Americans, could see themselves in western art. In the period when the Cowboy Artists of America was born and civil rights movements emerged in the West, America was awash in cowboys and Indians. Ageneration of young westerners took in a constant stream of western images from television shows like The Lone Ranger and Gunsmoke. They watched adver- tisements for Marlboro cigarettes and admonitions from a tearful Indian to “Keep America Beautiful” (fig. 3). They vacationed at the Grand Canyon and Disneyland, passing lariat-wielding plas- ter cowboys and cigar-store Indians all along the way. CAA artists appeared in western museums and homes across the West, while civil rights activists and environmentalists appeared in the streets and on the news. All of these cowboys and Indians formed a heroic pantheon for boys and girls alike, whether they were white, black, Latino, Indian, or Asian. Much as they have reinter- preted the nineteenth-century tradition of western art, postmod- ern artists have grappled with these ubiquitous characters in American culture. Peter Jemison (b. 1943) and Robert Buitron (b. 1953) watched westerns faithfully when they were growing up. But both Jemison and Buitron noticed a problem: the Lone Ranger’s Tonto and the Cisco Kid’s Pancho were not real cowboys, and they certainly were not real Indian or Mexican people. In Missing Legends of the A merican West (no. 27), Buitron stages a photo of Pancho and Tonto writing Mexicans back into history by designing a postage stamp of Joaquin Murrieta, who fought against Anglo miners when they forced Mexicans off their land. Jemison’s Black Cowboy (no. 26) and Buitron’s Leccitin 34 (no. 28) also confront media stereotyping by creating new images of black, Indian, and Mexican cowboys. Kate Bonansinga’s discussion of Cinderella Story (no. 23) by Alexis Smith ( 1 ). 1949) illustrates how a cinematic cowgirl complicates the picture by drawing gender into the topsy-turvy world of post- modern cowboys. Although the artists use different media and approaches in creating their western heroes, Black Cowboy , Leccion 14, and Cinderella Story make protagonists of westerners who have been cast as sidekicks and colorful extras in both fictional and his- torical renditions of the western past. In addition to artists’ responses to social inequality in the region, western art has been shaped by artists’ concern with the numerous threats to the region’s natural environment. The western landscape has changed dramatically since the Second World War, when the bombing ot Pearl Harbor revealed the vulnerability of one of America’s westernmost points. New mili- tary bases sprung up to fortify the Pacific Coast against the Japanese, while scientists hid in the desert to secretly develop the first atomic bomb. The burgeoning war industries attracted waves of new pioneers. Anglo Americans’ false belief that western land is infinitely available and inexhaustible had disastrous effects on some segments of the West. Rapid urbanization and suburbanization stretched the limits of the region’s natural resources. In his tableau of amputated tree stumps. Goodnight Irene (no. 16), Michael Brophy (b. i960) portrays the exploitation of the land with equal parts beauty and horror. 30 The proliferation of nuclear test sites throughout the West also wrought tremendous environmental damage. Karen Rice’s Burning Sage (no. 18) exposes the ways that the nuclear industry separates people from the dying land. In Rice’s view of the atomic West, the lines between the natural and the unnatural are blurred, while the lines between free and forbidden land have become increasingly rigid. According to Rice (b. 1968), a traveler to the West is as likely to be stopped by a Department of Energy barricade as welcomed by a ranger from the National Park Service. In the decades following Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the western terrain has come to embody unending conflict instead of endless promise. 31 These more recent works reflect two competing impulses that have taken hold of the western art world over the last forty years: the Western Realists’ careful preservation of a particular western past, and the Postmodernists’ fervor to crack that his- torical narrative open, reconfigure it, and explore new interpre- tations. In the realm of western art, critics never judge the canvas or the bronze alone. Behind every appraisal lies a judge- ment about whether the artist’s vision of the West— “as it was and is” — should prevail. Cowboys, Indians, and the Big Picture Being western in the post-frontier age is a complicated matter. If the Old West was nothing but the fantasy of ideologues, why is it still so compelling to make images of it? If all westerners were free-spirited cowboys, why were there no Indian and Mexican cowboys — or cowgirls? If Indians only existed as nineteenth- century ethnographic subjects, how can young Native Americans account for their lives in the contemporary world? If we see America’s quest for its Manifest Destiny as tragic, rather than heroic, what will this legacy mean for the descendants of America’s trailblazers? If the West is defined by its abundant, unspoiled land, why do so many western families live in cramped, polluted neighborhoods? At the beginning of the twenty-first century there are many Wests, each existing separately in the minds and hearts of young westerners. The artists among them create images that trace their unending search for this personal idea of the West. The thirty- eight works in this exhibition have been selected to form a big picture that unites artists from disparate places, perspectives, and eras. Despite the conflicts among them, these works coexist in western museums, galleries, and private collections because together they represent most westerners’ experience of the region. Western Realism and western-themed Modernism and Postmodernism use different strategies to examine the meaning of the American West, and they come to very different conclu- sions. Like the West itself, this Big Picture of western art is grand in scale, energetic, contentious and ever evolving, and rich with unanswered questions. As this exhibition shows, the more images one brings together, the more authentic the picture gets. 1 Patricia Nelson Limerick, Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: Norton, 1987). 2 Brian W. Dippie, “The Visual West” in Clyde Milner, et al., editors, The Oxford History of the American West (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 676 & 680. 3 Dippie, “The Visual West,” 680-82. 4 Gordon Hendricks, Albert Bierstadt: Painter of the American West (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1974), 64-80; Matthew Baigell, Albert Bierstadt (New York: Watson-Guptik Publishers, 1981), 8-9. 5 Hendricks, 25. 6 Hendricks, 179. 7 Jonathan Raban, “Introduction” in Kitty Harmon, editor, The Pacific Northwest Landscape: A Painted History (Seattle: Sasquatch Books, 2001), 12-13. 8 Robert Hughes, American Visions: the Epic History of Art in America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997); Joni Louise Kinsey, Thomas Moran and the Surveying of the American West (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), 125-37. 19 9 Hippie. " l'he \ “isu.il West," 6 SS 090. Bierstadt originally reeeived a Congressional commission, which he dearh wanted, but at a high price. During an ei onomie downturn. Moran received his Yellowstone Commission See' Thurman Wilkins. Thomas Moran : . I rtist of the Mountains Norman: Tniversitv of Oklahoma Press. 1998), 159-60. 10 William Goct/mann, '‘Introduction," in Karl Bodmers America (Lincoln: Tniversitv of Nebraska Press. 1084). 6-“. 11 Biographv of George Catlin, wevw.askart.com/biography.asp. '‘William II Iruettner. The Natural Man Observed. 1 Study of Cattin’s Indian tCf/cn (Washington, DC The Smithsonian lnsitution, 1079), 11-35. 3 Barbara Groseclose. Nineteenth Century American Art (New' York: Oxford Tniversitv Press. 2000) 152-54; William J. Orr, “Karl Bodmer: the Artist’s Life." injoslvn Art Museum. Karl Bodmer's America, 362. 14 Brian W Dippie. Remington and Russell: The Sid Richardson Collection (Austin: Tniversitv ot Texas Press. 1994). 2-3. 1 5 1 mils Ballew Ned. Frederic Remington: The Hogg Brothers Collection at the Museum ft Fine Irts. Flouston (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2. 1. 59 pi; Michael Edward Shapiro, “Remington The Sculptor” in Feeder ;. Remington the Masterpieces cd. Michael Edward Shapiro and Peter 1 lassrick (New York: 1 lenrv N. Abrams, Inc., 1988), 186-87. 16 Peter 1 lassrick. Remington. Russell and the Language of Western Art ■ W ashington. DC: The Trust for Museum Exhibitions, 2000), 57-63 & : ; 25: Dippie. Remington and Russell: The Sid Richardson Collection , 2—3. 17 W anda M. Corn. The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity 29/5 1955 (Berkelev and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 1999). 260 and 2-6; Suzann Campbell, The Taos Artists and Their Patrons. 1S98—1950 (South Bend. IN: Snitc Museum, University ot Notre Dame, 1999), 43 & 75; I lughes, 389. ls John C Ewers, Artists of the OldWest (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1973). 1 9 lames k 1 tow ard, Ten Tears with the Cowboy Artists of America: a Complete History and Exhibition Record , (Flagstaff, AZ: Northland Press, 1976) 1-3; The CAA’s principal founding members were artists Joe Beeler, Charlie, Dve, George Phippen, and John Hampton. 20 Interview with Tom Watson, CAA Historian, March 10, 2002; Howard, 1-3. 21 W alt Reed, John Clvmer: An Artist’s Rendezvous With the Frontier West fFlagstaff, AZ: Northland press, 976) 16-33; James K. Ballinger, “Introduction" in The Art of Frank C. McCarthy ed. Elmer Kelton (New York William Morrow and Co., 1992) 12-13; Terpning Biographies, www.askart.com/biography.asp. 22 Everv CAA member adheres to the artistic mission to ensure that “as society change[s], the stature of western art within the area of fine art [will] remain solidly fixed.” “Cowboy Artists of America,” www.askart.com interest/cowboy; interview with Tom Watson, CAA Historian. March 10, 2002; Elizabeth Cunningham, Masterpieces of the American Ur ■/ Selections from the Anschutz Collection (Denver: The Anschutz Collection, 1983), n.pag. 23 For more about the legal history and cultural impact of the Indian Arts and Crafts Art see Gail K Sheffield, The Arbitrary Indian: The Indian Arts and (.rafts Act (Norman: Cnivcrsity of Oklahoma Press, 1997). 24 Melissa Merer, “American Indian Blood Quantum Requirements: Blood is The 1 < r Than Family,” in Valerie Matsumoto and Blake Allemcndinger, editors. Over the Edge: Remapping the American West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 231-49. 25 Rennard Strickland and Margaret Archuleta, “The Way People Were Meant to Live: The Shared Visions of Twentieth Century Native American Painters and Sculptors,” in Margaret Archuleta and Rennard Strickland, editors, Shared Visions: Native American Painters and Sculptors in the Twentieth Century (Phoenix: The I Icard Museum, 1991), 5-11 Janet C. Berio and Ruth B. Phillips, Native North American Art (New York: Oxford Press, 1998), 220-25; Margaret Archuleta, “The Native American Fine Art Movement" www.heard.org/education/resource/indcx.html. 27 Terry Anderson, The Sixties (New York: Longman, 1999), 159-67; Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Warrior, Like a Hurricaine: The American Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee (New York: New' Press, 1996), 25-26. 28 Karen Umemoto, “On Strike! The San Francisco State College Strike 1968-69: the Role of Asian-Americans" in Min Zhou and James V. Gatewood, editors, Contemporary Asian- America: A Multidisciplinary Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 80-83; Ron Chew, They Painted From their Hearts: Pioneer Asian American Artists (Seattle: Wing Luke Art Museum, 1995), 4; Timothy Anglin Burgard, “The Art of Survival: Chiura Obata at Tanforan and Topaz” in Kimi Kodani Hill, Topaz Moon: Chiura Ubata'sArt of the Internment (Berkeley, CA: I leyday Books, 2000), xiii-xviii. 29 Alicia Caspar de Alba, Chicano Art Inside/Outside the Master's House. Cultural Politics and the CARA Exhibition (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 3-7; David R. Maciel, “Mexico and Atzlan in Mexico: the Dialectics of Chicano-Mexicano Art” in Richard Griswold del Castillo, editor Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, 1965-198$ (Los Angeles: Wight Art Gallery, 1990), 109-119. 30 1 leather Fryer, “Into the Prefab West: Federal Settlements and Western Migration during World War II” in Scott Casper, editor, Moving Stories: Migration and the American West (Reno: LIniversity of Nevada Press, 2001), 213-248. 31 Mike Davis, “Dead West: Ecocide in Marlboro Country,” in Matsumoto and Allemendinger , 339-69; Karen Rice artist statement, www.karenrice.com. 20 FORWARD AND DACE AGAIN: ARTISTIC PIONEERS OF THE AMERICAN WEST Kate Bonansinga S INCE THE TIME of Daniel Boone (1735-1820), the American West has represented grandeur, freedom, and the excitement of the unknown. Artists have been both awed by its beauty and frustrated by its demise. In the years that separate the earliest work (1843) from the most recent (2002) in Cowboys , Indians, and the Big Picture, the West has been crisscrossed with railroads, highways, and fiber-optic cable. This period also spans the advent and fall of Modernism, the shift from nature to culture as artistic muse, and a mainstream embrace of materials other than paint and bronze in the making of fine art. Consequently, the perspectives, lifestyles, audiences, and inten- tions of the artists exhibited here vary dramatically Perhaps the most important question this exhibition raises is “What does it mean to be American?” Most of the artists exhibited here were born in the United States. Also, most are from families who came west sometime after the migration of Anglos, which began in earnest in the early nineteenth century and then acceler- ated rapidly by the turn of the twentieth. Some celebrate the West as a symbol of individualism, liberty, and identity; others critique that widely accepted paradigm as a flawed mystique. I have chosen to divide my discussion into premodern, modern, and postmodern representations, in order to more clearly place these works in the context of other art being created at the time. Premodern Romantic and Imagined Views It goes without saying that modern European art is not easily defined. However, it is generally agreed that Modernism began after the Industrial Revolution of the mid nineteenth century, which was marked by urbanization and a growing middle class. Subject matter in art expanded from its focus on historical scenes, biblical narratives, and portraits of the moneyed classes to include images of everyday objects, people, and landscapes. Formal innovation was paramount. Given this denotation, the paintings of Karl Bodmer, Albert Bierstadt, and H. W. Hansen are premodern. William R. Leigh, Thomas Moran, and Frederic Remington sit at Modernism’s nascence. The nineteenth- and early twentieth- century painters (Hansen, Bodmer, Bierstadt, Leigh, Moran, and Remington) lived most of their lives in places other than the West. They spent very little time with their subjects, relying instead on paintings and sculpture by their European predecessors for models. To varying degrees, they depended upon a bit of first-hand knowledge, a bit of hearsay, and a bit of artistic license to convey scenes that they believed to be true. In a sense, they functioned as history painters, although their distance from their subject was geographic rather than temporal. 21 Karl Bodmer (1809-1893, nos. 3 and 4) painted ethnographic studies of Plains Indians before they were relegated to reserva- tions. His portraits were so fascinating to Anglos that they set the standard for the “noble savage,” the stereotype of Indians as uncultured, but honorable. Born in Switzerland, Bodmer studied painting in Paris. In 1833-4, he accompanied Maximilian Wied- Neuwied, a Prussian prince, on an expedition to observe the native tribes at the American Fur Company outposts along the upper Missouri River. 1 Bodmer returned to Europe in 1834 and never again visited the American West. Instead, he became a French citizen and a member of the Barbizon School, where he associated with Jean-Francois Millet (1814-1875), Jean-Baptiste- Camille Corot (1796-1875), and other painters of French rural life I le went on to exhibit in several French salons. 2 The renderings that Bodmer produced during his time in America are illustrative, detailed and, it is assumed, representative of the early frontier existence. He treated Indians, flora, and fauna equally as specimens, to be classified in the spirit of scientific inquiry that was prevalent at the time. This body of detailed, visual documentation is distinct from his later painting practice, which is more typical of nineteenth-century proto-impressionistic European landscape painting. Bodmer’s pictures and Maximilian’s narrative were eventually published, informing an international audience about this northwestern region of the United States. Beginning with the Eong Expedition of 1820, the United States government employed artists to produce visual documen- tation to augment written reports of westward movement. 3 Anticipating a renewed westward expansion after the Civil War, the government underwrote a series of ambitious explorations of the West. Painters began to share the territory with photogra- phers in 1871, when the photographer William Henry Jackson accompanied Dr. Ferdinand V. Hayden’s United States Geological Survey party to explore Yellowstone. By the twenti- eth century, the photograph, rather than drawn or painted imagery, became the most accepted medium for documenting visual reality. New printing processes were developed to repro- duce photographs in general-interest publications such as Harper's and Scribner's. When the photograph took over the depiction of the physical world, many artists were compelled to explore new territory. Metaphysical and psychological ideas, as well as abstraction and new aesthetic concerns, dominated artists’ time and interest. T hus, photography was, in part, responsible for the birth of Modernism. Painter Thomas Moran (1837-1927) joined Hayden’s survey party in 1871. Already familiar with Jackson’s photographs, 4 he eventually depended upon them for his engravings for the 1872 publication Picturesque America , a tourist’s guide to western American scenery. Born in England, Moran immigrated to the United States when he was seven years old. He returned to England in 1861 to copy the work of the J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851), who is best known for his atmospheric renderings of landscapes and bodies of water. Moran followed Turner’s practice of transform- ing his subject in his imagination before setting it down on paper. 5 Like the American Hudson River landscape painters of the mid nineteenth century, he first sketched from life and then painted from these sketches in his Philadelphia studio. 6 The artist contended that the combination oi photographic precision and compositional license yielded a higher truth that could never be obtained by simply documenting nature. Children of the Mountain (Fig. 4) was exhibited at the 1867 World’s Fair in Paris, along with other American paintings and sculpture. I lere, a waterfall is centered on the canvas, a bright point crowned by a turbulent sky, framed to the right by dark and somewhat foreboding boulders. A lone bird soars above. Though 22 a ray of sunshine pierces the clouds, the overall feeling of the painting is ominous. I luman presence seems unwelcome. This image is somewhat reminiscent of places in the Rocky Mountains, but it was painted in France and is completely imagi- nary. Moran had not yet seen the Rockies, which he visited for the first time with Hayden’s survey. In 1879 he declared, “I place no value upon literal transcripts from Nature. My general scope is not realistic; all my tendencies are toward idealization... 1 believe that a place, as a place, has. ..value. ..for the artist only so far as it furnishes the material from which to construct a picture.” 7 But viewers of the time period may not have been aware of Moran’s philosophy of artistic entitlement. They rarely questioned a painting’s fidelity to its depicted site, which was typically so remote that they could not experience it first-hand. Fueled by faith in Manifest Destiny, the viewing public was hungry for experiences of the American West. Under this nine- teenth-century doctrine, white Americans believed that they had a divine right to dominate the entire continent. Revered writers, such as Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman, glorified the mystery and power of nature and its association with God. Their audiences relished their descriptions of boundless natural drama and places waiting to be conquered in God’s name. The more awesome the natural wonder, the more challenging and com- mendable its inhabitation would be. The East Coasters who moved west of the Mississippi saw their relocation in part as an attempt to control the chaos of nature. Those who remained at home, enthusiastically consumed images and stories of pioneer- ing efforts. In 1872, Congress paid $10,000 for Moran’s Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone , a landscape based on the artist’s field sketches from his 1871 trip. The lighter palette and gestural brushstrokes in this later painting seem fresh and modern in con- trast with the more traditional style of Children of the Mountain. The purchase gave congressional validation not only to Moran’s artistic vision, but also to his choice of subject. Frederic Remington (1861-1909) is well-known for his ener- getic renderings of cowboys and Indians on horseback. He shared with Moran an interest both in the American West and in novel painting styles. Educated at Yale University and the prestigious Art Students League in New York City, Remington, like Moran, traveled in the West but painted in the East. And, like Moran and many other artists of the time, he worked for east coast maga- zines that looked to the West for fresh material. By publishing sketches from Remington’s trip to Arizona in 1882, Harpers Weekly launched Remington’s career. I le went on to create more than two thousand images for the printed page. By 1904, just five years before his death. Remington was offered and accepted an exclusive four-year contract with Collier's Weekly, the artist gained total freedom to select his own subject and also earned $1,000 per painting. In exchange, Collier's secured reproduction rights to twelve paintings per year. Through such widely distributed publications, Remington’s romantic images shaped public per- ception of the West. In Saddling Fresh Horses (no. 5), Remington documents the beginning of a mounted, group outing. Each of the men and horses commands equal attention from the viewer. Later in his career, Remington tended to ennoble his subjects, isolating them on the picture plane so that other elements in the composition became secondary. At the same time, he moved away from picto- rial realism and towards the distillation of light and color he had admired in the works of the American Impressionists, particu- larly Childe I Iassam (1859-1935), John Twachtman (1853-1902), and Thomas Dewing (1851-1938). Remington’s stylistic shift coincided with his realization that the West that he was portray- ing had vanished. In 1900, ten years after the US Census Bureau declared the closing of the frontier, he wrote “Shall never come west again— it is all brick buildings— derby hats and blue cover- alls— it spoils my earlier illusions — and they are my capital.” 9 Remington pushed the boundaries of his media in the latter part of his career. His initial experiments with a brighter palette and looser brush strokes occurred soon after his foray into sculpture in 1895. His first three-dimensional work, The Bronco Buster (no. 6), was derived from his illustration A Pitching Bronco, published in Harper’s Weekly in 1882. In 1909 Remington decided to reinterpret Bronco Buster by increasing its size, suggesting that he considered it his most successful sculpture. Although by the end of his career he was expanding his repertoire and coming into some critical acclaim, Remington’s popularity and facility at narra- tive illustration kept him from being fully accepted in fine art cir- cles. 10 At the time of his death Remington was crossing the bridge to Modernism. He began his career enhancing the gusto of fron- tier life, and ended using this subject matter to explore formal concerns pioneered by the most innovative artists of his day. In contrast, John Clymer (1907-1989), Frank McCarthy (b. 1924), and I Ioward Terpning (b. 1927) are revivalist painters of the late twentieth century. Their role models are the history painters of premodern times, rather than their contemporaries 2 3 who have forged new paths in art making. Charier spent most ot his life in Wyoming and had a prolific career as an illustrator tor clients such as the Chrysler Corporation, Field and Stream, Good Housekeeping and the Saturday Evening Post. McCarthy and Terpning spent most ot their time in Arizona. Like the easterners Moran and Remington, these contemporary western artists con vev images from their imaginations. 1 lowever, time rather than space distances them from their subject. They live in the modern West, hut paint the Old West as they believe it was over one hun dred years ago. Like Bodmer and the other nineteenth-century painters, they represent the American West as wild, exotic, other. All three ot these artists have been inducted into the Cowbov Artists ot America (CAA), an all-male association of painters and sculptors who are committed to the creation ot nos- talgic representations of the romanticized Old West. The CAA began in 1964 as the brainstorm of the organization’s three founders while thev were attending an old-time Round Up near Magdalena, New Mexico. 11 Every year since then, CAA has sponsored an annual exhibition of members’ works. During the first years it was held at the Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City, and since 19-3 it has been a fund-raising project of the Men’s Art Council at the Phoenix Art Museum in Phoenix, Arizona. Sales from the exhibition grossed two million dollars each year in the late 1990s. 12 These sales figures are notable. Americans today are still hungry for portrayals of the Old West. Somehow these imagined scenes conveyed as illustrative documentation, capture the free- dom and independent spirit that Americans believe are our most distinctive national traits. Santa Fe, New Mexico supports one of the largest art markets in the United States due to vigorous merchandising of cowboys and Indians, from bronze sculptures to Native American crafts. Indians on the warpath seems to be a particularly popular subject; we consume images of the people we annihilated. McCarthy’s Forming the Hostile Cdrcle (no. n), Terpning’s War Cry to the Sun (no. 12), and Clymer’s Crazy Horse (no 10) convey scenes of Natives fighting to protect their home- land, desperate acts of a people attempting to survive. Crazy I lorse was the great Sioux leader and warrior who defeated General Custer at the Battle of Little Big Horn in 1876, the most noted Indian victory of the nineteenth century. But a year later, he and his Oglala Sioux surrendered. And though a United States agent promised Crazy I lorse safety and security, he was instead arrested and detained at a guardhouse, where he was eventually killed. 13 This story of betrayal impressed John McMullen, the businessman and art collector who owns these three paintings, as well as many of the other works exhibited here. McMullen claims, “We destroyed the Indians and then depicted them as bums.... We didn’t treat them fairly.” 14 Modernist Renderings of Westerners and their Landscape In 1821, Mexico won its independence from Spain after more than two centuries of colonial rule. Soon afterwards, in 1848, Mexico signed the Treaty of Guadalupe I lidalgo, thereby ceding to the Llnited States half of its territory, including what are now Texas, New Mexico, Lltah, Nevada, Arizona, California, and part of Colorado. By 1879, the railroad from the East reached Santa Fe and Anglos began to settle the area, perpetuating the spirit of American expansionism. Both Frederic Remington and Joseph Henry Sharp (1859-1933), an Ohio-born artist who studied in Antwerp and is best known for his honest portrayals of pueblo Indians, visited New Mexico in the 1880s. There, the dramatic landscape and the confluence of Native American, Spanish, and Mexican cultures provided engaging artistic subject matter. Sharp’s second visit in 1893 included a stay in Taos, and Harpers Weekly published one ot his illustrations of the Taos pueblo that year. 15 In 1895, the artist was back in Europe, this time in Paris studying in the studios of academic painters. There, he met the young American painters Ernest L. Blumenschein (1874-1960) and Bert Phillips (1868-1956) and spoke to them about Taos’s beauty and history. Intrigued by Sharp’s stories, Blumenschein and Phillips ended up settling in Taos in 1898, initiating an artistic center that would maintain its vitality until World War 1 1 . 16 The list of artists who spent time in Taos, Santa Fe, and the surrounding area during the first half of the twentieth century reads like a Who’s Who of American Modernism. They include Edward Hopper (1882-1967), Stuart Davis (1894-1964), John Sloan (1871-1951), Fremont Ellis (1897-1985), Marsden Hartley (1877-1943), Robert Henri (1865-1929), John Marin (1870-1955) and, of course, Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986). 17 By the third and fourth decades of the twentieth century, more and more Anglo artists called the West their home for at least part of the year. Where once the artists residing east of the Alleghenies had looked west to the Rockies and beyond for exotic but real subject matter, now artists in the West turned east toward the stylistic avant-garde, since painters in eastern cities were experi- menting with abstraction. Western-based artists applied their stylistic inquisitiveness to their paintings of the landscapes and peoples who defined the West. Through the efforts of the Taos Society and the Santa Fe Railway, both the east and west Coasts were repeatedly exposed to paintings of the Southwest. The years between the world wars are not represented in Cowboys, Indians, and the Big Picture, though the effect of Modernism is apparent in several contemporary works in the exhibition. For example, the figurative works of Sidonie Caron (b. 1932) embrace a modernist acceptance of everyday subjects and those of Rick Bartow (b. 1946) convey a modernist aspiration towards transcendence. Caron lives in Portland, Oregon but was born and educated in England where, in her words, “...there’s nothing like a cowboy, but rather a hunting, horsy set. Cowboys need vast territory.” 18 She has been painting for years, moving from figuration to abstraction and back again. Hands on the Horn and Getting a Grip (nos. 24 and 25) are two of a series of six paint- ings of cowboys’ hands that evolved from her investigation of the bodies and movements of manual laborers. She first became interested in cowboys as workers when she saw a series of late nineteenth-century sepia prints of this subject by Texas photog- rapher Edwin Smith (1880-1952). To her, as to most Europeans, the cowboy is quintessentially American, a romantic icon exclu- sive to our culture. But Caron represents the cowboy not as an icon of freedom, but rather as the uncelebrated worker, with neither property nor respect. Her dark palette and artistic intention is more closely aligned with the French painter Gustav Courbet (1819-1877) than with Frederic Remington. Courbet’s 1849 painting, The Stonebreakers (Fig. 5), was a milestone of Modernism because it realistically portrayed workers, a subject previously thought unworthy of representation in art. Caron compares these paint- ings to earlier American representations of ethnic, migrant workers, but states that her focus on the hands alone sets them apart from this genre. “You only need one small piece to get the whole picture. ..with very little information you can tell immediately what it is.” Viewers’ preconceived images of what a cowboy should look like fill in the rest of the story. For Rick Bartow, art mirrors life. Flis personal quest for self- fulfillment and improvement is manifest in the subjects of the native myths that he represents in paintings, pastel drawings, and sculptures. Flis father, who was the source of his Yurok heritage, Fig. 5 Gustave Courbet, The Stonebreakers, 1849, 65 x 93 in. Lost. passed away when Bartow was five years old. Soon afterward the artist’s uncle became his mentor in native teachings, encouraging him and his brother to spend time with the elders and to research the stories, traditions, and practices of the Yurok and other tribes. This connection with his cultural roots helped Bartow to recover from the psychological duress and general disillusion- ment that followed him home after service in the Vietnam War. Today he lives in Newport, Oregon, the place of his birth, and is active on the Siletz Confederated Reservation. Animals such as coyote, deer, hawk, and ravens populate Bartow’s drawings, which are distinctly expressionistic in style. Traditionally, shamans’ masks were carved in the likeness of ani- mals. The creatures served as role models for the shaman’s trans- formation from human to greater-than-human channeler of the divine. Aesthetically, Bartow’s work is allied with artists who convey angst and change through aggressive and gestural mark- making, such as the English painter Francis Bacon (1909-1992) and the German Expressionist Florst Janssen (1929-1995), whom Bartow respects. Die A/tersschwache (no. 34), which translates as “decay, decrepit,” is one of Bartow’s many self-portraits. The artist has a difficult time articulating what compels him to render his own image, but here he wears what might be interpreted literally as an Indian headdress, a symbol of the heritage that is the cornerstone of his complex identity A modern distillation of form characterizes the works of Chiura Obata (1885-1975, nos. 14 and 15) and Agnes Martin (b. 1912, no. 13), both of whom use the western landscape as a source of inspiration. Chiura Obata brings an outsider’s perspec- tive to the painted American landscape. Obata was born in Japan, where he studied painting from the age of seven and prac- ticed Nihonga, which joins traditional Japanese ink painting 25 with Western Naturalism. Traveling to Yoscmite anti the Sierra Mountains. Obata depicted monumental landscapes using washes tit pale color on silk. 1 Its style is rooted in Zen philosophy, which accepts the brevity and lack of import of human concerns in the face ot the eternal magnificence of nature. Obata emigrated from Japan to San Francisco in 1903 and was in the United States when the Second World War broke out. 1 le and his family w ere confined to an internment camp in Topaz, Utah during the war, where he was the founder anil director of the Topaz Art School. Within an art historical framework, the unfair treatment of innocent Japanese residents by the United States is ironic because many American artists, including Ad Reinhardt and John (age, developed an interest in Japanese Zen Buddhist philosophy during the post-war years. Zen’s insistence on the import of the present moment and on a healthy detach- ment from material objects was attractive during a time when many people were still devastated by widespread, human-initi- ated destruction and loss of life. Many important artists, includ- ing Surrealists, with their focus on Jungian and Freudian philosophy and teachers from the Bauhaus, escaped to the United States from war-torn Europe. They shifted the center of the avant-garde from Paris to New York, where the mingling of Asian and European ideas and belief systems invigorated the art scene in America, and gave birth to Abstract Expressionism. These artists built upon the fusion of abstraction and representa- tion that the second wave of the Taos artists and other early Modernists propounded, taking it to new heights in purely abstract works. Agnes Martin’s minimalism benefited from the break- throughs of these mid-century painters. Like many American intellectuals of the 1950s, she turned to Asian philosophies as a source of inspiration and definition. During her childhood in Saskatchewan, Canada, Martin developed a disciplined approach to life and w ork rooted in the Presbyterian faith and an apprecia- tion for wide-open, natural space. She moved with her family to Calgary. Alberta, then Vancouver, B.C., and then on her own, in 1931, to Bellingham, Washington to care for her pregnant sister. Attracted by what she termed the “American character,” or inde- pendence of mind and egalitarian attitudes, Martin remained in W ashington State to graduate from high school and study at the Western Washington College of Education. In 1950, Martin became a United States citizen and four years later defined her artistic goal as helping to establish a distinct and authentic national art that would represent “the expression of the American people.” 19 Throughout the 1940s anil 1950s, Martin traveled regularly between New Mexico and New York City, studying at both the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and at the Teachers College, Columbia University, where in 1952 she received a Masters of Arts degree. Beginning in 1958, Martin secured a string of enduring relationships with New York dealers, first at the important Betty Parsons Gallery, then with Robert Elkson Gallery, and ultimately with Pace Gallery, which evolved into PaceWildenstein, where she still exhibits today. She was deeply involved with the New York Minimalists, who aspired to convey the essence of life through spare, economical forms. She admired the transcendent color-field paintings of Barnett Newman (1905-1970) and Mark Rothko (1903-1970) and developed cama- raderie with her artist neighbors in downtown New York, who included Ellsworth Kelly (b. 1923) and Lenore Tawney (b. 1925). Yet Martin was continuously drawn to the quiet expansiveness of the American West. She took a year- and-a-half long hiatus from painting in 1967, traveling and camping in the western portion of Canada and the United States. In 1969, she settled in Cuba, New Mexico, and today lives in Taos, where she continues to paint. Her mature work, such as the graphite striations on gessoed canvas exhibited here (no. 13), conveys a perfection that exists only in the mind’s eye, one conveyed through points, lines, and circles that do not exist in nature. Undeniably attracted to open and quiet natural environments, Martin shuns the imperialist impulse that prompted westward expansionism and the exploitation of the land. Though Martin’s bands of horizontal lines might be interpreted as abstracted landscapes, they are more rooted in Greek classicism and its striving for an illusive balance and perfection that the world around us cannot provide. In 1972 she wrote: I believe in the recurrence That this is a return to classicism Classicism is not about people and this work is not about the world... Classicists are people that look out with their back to the world It represents something that isn’t possible in the world More perfection than is possible in the world It’s as unsubjective as possible 26 the Ideal in America is the natural man The conqueror, the one that can accumulate The one who overcomes disadvantages, strength, courage Whereas inspiration, classical art depends on inspiration... The classic is cool... detached and impersonal... Being detached and impersonal is related to freedom... To a detached person the complication of the involved life is like chaos If you don’t like the chaos you’re a classicist... Painting is not about ideas or personal emotion When I was painting in New York I was not so clear about that Now I’m very clear that the object is freedom... 20 All of these artists have located a sense of truth in life in the American West, and portray it in a Modernist, yet individual- ized, manner. Caron enlarges and ennobles the hands of mythic cowboys; Obata abstracts expansive landscapes; Martin finds freedom and clarity in her simplified existence and in minimalist compositions. These artists tend to focus on philosophy and spir- ituality, rather than on the ironic sociopolitical critique pursued by their postmodern colleagues. The Postmodern West: Popular Culture as Muse I will divide the postmodern works into two groups, first dis- cussing those that employ images from popular culture and then exploring those that reinterpret Old Master paintings of the West. In many respects, the American West is still free of the traditional social restrictions and conventions of the East. Most of the contemporary artists discussed below live in urban envi- ronments in the West, namely Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Portland, Oregon. They tend to base their artistic practice in personal experience but create work that transcends the personal by employing imagery with wide appeal and recognition. They share with the western pioneers of the last two centuries an enchantment with reinvention, an embrace of the new and the adventurous, and a breaking open of conventions. Since the advent of Postmodernism in the mid-1960s, more and more artists have used non-traditional materials, often appropriating everyday stuff and assembling it in new ways. Photography, too, has found acceptance in fine art circles in the past several decades. In this exhibition, Alexis Smith, Allen Ruppersberg,Joe Cantrell, Jaune Quick-To-See Smith, and 1 Iarry Fonseca use photographs and found objects to convey their ideas. In an act that expresses the enchantment of reinvention, Patricia Anne Smith (b. 1949, nos. 22 and 23) renamed herself Alexis at age seventeen, when she went to college. The theme of reinvention prevails in Smith’s collages, where she gives new con- text to preexisting things. The artist has spent her adult years in Los Angeles, where Hollywood has a dominant presence, and people often assume new and unpredictable roles. “I think the West helped me form a sense of self,” said Smith in 1991. “I have assimilated so much of its history from my father and his family: its traditional pioneer values of individuality — being who you want and changing your life and doing what you please.” 21 Cinderella Story (no. 23) is part of Smith’s Jane series of 1985, an outgrowth of her interest in heroines. The artist recalls, “I started with Jane Doe, then I made the comparison between Tarzan and Jane and Jayne Mansfield and Mickey Hargitay being couples, then I thought of otherjane couples...” 22 Jane is an every woman figure, one who fully experiences the joys and pains of life, but often goes unrecognized. The central image in Cinderella Story is a photo- graph of the actress Frances Farmer in her role as Calamity Jane in the 1941 film Badlands of Dakota. Jane, a fearless woman of the Old West, was born in Missouri around 1850 as Martha Canary, and as a teen moved to Montana with her family She became famous for her skill with horses and guns, for her alliance with Wild Bill Hickock. She was also known for wearing men’s clothes, which she adopted when she joined General Custer as a scout at Fort Russell, Wyoming during the Indian Wars. Her nickname “Calamity” empowers her present, mythical status. The name was given to her by others, validating her as an independent woman of the West, capable of overcoming unexpected mishaps. Here, Smith adorns Jane’s buckskin jacket with a three-dimensional traditional cor- sage, a feminizing counterpoint to the gun in her hand. This addi- tion of flowers creates an effective interplay between the actual and the photographed, the acted and the fantasized. The phrase “It was well past midnight, and she was very tired” is superimposed over Jane’s belt of bullets, simultaneously referencing the fairytale hour when the Cinderella’s coach becomes a pumpkin and the human frailties of this greater-than-human figure. Smith masks Jane’s eyes with strokes of red, neutralizing her face and making her a symbol of the courageous and independent women of the Old West, a female partner for Remington’s anonymous cowboys. 27 Allen Ruppershcrg's (b. 1044) western images are just one element of his larger investigations of both the relationships between word and image and the undercurrents ot meaning in objects and interior spaces. Cover Art (Space Adventures) (no. 20) explores, in bis words, "space in every respect: interior, exterior, objecth e. non-objective. ” 23 The artist juxtaposes calendar photo- graphs ot idyllic landscapes into a puzzle-like collage. It, like the others in the series ot twenty or so works, was conceived ot as a faux mock-up for a pulp fiction book cover. Predating the time of computer graphics, this “cover art” was seemingly ready to move from the table of the art director to that of the printer. Ruppersbcrg plays with the idea of authenticity by appropriating cheap calendar art. titling it “cover art,” anti scaling it like a grand landscape painting. The title also brings to mind both govern- ment-funded explorations ot outer space, and the claims of UFO sightings that have made Roswell, New Mexico infamous. Though the history of the West is only one aspect of Ruppcrsberg's eclectic investigations, it plays an instrumental part in the art and identity of Joe Martin Cantrell (b. 1945), a part Cherokee Indian now living in Portland, Oregon. His great-great- great-great-great grandfather, Joe Martin, died on the Trail of Tears. In 1996, the artist learned of this heritage and of the origin of his middle name. In response, he began a body of work that includes Road Sign along the Trail of Tears. In Road Sign Along the Trail of Tears, Cantrell duplicates and enlarges the photographic portrait of our seventh president that graces the twenty-dollar bill. Cantrell shot bullets from a replica 1830 vintage gun to obliterate the portrait, as much a tongue-in-cheek comment on road signs used for target practice throughout the West as it is a symbolic act of revenge against Andrew Jackson. 24 Cantrell also included a sign for the Dead Indian Memorial Highway, a stretch of road near Ashland, Oregon, a few hours south of Cantrell’s home. Cantrell made seven bullet holes, one for each Cherokee clan. From each hole hangs a string of plastic beads, painted red on one side, silver on the other, to represent blood and tears. Andrew Jackson is celebrated in most history books as the cham- pion of the frontier farmer and laborer and a shrewd statesman and businessman, but he was also instrumental in the policy of Indian Removal that cleared the land for white occupancy between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi. In 1820, 120,000 Indians lived east of the Mississippi, and by 1844 fewer than 30,000 were left. T his drastic change was vital to the distribution of American lands for agriculture and commerce and the subsequent development of the modern capitalist econ- omy. In the Battle of I Iorseshoe Bend of 1814, Jackson promised government friendship to the Cherokees in exchange for their help with battle tactics, since his white troops had failed in a frontal attack on the Creek Indians. Accepting this promise, the Cherokees swam the river and came up behind the Creeks, claiming victory for Jackson. I he subsequent treaty granted Indians individual land ownership, thus splitting Indian from Indian, and providing Jackson and his friends the opportunity to purchase seized Creek land. Between 1814 and 1824, whites took over three- fourths of Alabama and Florida and parts ofTennessee, Georgia, Mississippi, Kentucky, and North Carolina. White settlements soon bordered Florida. Jackson raided that state and launched the Seminole War of 1818. After he brokered the American acquisition of Florida from Spain in 1819, he became governor. The atrocities continued as cotton plantations sprang up. Gold was discovered in Cherokee territory in Georgia and thou- sands of whites invaded and staked claims. In an act of betrayal by the United States government, the Cherokee Indians, once promised our friendship, were forced west from their homes beginning in 1834. In 1838, 17,000 of the remaining Cherokees were finally rounded up, crowded into stockades and sent on a forced march to Oklahoma that was to become known as the Trail ofTears. As they moved westward, an estimated 4,000 died of sickness and exposure. 25 Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (b. 1940) addresses her Cree and Shoshone Indian ancestry and identity in prints, paintings, and mixed-media works. She typically portrays traditional Indian subject matter (such as running horses, teepees, and figures) in outline over solid passages of painted color. The palette and ren- dering recall the great modern masters Vasily Kandinsky (1866- 1944) and Joan Miro (1893-1983), while also referencing Indian ledger drawings. A transitional art form, ledger drawings straddle the line between the traditional hide paintings of aboriginal times and the easel paintings of the 1920s. The pictorial style draws on the art of the ancient Plains Indians, who exaggerated and simplified dominant attributes of animals and people on hides, rocks, wood, and bone. Buffalo, for example, were identified by their humps; tribal affiliations were indicated by costume and hairstyle. By the early to mid 1800s, frontier artists such as Karl Bodmer encouraged warriors to use paper and col- ored pencils to depict their accomplishments, resulting in autobi- ographical narratives rendered with a geometricized realism. The subject usually floated on a flat expanse with little concern for spatial perspective. Later, captured warriors were encouraged by United States officers to glorify pre-reservation life in scenes of village life and warfare. 26 Quick-to-See Smith evokes these Indian pictorial practices of ledger drawings and pictographs in sophisticated composi- tions that balance spontaneity and control in what she calls “sweetgrass... bars of contemporary grids.” 27 In War Shirt { no. 38), painted vertical swaths ot yellow, red, and blue create a flat back- ground for the outline of a shirt. Recent images of Indians culled from newspaper photographs and merchandising propaganda emblazon it, badges on a contemporary warrior. Harry Fonseca’s Coyote character has many manifestations. The titles of Fonseca’s works include Snapshot: Wish Ton Were Here Coyote, When Coyote Leaves the Res: Portrait of the Artist As a Young Coyote, Coyotes with Watermelons, and Coyotes with Cotton Candy. This canine is a recurring character in western and southwestern Indian mythology, a clever trickster who both outsmarts and is deceived by his environment. The Couer d’Alene Indians believe the coyote was the source of the universe. Fonseca (b. 1946) claims, “For me the Coyote is a survivor and is indeed the spice of life.” 28 He portrays the Coyote as bipedal and places him in con- temporary settings, dressed in contemporary human garb that exaggerates the role he is playing. The aesthetic is decidedly Funk, a California-based tributary of Pop Art of the 1960s and 70s. Funk tends to poke fun at life with all its pain and mishaps, and is identified by a bright, neon palette and by the use of car- toon protagonists as subjects. What makes Fonseca’s St. Coyote (no. 33) particularly fasci- nating is its reference to Christian altarpieces. A painted image of a theater curtain frames the piece, unveiling the masterpiece. St. Coyote is dressed in a leather jacket and black Converse sneakers, and is surrounded by winged coyote angels descending from the clouds. Red roses are strewn at his feet. Fonseca transplants a character from Indian mythology into a format prescribed by an imported religion, one that went hand-in-hand with the Spanish colonization of the Southwest, and with their destruction of its native people. The political and religious subjugation of the natives was very near complete. By the eighteenth and nine- teenth centuries, indigenous Americans who lived along the Camino Real between Mexico City and Santa Fe were painting ret a bios of Biblical personages and narratives. In St. Coyote , Fonseca downplays the residue of pain caused by the Spanish and Christian invasion and instead emphasizes the transportability of the revered: an Indian Coyote becomes a Christian saint. The artist is more interested in using humor to dissolve boundaries than in revisiting historical events. These artists cull information from contemporary culture to create imagistic, mixed-media montages of their experiences in today’s world. They combine allusions to the collective myths, popular icons, and the often-gritty reality of the American West, and imbue them with a postmodern sense of satire. The Postmodern West: New Twists on the Old Masters Several contemporary painters in the exhibition look to the history of European art as a starting point for their visual comments on today’s world. They fuse competent technique with intelligent allusions to artistic styles of the past to explore human relationships with one another and with the surrounding landscape. Michael Brophy (b. i960) portrays the boundaries where nature and culture meet in landscapes altered by human pres- ence. In scale and medium, his compositions are true to the grand, oil on canvas, western landscape tradition established by premodernists Moran and Bierstadt, but they are neither ideal- ized nor romantic. Brophy portrays the deforestation that scars Oregon today with unforgiving realism and satirical wit. Goodnight Irene (no. 16) is one of a recent series of “staged” scenes: parted theater curtains unveil a canyon of tree stumps. Musical notes from the Leadbelly tune “Goodnight Irene” float above the tree stumps, forming a horizontal band across the sky. This tune adds an additional historical dimension to the painting. In May 1941, Woody Guthrie and his family left California for the Northwest, in the hope that Guthrie could write songs for a documentary film about the dams being built on the Columbia River. After he arrived, the Bonneville Power Administration hired him for 30 days, paying him $266 to write a song a day. The contract produced “Roll on Columbia,” “Jackhammer Blues,” and “Grand Coulee Dam” along with twenty-three others. For “Roll on Columbia,” Guthrie com- bined his lyrics with Leadbelly’s music. This brilliant piece of propaganda convinced an American public gripped by hard times of the value of cheap electricity. Ironically, the dams that 29 Guthrie's songs promoted have had well-documented detrimen- tal environmental and social effects, a result that would, no doubt, have caused heartache to the leftist poet. With the exception of a brief period of study in Europe, Brophv has spent his entire life in Portland, Oregon, a city surrounded by lush forests and dramatic mountains. The local timber industry utilizes these natural resources, providing jobs and fulfilling the consumer demand for wood products. Brophv renders the clear-cut forests of his native Oregon in lumi- nous color applied in painterly strokes by a sure and practiced hand A self-professed “day hiker," the artist is neither an out- doorsman nor a politically active environmentalist. His intention is to paint what he sees, what he calls “constructed landscapes, panoramic views and how they’ve been mediated.” 29 By staging hi s scenes, Brophv plays on the idea of a dramatic landscape, reminding us that our natural surroundings are, at best, becoming rarefied places of recreation and entertainment. At worst, they are being destroyed. Frank Romero (b. 1941) was a member of Los Four, the first Chicano artists’ collective to be exhibited at the Los Angeles Counts Museum ol Art in 1974. Incorporated in 1975, Los Four was committed to politically charged image making. They told the story of Mexican Americans bv combining graffiti with icons drawn from Chicano popular culture, such as the lowrider, the crucifix, and the Sacred Heart. Romero’s Vaquero (Spanish for cowboy) of 1982 (no. 29) is not far removed from his previous sub- ject matter. In fact, Elizabeth Broun, director of the National Museum of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution, described a vaquero sculpture by another prominent Chicano artist, Luisjimenez, as making “...many points that are key to our program: that American art began in the Hispanic Southwest, that Latinos are the most rapidly growing segment of the popula- tion, that the traditional American symbol of the cowboy began with Latinos in the Southwest.” 30 Romero’s Vaquero is a male version of Alexis Smith’s Calamity Jane, in that both are reinterpreted portraits of the western hero. 31 Romero paints a cowboy with a melancholic expression. I lis face is bracketed by his plaid shirt and bow tie below and his ten-gallon hat above, which consumes the entire top half of the composition. The hues are exclusively red, white, and blue, a wry reference to the American flag; the brushstrokes arc bold and confident, conveying minimal detail. The vaqueros skin is not flesh toned, but a bruise-like red and blue. With this unusual choice of color, Romero has entered a territory opened by turn-of-the century Fauvists such as French painter I lenri Matisse (1869-1954). This cowboy ironically has the red skin of the Red Man, possibly a comment on the value of transcending racial difference and prejudice. Romero’s Freeway Wars (no. 30), conveys the random shoot- ings between drivers on congested highways in Los Angeles, a sprawling city that lacks public transportation. In this recent manifestation of the human brutality that has, in part, shaped the history of the American West, frustration rather than imperial- ism prompts violent territorialism. The automobile replaces the steed as an emblem of mobility, masculinity, and power. The painting style in Vaquero is best described as loose and expression- istic, but in Freeway Wars Romero employs simplistic blocks of color and shapes with exaggerated curves to create a cartoon-like atmosphere, emphasizing the ridiculousness rather than the horrific violence of road rage. In conclusion, Michael Brophy imbues a historical format with sardonic imagery that comments on the worrisome state of our natural environment. Frank Romero’s Freeway Wars conveys the edginess and frustrations of urban life. What these artists share is a need to frankly comment on our current state of affairs. This sets them apart from their modernist predecessors, firmly establishing them in the postmodern art world. Conclusion The past century and a half have been marked by profound change. Many sociological, cultural, and technological transfor- mations have impacted both the American West and the world of art. What many of the artists exhibited here have in common is that they have been relegated to the periphery of European- based American fine art. Nineteenth-century American artists who painted images of frontier life were thought to be unimpor- tant contributors to a conversation dominated by their contem- poraries who painted portraits, still lives, and biblical and historical narratives in the European tradition. Artists of Native American and Chicano heritage are often known more for their ethnicity than for their artistic talent and ideas. Even artists who create in the formats and styles of their European predecessors but live in the West may receive, at best, a cool embrace from the east coast art world. Only in the past few decades has recogni- tion become more democratic, with the de-centralization of the 3 ° art world and a broader embrace of non-white cultures. All of the artists represented in this exhibition have been impacted in some way by their experience as Americans in the American West. Their visual expressions warrant a careful and considered look as subjective interpretations of and contributions to our cultural history. 1 John Jacob Astor founded the American Fur Company in 1808. Its posts ranged westward from the Mississippi River to the coast of Oregon. I Iis friend Washington Irving wrote “The Adventures of Captain Bonneville, USA” based on the French fur-trapper’s exploits on the Great Plains and in the Rocky Mountains in 1837. Irving journeyed to the West to visit the Osage and Pawnee Indian nations. In Elizabeth Cunningham, West, West, West: Major Paintings from the Anschutz Collection (Denver: The Anschutz Collection in association with University of Nebraska Press, 1991) 16-17. 2 William Goetzmann and Joseph Porter, The West as Romantic Horizon (Omaha, NE: Center for Western Studies, Joslyn Art Museum, 1981) 54. 3 Cunningham, 21. 4 Estelle Jussim, Frederic Remington, the Camera if the Old West (Fort Worth: Amon Carter Museum, 1983) 11. 5 Joan Carpenter Troccoli, Painters and the American West: The Anschutz Collection (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000) 141. 6 Thomas Cole's (1801-1848) paintings of the Hudson River valley were the first of a tradition that came to be known the Hudson River School. Just as Bodmer recorded what was then thought of as a vanishing race, Cole and other Hudson River painters captured the moment when wilderness became farmland. Cole remarked that the painter of American scenery in his day was privileged because “all nature here is new to art.” See Gloria- Gilda Deak, Profiles of American Artists Represented by Kennedy Galleries (New York: Kennedy Galleries, 1981) 33. 7 Troccoli, 141. 8 The sketches that he sent were translated into wood block prints and then published. The half-tone printing process was developed by 1889, and this photographic reproduction process eliminated the need for the intermediary wood block. Jussim, 21. 9 As quoted in Kellie Keto and Melissa Webster, Remington: The Tears of Critical Acclaim (Santa Fe, NM: The Gerald Peters Corp., 1998) 1. 10 In 1899 he was refused full membership for the final time from the National Academy of Design’s annual juried exhibition. He never again subjected himself to the scrutiny of this leading arbiter of taste. See Keto and Webster, iv. 11 Describing this experience, Charlie Dye, one of the founders wrote, “Those vaqueros sure showed us how to handle a rawhide right and sit up straight on a bronco. We had a wonderful time, a thousand laughs, and the thought hit us that other cowboy artists would have enjoyed it as well.” www.caamuseum.com 12 Since the early 1980s, the CAA has been affiliated with the Cowboy Artists of America Museum in Kerrville, Texas, which is dedicated to col- lecting, displaying, and teaching about the finest in contemporary Western art. CAA members assist the museum’s art education program in training artists in the techniques ofWestern art and applied realism. 13 The details of Crazy I Iorse’s death are still being disputed. See Robert A. Clark, editor, The Killing of Chief Crazy Horse: Three Eyewitness Views by the Indian, Chief He Dog the Indian-white William Garnett and the White Doctor, Valentine McGillycuddy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1976). 14 Conversation with the collector, March 2002. 15 Van Deren Coke, Taos and Santa Fe: The Artist's Environment , 1882-1942 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1963) 12. 16 Taos Society of Artists was organized in 1912. Its original members were I I. Couse, Bert Phillips, Oscar Berninghaus, Ernest L. Blumenschein, W. I Ierbert Dunton and Joseph Henry Sharp. In March 1927, the Society was dissolved by a vote of its members. 17 Coke, 24. 18 Conversation with the artist, April 2002. 19 I laskell, Barbara, Agnes Martin (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1992) 96, as quoted from Martin’s application for a I Ielene Wurlitzer Foundation grant in 1934. 20 Excerpted from Agnes Martin’s “The Untroubled Mind,” as published in Haskell, 15 21 Richard Armstrong, Alexis Smith (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1991) 9-10. 22 Armstrong, 140. 23 Conversation with the artist, March 2002. 24 Conversation with the artist, April 14, 2002. 25 In Dec. 1838, Martin Van Buren, Jackson’s successor to the presidency, addressed Congress: "It affords sincere pleasure to apprise the Congress of the entire removal of the Cherokee nation of Indians to their new homes west of the Mississippi. The measures authorized by Congress at its last session have had the happiest effects." See I loward Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1990) 124-46. 26 See Edwin Wade, The Arts of the North American Indian (New York: I ludson Hills Press, 1986) 187. 27 Edwin L. Wade and Rennard Strickland, Magic Images: Contemporary Native American Art (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1981) 80. 28 As quoted in Wade, Magic Images , 94. 29 Conversation with the artist, April 14, 2002. 30 As quoted in Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Chicano Art: Inside/Outside the Master’s House, Cultural Politics and the Cara Exhibition (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998) 185. 31 ENDURING ICONS, CHANGING REALITIES: THE VESTVARD TRAIL OF THE COWBOY IN AMERICAN ART By Marilynn S. Johnson I N THE EARLY SPRING of 1887, cowboys on the northern Great Plains emerged from their bunkers to find hundreds of rotting cattle corpses strewn across the range. During that bitter cold and snowy winter, cattle owners lost roughly one- third of their total herds, joining the ranks of stockmen on the southern Plains who had faced similar losses the previous winter. Overproduction and overgrazing, combined with summer drought and winter blizzards, devastated the western cattle busi- ness. Pressed to meet their loans, stock owners rushed the remaining animals into a declining market, a move that further depressed prices and drove many into bankruptcy The process repeated itself in the Great Basin of Nevada two years later. By 1890, the much-heralded western cattle boom had burst. 1 Ironically, the decade that marked the demise of the cattle boom also saw the rise of the cowboy as the new icon of the American West. Romanticizing the pastoral life, cowboys began to publish their memoirs, and artists began to paint scenes of cowboys, Indians, horses, and cattle roaming the range. In 1888, an up-and-coming adventurer named Theodore Roosevelt authored his highly popular Ranch Life and Hunting Trail , which featured the exploits of cowpunchers and buffalo hunters on his North Dakota ranch. Over the next two decades, the cowboy became a fixture of western Americana, and the 1902 publication of Owen Wister’s The Virginian would establish the range-riding horseman as the standard western hero in hundreds of western novels and films. 2 Although the cowboy would soon become synonymous with the American frontier, he was a newcomer to western art and popular culture in the 1880s. Earlier artistic renderings of the West had focused on the trans-Allegheny frontier and the buck- skin-clad figures of Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett or the scouts and trappers who succeeded them into the hinterlands of the mountain west. As Brian Dippie has observed, this buck- skin brigade of early nineteenth-century western art gave way to the cowboy via the transitional figure of Buffalo Bill Cody, the frontiersman-turned-entertainer who introduced his Wild West Show to American audiences in 1883. A master showman, Cody brought his life experiences as an army scout and Indian fighter together with his fictional persona as the fearless hero of western dime novels. Filled with crowd-pleasing feats of western riding, roping, and shooting, his Wild West shows were rip-roaring extravaganzas of frontier history that familiarized audiences around the world with the American West and helped establish the cowboy as its internationally recognized symbol. 3 Among more genteel eastern audiences, the work of Frederic Remington (1861-1909, nos. 5 and 6), Charles Russell 33 USo-4 1926), Charles Schrewogel (1861-1912), and other turn-of- the -vcnturv artists plaved a similar role. With the notable excep- tion of Russell. these artists were based in the Hast and worked out of studios in places like 1 loboken, New Jersey (Schreyvogel) anil New Rochelle. New York (Remington). The market tor their work was largely eastern. As newspaper and magazine illustrators, thc\ produced images tor Harper’s, Collier's, and other New York- based magazines, and as tine artists, they exhibited their works at New York galleries that catered to western art. To get material and inspiration tor their works, they studied frontier history, took frequent trips out west, anil collected western tack, cloth- ing. and other artifacts to use as props in their studios back homi Authenticity became the rallying cry ot western art, with the artists and their critics engaging in a never-ending battle over the technical accuracy of equine anatomy, saddlery, chaps, and other cowboy paraphernalia. 4 The documentary mission of turn-of-the-century western artists was driven bv the desire to preserve away of life that was fast disappearing. Bv 1890 the buffalo herds were already gone, Y ip. 6 !>uffalo Hill f Wild West and (.ongress of Rough Riders of the World, Ihftoncal Sketche f and Programme (Chicago: Blakely Printing Co., 1893). I •• c rert D. ( traff Collection folio 784, The Newberry Library, Chicago. barbed wire enclosed much of the range, many cowboys had become fence-mending ranch hands, and most Indians were confined to barren and shrinking reservations. “I knew the w ild riders and the vacant land were about to vanish forever,” Remington wrote in 1905, “and the more I considered the subject, the bigger the Forever loomed.” Americans’ anxiety about the closing of the frontier was most clearly expressed by the historian Frederick Jackson Turner in his 1893 address, “The Significance of the Frontier in American I listory.” Noting that the recent 1890 census had abandoned the idea of a “frontier of settlement,” Turner argued that the nation’s frontier past was the wellspring of the American character. It was the frontier experience, he insisted, that gave rise to the uniquely American values of inde- pendence, resourcefulness, and self-reliance — as well as the American system of democracy itself. Reflecting the Eurocentric culture of his times, Turner saw the frontier as “the meeting point between savagery and civilization” and believed that the struggle to tame the frontier was what made the country great. 5 Turner’s address was a particularly eloquent statement of long-standing and deeply cherished beliefs about the western frontier. Popular narratives and images of western pioneers had long emphasized these themes of independence, freedom and self reliance, and the western artists of Turner’s day— influenced by the popular imagery of the Wild West shows (fig. 6)— updated the rugged western hero into the more familiar form of a post- Civil War cavalryman or cowboy. Their desire to document the authentic West was not merely a personal avocation but part of a larger national effort to celebrate a set of American values that seemed endangered by modern urban industrial life. As Americans faced a growing tide of immigration, a burgeoning fac- tory system, labor unrest, and the proliferation of urban poverty and decay, the artists’ image of the Old West as a repository of traditional American values of independence and individualism was a reassuring message. Turner and other western enthusiasts had long identified the West as a kind of safety valve for eastern ills; with the closing of the frontier, the artists’ renderings of the Old West would preserve that way of life and provide a kind of psychic escape from modern day problems. 6 Never mind that the reality of cowboy life was not particu- larly independent or self-reliant. Most real cowboys were low- paid hired hands, some of whom worked for large corporate cattle companies owned by absentee investors in the East or abroad. They lived in crude dugouts for most of the year or in 34 Fig. 7 Charles Marion Russell (1864-1926), The Stick Ear , 1914. Oil on canvas, 30 x 33.5 in. Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, University ofTexas at Austin. 1985.83 tents during the annual cattle drives to the nearest railroad line. Low pay and isolated working conditions were so grim that a group of cowboys in the Texas Panhandle organized a strike in 1883, but the Panhandle Cattleman’s Association ruthlessly sup- pressed it. Although some cowboys who worked under the open range system managed to start their own herds, the enclosure movement led by large-scale cattle owners made this mobility increasingly difficult. Maverick-chasing cowboys were more likely to become the targets of vigilante violence led by the stockmen’s associations than to become successful ranchers on their own homesteads. In the Southwest, moreover, hard-pressed cattle companies gradually replaced Anglo cowboys with Mexican and Tejano vaqueros , who earned only half to two-thirds the wages paid to Anglos. In Texas and Indian Territory (Oklahoma), a significant number of the cowboys were black, while in the northern Plains, the Blackfeet, Crow, and other native peoples raised cattle as a means of survival during the reservation era. 7 The vast majority of turn-of-the-century cowboy paintings, however, depicted these westerners as heroic white men. Like Buffalo Bill’s frontier reenactments, Remington’s paintings of cowboys fighting Indians, roping cattle, and other frontier adventures highlighted the western struggle against nature and savagery, a violent battle that would help rejuvenate a sickly eastern civilization. One of his most famous sculptures, The Bronco Buster, uses dramatic gut-busting action to convey the courageous struggle to tame the frontier (no. 6). Unlike the sweeping panoramas of western painting, the bronze cast pro- vides no context, because it is not necessary— the viewer immediately recognizes this image as the human embodiment of the western saga. In other paintings, such as Russell’s The Slick Ear (fig. 7) and Roping a Grizzly (fig. 8), cowboys test their manhood against ornery bulls, grizzly bears, stampeding cattle, and a variety of other savage beasts. 8 Remington is perhaps best known for his works depicting cowboys and cavalrymen fighting Indians in an epic drama of the Anglo-Saxon conquest of the West. Relying on the principles of Social Darwinism, Theodore Roosevelt popularized this theme in his four-volume The Winningofthe West (1889-1896) in which he depicted a rough-and-tumble western frontier as the crucible of a superior white American race. Like many early Remington paintings, Dash for the Timber {fig. 9) reflected this same struggle, as dashing white cowboys sprint at top speed from savage Indians in hot pursuit. Such chase scenes became a com- mon cliche of western art, as did the so-called “last stands” of Custer, the cavalry, and assorted cowboy outfits. Gathered in a tight cluster with their backs to each other and their rifles pointed out, the cowboys of Russell’s A Desperate Stand (fig. 10) heroically stand their ground as galloping Indians slaughter their horses and their comrades. Both the chase scenes and the last stands depict moments of danger and perhaps imminent defeat for the cowboys, inverting the historic roles of victors and vic- tims. The artists thus seek to enlist our sympathy and respect for a besieged white race, a message that no doubt played well in an urban society facing mass immigration and industrial strife. Fig. 8 Charles Marion Russell (1864-1926 ), Roping a Grizzly , 1903. Watercolor on paper, 19.5 x 28.5 in. Buffalo Bill Historical Society, Cody, Wyoming. Gift of William E. Weiss. 19.73 35 Fig. 9 Frederic S. Remington (1861-1909). Dash for the Timber, 1889. Oil on canvas. 48. 25 \ 84.12? in. Anton Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas. 1961.381 Moreover, Remington’s rendering of the frontier myth also served to justify imperialist adventures abroad. Theodore Roosev elt's Rough Riders, who led the charge up Kettle Hill in the Spanish- American War, adopted Remington’s The Bronco Buster (no. 6) as the emblem of their unit. 9 Despite the daring and danger portray ed in these works, viewers knew that in the end the West was won. The appropriation of western imagery thus helped reassure Americans that the nation would prevail in its latest battle against Spanish barbarism and Native savagery. Cowbov art also had a strong gender ideology — it was a genre created bv and for white men. The winning of the West was not only a battle of the races, but an opportunity for white men to test their mettle against primitive conditions, savage beasts, and bar- barous people. In a society that some believed had grown overcivi- lized and effeminate, a sojourn in the Wild West offered American men a chance to revitalize themselves and reaffirm their man- hood — a process Richard Slotkin calls “regenerative violence.” As western artists suggested, the West was a male domain where "men with the bark on,” as Remington put it, bonded with one another through violence and male bravado. While cowboys worked together to round up cattle or fend off Indians, they also spent time off together in the dugouts and the cattle towns. In Cowboy Race (no. 8), H.W. Hansen (1854-1924) portrayed the lighter side of cowboy life — the male camaraderie and competi- tiveness that characterized this freewheeling world of single men. Like the regenerative violence against savagery, the raucous male bonding of the cowboys was a bracing antidote to the sentimental and feminized Victorian culture of the East. 10 As a white male genre, cowboy art effectively erased women's presence from the Old West. Remington rarely included yy omen in his works, claiming that he could not paint them. In reality, though, the more settled domestic visions of the West in which women were likely to appear held little interest for him or for most other turn-of-the-century cowboy painters. When women did appear, as in Charles Schreyvogel’s The Summit Springs Rescue i86<) (fig. 1 1) or Charles Russell’s Cowboy Bargaining for an Indian Girl (fig. 12), they were usually depicted as dependents to be rescued or property to be acquired by white male protectors. Although Annie Oakley had pioneered the role of the sharp- shooting cowgirl in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show back in 1885 (fig. 13), western painters rejected this image as inauthentic (though they accepted equally inauthentic accounts of last stands and other heroic feats by white men). Later historians would argue that the western environment had a bracing and liberating effect on white women as well as men, but most turn-of-the-cen- tury western artists were not prepared to admit women to the free-wheeling masculine frontier they cherished. Likewise, African Americans were also purged from this mythic cowboy frontier. While Remington produced several works documenting the exploits of the army’s Buffalo Soldiers, he did not permit them into the ranks of his canvas cowboys. Remington admitted that there were some good black cowboys out west but noted, “I wouldn’t want to mix with them.” 11 I Iispanics and Native Americans, however, were another story. Their prior possession of the land, their sheer numbers, and the obstacles they presented to white expansion into the West made them a force to be reckoned with, both in myth and reality. Early works by Remington, Schreyvogel, and other artists based in the East portrayed Indians as bloodthirsty savages who deserved the rough treatment they received at the hands of white Fig. 10 Charles Marion Russell (1864-1926), A Desperate Stand, 1898. Oil on canvas, 24.125 x 36.125 in. Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas. 1961.158 Fig. ii Charles Shreyvogel (1861-1912), The Summit Springs Rescue 1869, 1908. Oil on canvas, 48 x 66 in. Buffalo Bill Historical Society, Cody, Wyoming. Bequest in memory of the Houx and Newell families. 11.64 cowboys and cavalrymen. In the early twentieth century, how- ever, Charles Russell began to present more dignified images of Indians, albeit ones that were filled with nostalgia for a noble but doomed race. Unlike Remington and Schreyvogel, Russell had moved to Montana as a sixteen-year-old and had spent his adult life in the West, where he worked on a ranch and came to know many cowboys and Indians on a sustained basis. His paintings of Indians, which soon eclipsed his love affair with the cowboy, commemorated a lost way of life and expressed the artist’s sym- pathy for those whose traditional ties to western lands were under assault. As railroads, barbed wire, agriculture, and eastern- financed development put an end to the nineteenth-century frontier, Russell and other western artists idealized the Native American past and lamented its demise. Increasingly, western paintings of both cowboys and Indians riding the plains evoked the same wistful longing for an unspoiled, bygone era. By con- trast, depictions of the lives of contemporary Indians imprisoned on reservations were nowhere to be seen. 12 Like the Indians, Hispanic cowboys — or vaqueros— were common subjects of western art whose popularity grew over time. And like Russell’s native subjects, the vaquero was depicted as a traditional figure, preferably one who remained on the hacienda (ranch) in Mexico. Remington began painting vaqueros in the early 1890s following a trip to a Babicora, a cattle-raising hacienda near Chihuahua, Mexico owned by the California heiress Phoebe Hearst (mother of William Randolph Hearst). When Charles Russell traveled to Mexico in 1906, he was equally entranced with the vaqueros colorful clothing and picturesque surroundings. But perhaps the most important painter of vaqueros was Edward Borein (1872-1945), an Oakland-born artist who worked as a cattlehand on several California ranches in the 1890s. Late in the decade, he traveled to Baja California in search of the authentic Spanish and Mexican roots of the American cowboy. In 1903, he too visited the Hearst ranch, where he signed on for a two-hundred-mile trail drive to move 3800 head of cattle north to New Mexico . 13 1 Iere, in the less developed spaces of the Chihuahuan desert, cowboy artists like Borein could re-live the long drives of the 1860s and 70s, recap- turing the Old West with a picturesque Mexican twist. Borein’s romantic renderings of vaqueros and hacienda life (fig. 14) were well received in California, where a Spanish revival movement was underway. Beginning in the late 1880s with the publication of Helen Hunt Jackson’s novel Ramona, California publishers and promoters had been cultivating a sentimental image of the region’s Spanish past, presenting it as a benevolent, pastoral society of missions and haciendas. Charles Fletcher Loomis, editor of the Southern California magazine Land of Sunshine and one of the chief architects of the mission revival movement, was drawn to Borein’s vaquero images and hired him as an illustrator. Borein’s romantic images of vaqueros , haciendas, and missions would help sell a booming California real estate market to the readers of Harpers, Collier’s, Saturday Evening Post, and the California-based Sunset Magazine . His studio in Santa Barbara would become a west coast gathering place for fellow western artists, including his close friend Charles Russell. Like Borein, many of these artists looked to Mexico and Spanish-era Fig. 12 Charles Marion Russell (1864-1926), Cowboy Bargaining fur an Indian Girl, 1895. Oil on canvas, 19.125 x 28.25 in. Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. Gift ofj. Shirley Austin, Class of 1924. P961.261 37 DlJffALtl IilLL'5 //JUJ V/£ 51'" (&tfGK£S5, KOI/gH KlDEflS OF THE WORLD. MISS ANNIE OAKLEY, THE PEERLESS LADY WING'SHOT. Fig. ij A Hoen & Co., Miss Annie Oakley, The Peerless Lady Wing-Shot , c. 1890. Four-color lithograph, 28.5 x 19 in. Buffalo Bill Historical Society. Cody, Wyoming. 1.69.73 California and the Southwest as inspiration for their paintings of a colorful and pastoral Old West— one which meshed well with the boosterism of California publishers, land developers, and a growing Hollywood film industry. As the careers of Borein and Russell indicate, western- based artists with their own homegrow n views of the region were gradually eclipsing the earlier generation of eastern sojourners such as Remington and Schreyvogel. Western critics began to attack the latter as “Wild West Fakers,” denouncing the technical accuracy of their paintings as a byproduct of their social distance as easterners. At the same time, the Montana- based Russell became known as the premier “Cowboy Artist.” Would-be western painters would now have to prove their authenticity by living and working in the West as Russell had done Increasingly, their depictions of the cowboy West were less about epic drama and conquest and more about the serenity and simplicity of an earlier era. This nostalgic vision grew out of western artists’ genuine reverence for the old pastoral West, but it was often promoted by individuals and institutions that were exploiting such images to attract new population and investment to a rapidly developing region. In the process of sell ing the West, of course, the boosters helped to despoil the very qualities idealized in western painting. This vicious cycle would continue throughout the twentieth century. The popularity of the cowboy art genre, however, fell off markedly during the it)20s, eclipsed by new styles, subjects, and popular media. In the wake of the Armory Show of 1913, the American art world was heavily influenced by European Modernist styles ot Impressionism, Cubism, and other less repre- sentational approaches. Although Remington and other western artists would experiment with Impressionist cowboy painting, it was the second generation ofTaos artists that fully embraced Modernist styles to create their very personal evocations of the southwestern landscape. The work of the Taos artists, which included the distinctly female perspectives of Georgia O’Keefe (1887-1986), eventually overshadowed the masculinist cowboy school. Although wealthy westerners continued to acquire works by Remington and Russell, national attention now focused on the Taos painters as the interpreters of western life. Remington enthusiasts, in fact, complained that the Metropolitan Museum of Art had little regard for its valuable collection of the artist’s works and had stuck one of his most famous bronzes, Coming Through the Rye, in a dingy, poorly lit stairwell. In the years follow- ing World War II, cowboy genre artists would remain in the shadows as Abstract Expressionism furthered the trend away from representational art. This is not to say, however, that the cowboy disappeared from American culture during these years. Devotees of the Old West could now turn to a thriving industry of western films that recreated traditional cowboy themes for a popular audience. From the 1920s to the 1960s, Flollywood produced hundreds of Westerns in an exciting celluloid format that was well suited to both the action-packed adventure of Remington and the romantic nostalgia of Russell. Hollywood also launched the careers of cowboy singers and performers such as Gene Autry (fig. 15) and Will Rogers and contributed to the rise of a national country-western music industry in the 1930s and 40s. Although the I Iollywood cowboy temporarily lost ground to the movie _25> w*? Fig. 14 Edward Borcin (1873-1945), Vaqueros in a Courtyard, 1925. Watercolor on paper, approx. 10 x 15 in. Arlington Gallery, Santa Barbara, California. gangsters of the 1930s and the war heroes of the 1940s, he enjoyed a triumphant comeback in the fifties and early sixties. Preoccupied with stories of gunfighters and outlaws, the Western became a Cold War parable about America’s role in the world, the saga of a flawed but valiant western hero who fought against those who threatened civilization. Cowboys also made a successful transition to television, with western shows like Gunsmoke, Rawhide, and Bonanza capturing some of the greatest TV market shares of the 1950s and 6os. 14 Thanks to the film and television industries, the cowboy became a more popular national icon than ever before — one that symbolized American confidence and righteousness in a Cold War world beset by hostility and insecurity. At the same time, however, social and economic develop- ments in the West were also laying the groundwork for the reemergence of the cowboy as a distinctly western figure. During World War II, the Pacific Coast and much of the Southwest underwent explosive growth with the expansion of military bases, scientific research facilities, aircraft plants, shipyards, and other defense operations. Building on this wartime boom, the corporate leaders and development interests that dominated many western cities successfully attracted new businesses in the postwar period through low taxes, minimum regulation, cheap unorganized labor, and the active recruitment of federal defense projects. As the plight of older northeastern cities grew worse in the t950s and 60s, population and economic activity gravitated to the growing urban centers of the South and West. Soon, west- ern cities sprouted skyscrapers downtown and industrial parks and suburban subdivisions along their peripheries. Although the term “Sunbelt” was not coined until the 1970s, the roots of this phenomenon date back to World War 1 1 and the pro-growth campaigns of western political and economic leaders. As the urban West grew in wealth and population, local civic leaders sought to transform their communities into world- class cities. While some corporate leaders worked to establish eastern-style cultural institutions such as art museums, sym- phonies, and dance companies, others promoted mass cultural activities such as professional sports — creating new teams with a distinctly western flavor (the Cowboys, the Broncos, the 49ers, etc.). Taking the western heritage more seriously, some of the region’s homegrown capitalists founded specialized muse- ums that celebrated western culture. One of the first such muse- ums was the National Cowboy Hall of Fame founded in Oklahoma City by Chester Reynolds, former chairman of the H.D. Lee Company (the Kansas-based maker of Lee jeans). Opening its doors in the late 1950s, the Cowboy Hall of Fame brought together western historical artifacts and exhibits with a growing collection of western cowboy art and film memorabilia. A similar effort was underway in Cody, Wyoming, where the Buffalo Bill Museum opened a new gallery of western art in 1958 Fig. 15 Poster for Gold Mine in the Sky , 1938. Hershenson-Allen Archive, West Plains, Missouri. Reproduced from More Cowboy Movie Posters (West Plains, MO: Bruce Hershenson, 1998). 39 Fig. 16 Frank McCarthy (b. 1924), Lost Trail, 1972. Oil on canvas, 24 x 36 in.. Courtesy of Cowboy Artists of America Museum, Kcrrville, Texas. funded bv the Whitney family. In 1961, the Texas oil and pub- lishing magnate Anion Carter opened the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, with his treasured Remington and Russell collections as its centerpiece. Another prominent oilman. Thomas Gilcrease, had also amassed numerous works by western artists at his estate in Tulsa. Seizing the opportunity to acquire a major western art collection, Tulsa residents passed a bond measure in 1954 financing a city-owned Gilcrease .Museum. 15 These venues, and others that would open over the next two decades, formed a growing museum circuit for western art and helped re popularize the works of Remington, Russell, and other turn-of-the-century artists. As demand for these artists grew, a new generation of cow- boy painters began to attract attention. Citing Remington and Russell as their progenitors, these male artists produced a fresh outpouring of works depicting cowboys, Indians, cattle, and buffalo on colorful tableaus of western landscape. In 1965, four of these artists — Charlie Dye (1906-1972), Joe Beeler (b. 1931), George Phippen (1916-1966), and John Hampton (1918-2000) — formed the Cowboy Artists of America, an exclusive all-male group of western painters and sculptors. In a much-repeated story, the founders tell how they gathered in a tavern in Sedona, Arizona and drew up the organization’s bylaws, using those of the Coconino County Sheriff’s posse as a model. Their mission was to ensure the quality and authenticity of western art by limiting membership to a select few; they also sought to promote their u ork through an annual exhibition and to provide camaraderie among the artists through an annual trail ride and camp-out. The first CAA exhibition took place the following year at the National Cowboy I lall of Fame. 16 1 .ike the painters of Remington and Russell’s generation, many CAA artists are former illustrators who value authenticity as one of the hallmarks of good western art. And like their predeces- sors, they focus on the past, depicting the Old West as a reposi- tory of traditional American values of freedom, independence, hard work, and self-reliance. Although many of the early CAA works concentrated on violent, action-packed scenes reminiscent of Remington and I lollywood Westerns, later works have featured the more Russell-like scenes of a serene and pastoral West, includ- ing a greater emphasis on pre-conquest Indian life. Even in the more dramatic works, scenes of violent conflict between cowboys and Indians are rare. Cowboys test their mettle not against savage Indians, but against bucking broncos, charging cattle, roiling rivers, and other violent forces of nature. Indeed, the slaughter of Indians is no longer a compelling subject— contemporary artists have effectively erased those violent (and very real) episodes from their views of the western past. While the West continues to be an all-male world of heroic adventure, it is tempered by a greater rev- erence for Indians (who are no longer a threat) and tor the scenic wonders of the natural environment. In short, Russell’s influence has been more critical than Remington’s. At the same time, however, contemporary cowboy artists differ from their turn-of-the-century predecessors in that they have been influenced by the powerful conventions of Hollywood Westerns (fig. 16). CAA artists, for example, are much more likely than Russell or Remington to depict cowboys as gun-toting law- men or outlaws — a common motif in western films of the 1950s and 60s. Moreover, the breathtaking scenery of many western films has also turned up in the paintings of contemporary western artists such as Howard Terpning (b. 1927, no. 12) and Frank McCarthy (b. 1924, no. 11). The snow-covered mountains, tower- ing rock formations, and colorful canyons that set the scene in many of today’s western paintings would make John Ford himself proud. Likewise, the abundant use of color and photo-realist techniques by many of these artists is striking. In their works, the Technicolor of the celluloid West has been transferred to the painter’s canvas, with the film-like realism contributing to the artists’ quest for authenticity. Western sculptor Harry Jackson (b. 1924) acknowledged the influence of I lollywood more directly. His 1980 bronze, The Marshall, depicted John Wayne galloping on a horse in his movie role of Rooster Cogburn (True Grit , 1969). The piece was so successful that Jackson ultimately created three different versions. 40 Following the upswing in the western economy, the cowboy art market boomed in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Beginning in 1974, the OPEC oil embargo precipitated a sharp escalation in oil prices that set off a full-scale oil and energy boom in many western states. The wealthy ranchers and oilmen who were the traditional collectors of cowboy art now bought up whatever works were available, setting off a similar boom in the western art market. The popular frenzy for western art produced some unusual events. In 1979, for instance, a group of western artists gathered on a mountainside near Helena, Montana, where — at the firing of a pistol — they began a thirty-minute “quick draw” as six hundred anxious buyers looked on. When it ended, the pieces were auctioned off for as much as S2000. In energy boomtowns like Houston, Dallas, Denver, and Phoenix, CEOs of local corpo- rations, banks, and real estate development companies joined the fray, acquiring western art for their offices and homes. In these rapidly developing Sunbelt metropolises, the traditional themes of the new cowboy artists offered an instant connection to the region’s history and myths. By the early 1980s, the CAA annual exhibit (which had moved to the Phoenix Art Museum in 1973) was attracting record crowds and prices, and the value of works by many CAA artists was increasing by thirty to forty percent per year. Successful CAA artists, who had once traveled to the sales in their RVs and camped in the parking lot, now arrived in Cadillacs and Mercedes. Frequently described as “stampedes,” the CAA art sales were also gala events featuring prime rib din- ners, country-western music, and Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater as master of ceremonies. In 1983, a group of Texas oil- men and ranchers provided a more permanent institutional base for the CAA with the founding of the Cowboy Artists of America Museum in Kerrville, Texas — an institution wholly dedicated to contemporary cowboy and western art. During this same period, a number of new journals dedicated exclusively to western art commenced publication. The new western art boom flourished amid a powerful con- servative political resurgence based in the South and West. Dealers in CAA art, in fact, reported that most of their buyers were male entrepreneurs from the Southwest, who were usually Republicans. According to then National Cowboy Hall of Fame Director Dean Krakel, these men appreciated western art because “the cowboy and cowman represent, to most of us, the rugged individualism that made this country great.” Many observers agreed, emphasizing the patriotic quality of cowboy art in which pride in the frontier past translated into pride in the country as a whole. Others emphasized the strong work ethic represented in western art: “The traditional hardworking cowboy reminds us to earn our own keep,” one enthusiast explained. Moreover, some collectors identified with western artists, many of whom were self-taught and dismissive of the abstract styles that dominated the eastern art world. “Cowboy art is like an underground art movement,” said Art News writer Sheldon Reich, “it’s a separate but flourishing cultural manifestation which has virtually nothing to do with the elite establishment of the east or west coasts.” 17 Like the Sagebrush Rebellion of the early 1980s (a movement demanding the return of federal lands to western states), the resurgent popularity of cowboy art reflected a growing western populist impulse based on a long- standing resentment of federal authority and eastern elites. Indeed, since the late nineteenth century, western populists had chafed under the economic tyranny of eastern-owned corpora- tions, banks, railroads, and their allies in the federal govern- ment. In the postwar era, the western populist impulse took a more conservative form, in which western leaders denounced the regulatory and tax burdens of a liberal federal government and the moral corruption of a cultural elite based on the east and west coasts. Cowboy art— with its validation of freedom, individualism, patriotism, masculinity, hard work, and anti-government pop- ulism-meshed well with the New Right political agenda that had come to dominate much of the West. Right-wing Republican Barry Goldwater was the most visible promoter of CAA art, but other western politicians were also well-known collectors. Some of them, like President Lyndon Johnson and Texas Governor John Connolly, were Democrats or independents, but it was conservative Republicans who were most eager to identify cowboy art with their brand of Americanism. When President Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, his western friends wasted no time sending him an assortment of art works to hang in the White House. Philip Anschutz, president of a Denver oil and gas development corporation, loaned many of these works, noting, “this type of art will project the image of the new administra- tion-renewed vigor and self-reliance.” 18 As a former actor in western films, Reagan embraced cowboy art that mirrored his own love for riding and ranch life back in California. His incorpo- ration of western art into the White House symbolized the grow- mg power ot the West in American politics and suggested that traditional western values were now America’s values. 1 listorians. however, were busv contesting such notions. The rise ot the New Western historv, which rejected Turner’s rosy \ tew ot the frontier, was stirring controversy in the late 1980s. \\ hile promoting democracy, individualism, and self-reliance tor some white pioneers, these historians argued, the frontier had also giv en rise to violent conquest, dispossession, and environ- mental destruction for others. When a group of New Western historians attempted to incorporate these alternate perspectives into an art exhibition at the Smithsonian in 1991, all hell broke loose. Western art aficionados were scandalized by the “politi- cally correct” accounts of western conquest and the exposure of western artistic motifs as self-serving myths. Demanding that historians "leave our mvths alone,” angry art patrons and western conservatives pressured Congress to revoke federal funding for the Smithsonian exhibition. 19 In the end, the run-in with the New Western historv onlv reinforced western art lovers’ commit- ment to traditional themes and images. Bv the early 1990s, Republicans had vacated the White House and the western energy boom was long over. But the cow- bov genre remained popular in the West, and the CAA continued to draw manv- enthusiasts. Following the energy market collapse that crippled much of the Southwest economically in the late 1980s, CAA artists found new' adherents among the Hollywood jet set and the growing population of wealthy vacationers who bought homes in resort towns like Aspen, Colorado and Jackson Hole. Wyoming. 20 The appeal of contemporary cowboy art has thus broadened, but unlike the work of the turn-of-the-century artists, it remains a largely regional phenomenon. The resiliency of the cowboy icon, however, is most evident in the wavs it has crossed over to new interpreters and new audi- ences. Viewing the subject from a more humorous postmodern perspective, Alexis Smith (b. 1949) uses cowgirl images in Cinderella Story (no. 23) to comment on gender stereotypes and consumer culture. Alternately, Chicano artists like Frank Romero (b- 1941) and Robert Buitron (b. 1953) have reclaimed the image of the vaquero. Romero uses elements of Mexican arte folklorico to create a more complex figure in The Vaquero (no. 29). In Leccidn 34 (no. 28) and Missing Legends of the West (no. 27), Buitron emphasizes both the cultural hybridity of the western cowboy and the reconstruction of that culture in a modern urban world, hike Buitron, Native American artist Peter Jemison (b. 1945) remembers watching Westerns as a child but never seeing people like himself portrayed in these sagas. Influenced by the New Western history, Jemison uses his paper bag series to depict the previously invisible cowboys, including the African American range riders ( Black Cowboy , no. 26). In a different vein, Sidonie Caron (b. 1932) plays with the notion of western authenticity by separating discreet details of cowboy work from their larger mythical context, thus highlighting the importance of cowboy labor and craft {Brand X and Gettinga Grip , nos. 24 and 25). As these works suggest, the cowboy icon continues to have an irresistible visual power. In the past, cowboy artists have used a cloak of realism and authenticity to validate western myths about manly courage, Anglo-Saxon superiority, freedom, inde- pendence, patriotism, and hard work. But despite their attempts to control the image to serve particular ideological ends, the cow- boy (and cowgirl) will continue to be appropriated by many different artists for a wide variety of aesthetic and ideological purposes. More than a century later, the cowboy and the West continue to fascinate us as much as they did in the days of Turner, Russell, and Remington. 1 Richard White, “Animals and Enterprise,” in Clyde Milner, et al., editors, The Oxford History of the American West (New Yorkand Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 266-67. 2 Theodore Roosevelt, Ranch Life and Hunting Trail [1888} (New York: Winchester Press, rep. 1969); Owen Wister, The Virginian (New York: McMillan, 1904); Brian W. Dippie, West Fever (Seattle: Autry Museum of Western Heritage and University of Washington Press, 1998), 44. 3 Dippie, West Fever , 24-26; Peter H. Hassrick, Remington, Russell and the Language of Western Art (Washington, DC: Trustee for Museum Exhibitions, 2000), 129-31. 4 Hassrick, Remington, Russell , 21-2, 30-34, 85. 5 Brian W. Dippie, “The Visual West,” in The Oxford History of the American West , 690; Hassrick, Russell, Remington , 135; Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American I listory,” Proceedings of the Forty First Annual Meeting of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin (Madison, WI: 1894), 79-112. 6 Richard White, “Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill,” in James R. Grossman, editor, The Frontier in American Culture (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), 11-13; Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation (New York: Atheneum, 1992), 191-2; Alex Nemerov, “Doing the Old America: the Image of the American West, 1880-1920,” in William H. Truettner, editor, The West as America (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1991), 297-303; Dippie, West Fever, 32. 42 7 White, “Animals and Enterprise,” 261-2; David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988), 79-82, 90-92; David Lopez, “Cowboy Strikes and Unions,” Labor History 18 (1977): 325-40; Ronald Zeigler, “The Cowboy Strike ot 1883,” in Paul Carlson, editor, The Cowboy Way (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2000), 77-93; Kenneth Porter, “Negro Labor in the Western Cattle Industry,” Labor History 10 (Summer 1969), 346-74; Sarah Massey, editor, Black Cowboys of Texas (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2000). For information on Hispanic and Native American cowboys, see Jorge Iber, “Vaqueros in the Western Cattle Industry,” and Thomas Britten, “Indian Cowboys of the Northern Plains,” both in Carlson, The Cowboy Way , 21-32, 45-62. 8 Dippie, West Fever , 40; Hassrick, Remington, Russell, 131-33. 9 Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of the West, 4 vols. (New York: G. Putnam and Sons, 1889-96); Dippie, West Fever, 67, 72; Nemerov, “Doing the ‘Old America’,” 301; White, “Turner and Buffalo Bill,” 50-51. 10 Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation-, Dippie, “The Visual West,” 691; West Fever, 51; Jane Tompkins, West of Everything (New York: Oxford University Press, I99 2 )- 11 Hassrick, Remington, Russell, 92, 101, 156; Corlann Gee Bush, “The Way We Weren't: Images of Women and Men in Cowboy Art,” in Susan Armitage and Elizabeth Jameson, editors, The Women's West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 19-33; Glenda Riley, “Annie Oakley: Creating the Cowgirl,” Montana 45 (Summer 1995): 32-47. 12 Hassrick, Remington, Russell, 43-47, 107-110, 119-22. 13 Hassrick, Remington, Russell, 140; Arlington Gallery, “Biography for Edward Borein,” www.askART.com/biography.asp. 14 Anne M. Butler, “Selling the Popular Myth,” in The Oxford History of the American West, 790-91; Bill Malone, Country Music USA (Austin: University ofTexas Press, 1985), 142-44; John Cawelti, The Six-Gun Mystique (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Press, 1999), 96, 98. 15 “The Bull Market in Western Art,” Business Week, June 13, 1970, 93; Deborah Trustman, “Cowboys and Indians,” Atlantic Monthly, August 1979, 95-6. See also, web sites for Buffalo Bill Historical Center (www.bbhc.org/news/BBHChistory_oi.cfm), the Gilcrease Museum (www.gilcrease.org/4hist0ry.html), the Amon Carter Museum (www.carter- museum.org/amon_g_carter_bio.html), and Chester Reynolds (www.into- tran.com/ChesterReynoldsi.htm). 16 Joe Beeler, “The Cowboy Artists of America,” American Artist, April 1970, 67-74; Bob Heiberg, “The Cowboy Artists of America,” Southwestern Art 5 (1976-77), 47-9. 17 Sheldon Reich, “A Genuine Longing for an Older, Simpler Time,” Art News, December 1974, 32. 18 “The Reagans Look West,” Art News, Summer 1981, 11; Jerry E. Patterson, “The Western Art Rush,” Art News, December 1974, 30. 19 Mary Panzer, “Panning 'The West as America’: or, Why One Exhibition Did Not Strike Gold,” Radical History Review, 52 (1992), 105-113; Michael Kimmelman, “Old West, New Twist at the Smithsonian,” New York Times, May 26, 1991, sec. 2, 1; Martin F. Nolan, “Shootout at the PC Corral,” Boston Globe, June 16, 1991, A 35; Eric Foner and Jon Wiener, “Whose West?” Nation, July 29/August 5, 1991, 141, 180-66. 20 Ollie Reed, Jr., “Cowboy Art,” Albuquerque Tribune, April 18, 1997, B3. 43 ART AND AUTHENTICITY: AMERICAN INDIAN CREATIVITY AND IDENTITY Eva Marie Garroutte “He is of Maidu , Portuguese, and Hawaiian descent. ” (Harry Fonseca) *s» “[She is] a painter of Salish, French, Cree, and Shoshone heritage. ” ( Jaune Juick-to-See Smith) fsj “He grew up a stone's throw from the Cattaraugus reservation. ” (Peter Jemison) “[He] was raised in Phoenix, Arizona, where his parents were active in the urban intertribal community. He spent summers with his father's relatives on the Hopi reservation, where he learned Hopi traditions and ceremonies. ” ( Dan Lomahaftewa) “[He] calls himself an American artist who paints Indians, not an Indian artist.... He does not attempt to be authentic. "(John Nieto) “My art, my life experience, my tribal ties are totally enmeshed. ” (Jaune fuick-to-See Smith) rsi ‘“For me, who has never been in a reservation situation, it would be fool- ish to try to do tribal art. ...I do some traditional things, but it wasn t passed on to me. ” (Rick Bartow) L IKE OTHER PROFESSIONAL ARTISANS, American Indian artists are frequently the subjects of short bio- graphies and interviews that accompany the work they display. The foregoing statements are excerpted from gallery brochures, art magazines, internet sites, and exhibition catalogues . 1 The acknowledged purpose of such writings is to describe an individual, to locate his or her creative production in the context of a life history for the benefit of viewers and buyers. But these statements also do more, pointing beyond the individual to the environment in which he moves. They reveal the larger social con- text in which racial-ethnic identities are never simply asserted, but negotiated. American Indian artists (and American Indian people in general) are not free simply to claim the racial-ethnic identity that they, or even their tribal communities, feel characterizes them best. Rather, they must submit their claim to the judgment of vari- ous audiences that will evaluate its legitimacy. Because artist statements are part of those negotiations, they must be composed with exacting precision. These state- ments painstakingly lay out multiple ancestries and meticulously specify relationship to a reservation (even, as in the Jemison description, offering a measure of physical distance separating the youthful artist from that legitimizing location). They also 45 explicate rhe nature and specific provenance of any cultural know ledge that is said to underlie the work, establishing how the artists received it and from whom. The negotiated character of Indian identitv claims also accounts for the diffidence with which artists describe tribal identity. Although all the artists identify Native ancestry, a number qualify or even reject the title of “Indian artist." It is neither right nor wrong that an audience might want to know the kind of details that regularly appear in Native artists' biographies, or that artists and their agents might want to share such facts. But such examples lead us to consider the American racial consciousness as it applies to American Indians, l'hev direct us to explore the ways in which the process of identi- fication in this American racial-ethnic group is unique. Defining Indians I his essav will explore two of the many formal and informal definitions that circumscribe claims to Indian identity. It will also examine the ways in which the artists move from being passive subjects of such definitions to become active participants in the conversation about Indian-ness, using their work to challenge externally imposed definitions of racial-ethnic authenticity Legal Definitions of Identity Definitions grounded in law’ have a considerable impact on Indian people. The federal government uses a wide array of distinct legal definitions to distinguish Indians from non-Indians. Such laws recognize that American Indians are much more than a racial minority: they are also a category of citizens with very particular rights and responsibilities in relation to the federal government. In historic negotiations, the federal government agreed to com- pensate tribes for the large amounts of lands and other resources that they surrendered, often by force. 2 This compensation includes certain benefits in the form of education, health care, and hunting and fishing rights. Legal definitions ensure that modern Indian people receive their inherited rights and prevent non Indians from improperly gaining access to them. A legal definition with particular consequences for American Indian artists is contained in the Indian Arts and Crafts Act of i 990. It specifies that only those individuals who are citizens of a state or federally-recognized tribe may market their work as “Indian-produced,” and (unlike a related law passed in 193s) it attaches significant fines and prison sentences to its violation. Peter Jemison (b. 1943) suggests one of the reasons that this legis- lation w’as created in his sculpture Made in Japan (no. 35). Many buyers consider artwork more valuable if it is created by an Indian person. Consequently, a great deal of “Indian art” has been produced— often in Asian countries, but also domesti- cally— and falsely labeled. In 1985, the Commerce Department estimated that specious “Indian art” imported from foreign countries created $40-80 million in lost income for genuine Indian artists every year, or between ten- and twenty-percent of annual Indian art sales. 3 By regulating people’s right to identify themselves as Indian in connection with their sale of artwork, the Indian Arts and Crafts Act thus protects many Native artists from unfair compe- tition. At the same time, like other legal definitions, it seriously disadvantages many genuinely I ndian people who are unable to satisfy the definition of “Indian” contained in the Act. There are many sound, historical reasons why some people of exclusive or partial Indian ancestry are not citizens of govern- mentally recognized tribes. The situation is so complex that its discussion is well beyond the scope of this essay. 4 1 lowever, one rea- son that some Indian people do not possess tribal citizenship is that a central criterion of enrollment in the majority of American Indian tribes is “blood quantum,” or degree of Indian ancestry. Given that Indian people have the highest rate of intermar- riage of any American racial group, it is not surprising that some mixed-race Indian people cannot meet the minimum blood quantum required by their tribe for citizenship. 5 But an individ- ual with an objectively high blood quantum may also have difficulty establishing Indian identity because of the way in which blood quantum is reckoned. Initial calculation of blood quantum usually begins with a “base roll,” a census listing of tribal membership and degree of ancestry (usually self-reported) in some particular year. (Most were established in the late nineteenth or early twentieth cen- turies). These base rolls allow one to calculate that the offspring of, say, a full-blood Navajo mother and a white father is one-half Navajo. If that half Navajo child in turn produces progeny with a I Iopi person of one-quarter blood degree, those progeny will be judged to be one-quarter Navajo and one-eighth I Iopi. As even this rather simple example shows, such calculations can, in time, become infinitesimally precise. A person’s ancestry may be parsed into so many thirty-seconds, sixty-fourths, one- hundred-twenty-eighths, and so on. The final figure is authenti- cated by a Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood or CDIB, a document issued by the United States government. While indi- vidual tribes set their own criteria for citizenship, most rely on blood quantum, setting a minimum requirement that can vary from as high as one half in some tribes to as low as one thirty- second in others. 6 In all cases even a small deviation in the calculation may make a modern descendant unable to meet his tribe’s citizenship standard. A person’s status can be affected by ancestors who eluded federal census takers, who spoke English poorly, who understated or underestimated their actual tribal blood degree, who refused to acknowledge a child’s paternity, or who were orphaned and consequently had incomplete knowledge of a par- ent’s ancestry. It can also be substantially reduced by a forebear with mixed American Indian and African American ancestry, since such people were often treated quite differently by census takers than people of exclusively Indian, or of mixed American Indian and white ancestry. 7 Joe Cantrell (b. 1945) addresses the inherent unreliability of blood quantum records in his humorously imagined Authentic Indian ID Card (no. 36), a computer-generated variant of the fed- eral government’s CDIB. Cantrell’s card explicitly purports to certify what the real document implicitly assumes: that a person’s ancestry really can be traced and recorded with complete accu- racy over many generations. It assigns a blood quantum based on the sardonic promise that “every sexual encounter of all this per- son’s ancestors since 1492 has been recorded and the heritage of all these folks was absolutely known.” Cantrell’s piece also raises the significant issue of the gov- ernment’s shifting definitions of Indian-ness. The Indian Arts and Crafts Act is hardly the only piece of legislation to specify a particular definition of Native identity. The American govern- ment has crafted many distinct legal definitions, and still uses a range of definitions for different purposes: a 1978 congressional survey counted thirty-three definitions then in use. Some specify one or another minimum blood quantum requirement; some specify other criteria altogether. These variant definitions often serve particular governmental interests. For instance, when land cessions required signatures from a certain percentage of tribal members, nineteenth-century gov- ernment agents found that they were more likely to secure such cooperation from mixed-bloods than full-bloods. They crafted lenient definitions of Indian identity, following a logic expressed by President Benjamin I Iarrison’s Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Thomas Jefferson Morgan, in 1892: “To decide at this time that. ..mixed bloods arc not Indian. ..would unsettle or endanger the titles to much of the lands that have been relin- quished by Indian tribes and patented to citizens of the United States.” 9 Eater, however, when the question of legitimate land ownership was more settled, the government formulated more restrictive definitions. It often insisted on a standard of one- quarter, or even one-half, blood quantum before it would legally define individuals as Indians. 10 The government’s self-serving vacillations on the subject of American Indian identity continued in the twentieth century. For instance, in the late 1960s, the Department ofjustice went to considerable lengths to exclude Alaska Native communities from the benefits of the 1946 Indian Claims Commission Act, a bill which created a special tribunal to hear tribal claims against the federal government for violations of treaties and agreements. The attempt ignored a long series of court decisions holding that any of the aboriginal peoples of the Americas, regardless of nomenclature, should be included under legislation written to apply to American Indians. Cantrell’s imaginary identity card, which requires the holder to specify, whether or not his tribe “has land worth taking,” suggests that the American government’s motives for drawing legal boundaries are not always disinterested. In short, Indian-ness is hardly an unproblematic identity— one that individuals simply choose to claim — but one that must be carefully negotiated. But whether or not they successfully endure the rigors of formal, legal identity definitions, today’s American Indian artists are often subject to still other, informal standards of authenticity. Cultural Definitions of Indians Native artists, like American Indian people, generally are subject to identity definitions based on their cultural experience. Rather than grounding identity in legal fictions, cultural definitions hold out the promise of something observable and enduring. At first consideration, they appear to locate claims to identity in the dis- tinctive lifeways and thoughtways that define “peoplehood.” It is clear that historic Indian groups used cultural practices to distin- 47 guish their own from members of other groups, and most Indian people today continue to consider culture an important determi- nant of identity. At the same time, even such an apparently sensi- ble standard presents some puzzles and problems. 1 or one thing, the dominant society’s cultural definitions of Indian ncs> often feature extremely odd requirements. In partic- ular. non Indians usually demand that “authentic” Indians be anachronisms. The mainstream image of Indians is frozen in a y n idb imagined past memorialized in the paintings of Western Realists such as Karl Bodmer (1809-1893, nos. 3 and 4) or Frank McCarthy (b. 1924. no. 1 1). In this regard, American expectations about Indians are quite different from their expectations about other racial groups. By yvav of illustrating this point, anthropologist Jack Forbes compares common assumptions about individuals of Indian ancestry yvith common assumptions about individuals of African ancestry. As he yvrites, “Africans always remain African (or black) even yvhen they speak Spanish or English and serve as cabinet secretaries in the United States government or as trumpet plavers in a Cuban salsa group...” Indians, on the other hand, "must remain {culturally] unchanged in order to be considered Indian." This presumption prevails in much popular, and even scholarly, opinion. Forbes continues, “I am reminded of a Dutch book on ‘The Last Indians’ featuring pictures only of South American people still living a wav of life which is stereotvpically ‘Indian.’” By con- trast, “Blacks.. .are not seen only as traditional villagers in Africa. No one would dare to write a book on ‘The Last Blacks,’ with pic- tures of ‘tribesman’ in ceremonial costumes. So the category of "black" has a different quality than has that of ‘Indian’...” 11 The prevalent and powerful contemporary stereotypes of Indian cultural authenticity declare that an Indian who is not an historical relic is no Indian at all. Rick Bartow (b. 1946) gently tweaks these stereotypes by giving his distinguished elder not only a feather headdress but also a pair of dapper, wire-rimmed spectacles (no. 34). Are viewers surprised at this combination of the svmbol of the exotic warrior with the hallmark of the gentle intellectual? Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (b. 1940) likewise takes up images of Indians that pervade American racial consciousness, but she is less interested in understatement. She makes an all-out assault on cultural stereotypes in her War Shirt (no. 38), which is decorated with contemporary' images of Indians — from sports mascots to advertising icons— depicted as stoic chiefs, noble warriors, bloodthirsty savages, uncivilized buffoons. She reminds us that such depictions of Indians as primitive and other are etched deep into American popular culture, so much a part of our daily experience that we literally fail to see them. Would educated Americans tolerate similarly crude caricatures of other racial- ethnic groups? The work invites us to question to what extent familiar images continue to influence our thinking. Externally-imposed cultural standards of American Indian identity can be treacherous even when they do not characterize Indian people in the vulgar shorthand of Chief Wahoo and his many kindred. Just as legal definitions can exclude legitimately Indian people from recognition as such, cultural definitions also sometimes create debatable boundaries around Indian-ness. Many legitimately Indian people do not have access to the life experiences that others imagine for them. They may not know their language, their traditions, or even their tribe (as in the case of many infants who were adopted by non-Indians before the passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 made this much more difficult). It is not that contemporary Indian peoples do not maintain thriving, intact cultures: somehow, with a persistence and resilience that almost defy the imagination, they do. The Flopis, for instance, still perform the ceremony for which John Nieto’s Snake Dance is titled (no. 32). The Cherokees still tell their own, powerfully perspectival histories, as Joe Cantrell’s Road Sign on the Trail of Tears reminds us (no. 37). But not all Indian people remain connected to distinctive ceremonies or socially-located stories. The reasons are painfully evident. Agents of the American government devoted many years and millions of dollars to separate Indian people from their cultures through policies such as warfare, missionary work, forcible relocation, land allotment, boarding schools, and the criminalization of American Indian religious prac- tices. It would be very suqtrising if these efforts had not been widely effective in destroying language, spirituality, familial and communal relationships, geographic ties, and other elements of Native cultures. In fact, they have damaged Indian communities and cut many Indian people adrift from their heritage. The sad truth is that many Indian people have paid, and continue to pay, the economic, social, familial, personal, and other consequences of an Indian ancestry, but have little “tradi- tional culture” left to compensate them for it. Hopi/Miwok poet Wendy Rose recounts her own experience of cultural loss. Rose says that she thinks of herself as an “Indian writer.” Yet she is well aware that her biography is unlikely to satisfy the requirements of a cultural definition of identity. She writes: It is not Indian to be left so alone, to be alienated, to be friendless, to be forced to live on the street like a rat, to be unacquainted with your cousins. It would certainly be better for my image as an Indian poet to manufacture something, and let you believe in my traditional, loving, spiritual childhood where every winter evening was spent immersed in storytelling and ceremony, where the actions of every day continually told me I was valued. In reality, Rose concludes, “[tjhere is nothing authentic about my past; I am sure that I would be a great disappointment to anthropologists.” 12 As the bitterness of this statement implies, cultural definitions can impose an additional burden of shame upon those who have already suffered a profound loss. Conclusion As Indian people, the artists in this exhibition are forced to negoti- ate formal and informal standards of identity that have no counter- parts in other American racial-ethnic groups. The distinctiveness of their situation is reflected in information about their work; their artists’ statements point to a clear awareness of their audience’s demanding expectations about racial authenticity. But these artists do not just respond to the pressures on them to make claims that will be judged legitimate by externally- generated criteria. While recognizing that legal and cultural definitions often make sense, these individuals use their art to challenge and subvert identity definitions imposed on them. Inviting us to consider the shortcomings of some of the most powerful standards of Indian-ness, they help us to see beyond the tidy categories into which we file people. It is a lesson of which Harry Fonseca’s St. Coyote might approve (no. 33). As the trickster figure who scampers in and out of a number of Indian tribes’ sacred stories, Coyote is as Indian as anyone gets. Yet in Fonseca’s rendering he appears as an urban renegade in leather and chains, looking distinctly unlike anyone who would fit either a legal or a cultural definition of Indian authenticity. But then again, why not? One of Coyote’s custom- ary jobs is to remind his audience that real life is never as orderly as the conceptual categories humans dream up. Reality always escapes the most concerted intellectual efforts to discipline it. Coyote always draws us back to the complexity, and the richness, at the core of all human experience, reminding us not to accept society’s answers too easily. Ubiquitous and indestructible, he reminds Indian people that survival is possible, even for those who do not fit neatly into the available categories. 1 The descriptions of the artists appear in the following sources: Margaret Archuleta, “Coyote: A Myth in the Making” (Fonseca exhibition brochure, National History Museum Foundation, 1986) “Artist Profile: Jaune Quick To- See Smith” (Washington, DC: National Museum of Women in the Arts, n.d.) available online at http://www.nmwa.org/legacy/bios/bjqsmith.htm; Michele Alaimo, “Peter Jemison: Native American Historian,” available online at http://www.rit.edu/-paradigm/stories/seneca.htm; Catalogue entry for Dan Lomahaftewa’s Kiva Dreams in the current volume; “John Nieto: A New West Artist,” ArtLife Arizona (Tucson: The Stanbery Corporation, 1999-2000). Available online at http://www.artlifearizona.com/articles/nieto.html; Margaret Dubin, “Talking Yurok: Painter/Sculptor Rick Bartow,” Indian Artist 36 (winter 1999). 2 Wilcomb E. Washburn, Red Man's Land/White Man's Law: A Study of the Past and Present Status of the American Indian (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971). 3 H.R. 101-400, 101st Cong., 1st Sess., Congressional Record , 1990, 4-3. 4 See further Eva Garroutte, Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America (Berkeley: University of California, 2003) and Gail K. Sheffield, The Arbitrary Indian: The Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press) 1997. 5 C. Matthew Snipp, American Indians: The First of This Land , (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1989) 157. 6 Russell Thornton, “Tribal Membership Requirements and the Demography of ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Native Americans,” Population Research and Policy Review 16 (1997): 33-42. 7 Circe Sturm, Blood Politics: Race, Culture and Identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002) Kent Carter, The Dawes Commission and the Allotment of the Five Civilized Tribes, 1893-1914 (Orem, Utah: Ancestrycom, 1999). 8 Sharon O’Brien, “Tribes and Indians: With Whom Does the United States Maintain a Relationship?” Notre Dame Law Review 66 (1991) 1481. 9 Thomas J. Morgan, Annual Report (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1892) 36. 10 Washburn, 167. 11 Jack D. Forbes, “The Manipulation of Race, Caste, and Identity: Classifying AtroAmericans, Native Americans and Red-Black People,” Journal of Ethnic Studies 17, no. 4 (1990): 23-24. 12 Wendy Rose, “Neon Scars”, in Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat, editors, / Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1987) 260-61. 49 CONTRIBUTORS TO THE CATALOGUE HEATHER FRYER is a native Oregonian who considers Portland her home. Currently, she is adjunct assistant professor of history in the Department of History at Boston College, where she teaches modern European history, American Civilization, and the history of the American West. Articles from her dissertation on the impact of federally run communities on the West have been published in the Journal of the West and the University of Nevada’s Halcyon Series in Western History. She served as curatorial assistant to the McMullen Museum of Art from 1996 to 1999, where she co-curated an exhibition of Edward Curtis photographs in 1998. KATE BONANSINGA is Director of University Galleries at the University ofTexas at El Paso. She has lived in the American West since 1991, the same year that she earned a Master of Arts in art history from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has written extensively on contemporary art. MARILYNN S. JOHNSON is associate professor of history at Boston College where she teaches U.S. and western history. She is the author of The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the Eastbay in World War II (University of California Press, 1994). Though not a cowgirl, she led a nomadic academic life in California, Oregon, Washington, Texas, and Wyoming before landing in Boston. EVA M. GARROUTTE is a tribally-enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Having received her PhD from Princeton University in 1993, she is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Boston College. Her book, Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America (University of California Press, 2003), explores ways that modern American Indian racial-ethnic identity is negotiated, modified, challenged, and even revoked; it then develops the emerging intellectual perspective of “Radical Indigenism.” Professor Garroutte also works in the field of medical sociology, attempting to understand and improve the health ol American Indians. 51 CATALOGUE ENTRIES WESTERN REALISTS N AMERICAN STYLE that began in the nineteenth cen- tury, Western Realism sought to capture the grandeur of the West in a manner that both documented and aug- mented the unfamiliar, palatial western landscape and its people. The forerunners ot this movement were Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Remington, and Karl Bodmer. In representing the West, the artists used many approaches, including Realism, Romanticism, and ethnographic documentary portraiture. The product of a journey to explore American Indians, Bodmer’s water- colors and sketches were thought to be ethnographically accurate depictions of Native Americans in the Great Plains. Although highly detailed and skillfully drawn, Bodmer’s drawings demon- strate the pervasive nineteenth-century fascination with the exotic and the need to capture and record the unfamiliar. In concert with the United States government’s promotion of Manifest Destiny, Bierstadt created commissioned images that would inspire west- ward movement. Bierstadt ’s paintings functioned in part as propa- ganda, which explains the exaggerated vistas, heightened emotion, and unlikely scenarios. These forefathers of American Art created dazzling depictions of the western plains, inciting enthusiasm for the west coast and an enduring allure for its cowboys and Indians. The Twentieth Century Revival The later generation of western American artists working in the first half of the twentieth century was seen as a revivalist movement promoting realistic American genre painting. In the midst of the tumultuous 1960s, a growing number of artists romanticized the West by portraying it as the mythic place it was in the nineteenth century. In 1965, five western artists committed to revitalizing western culture and glorify- ing the cowboy within the visual arts formed the Cowboy Artists of America (CAA). To this day, Cowboy Artists like John Clymer, Frank McCarthy, and Howard Terpning revere the first generation of western artists, especially Bierstadt and Remington, and strive to continue their tradition. They are highly committed to authenticity in representation and believe that historical reconstruction is a successful vehicle for conveying the cowboy heritage. Their work consists of cow- boy and Indian imagery of the “Wild West.” While their ten- dency toward idealization can be seen as a glossing over of the current state of affairs of Native people and modern cowboys, the art of CAA members aims to be true to nature, ethno- graphically accurate, and patriotic. 55 No. i Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902) Mountain Sunrise , 1877 Oil on canvas, 12 x 18 in. Collection of Mr and Mrs. Alec 1 1 . Petro No. i Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902) Mountain Sunrise , 1877 Oil on canvas, 12 x 18 in. Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Alec 1 1 . Petro While Bierstadt is considered one of America’s foremost land- scape painters, his style comes from his training at the Dusseldorf School, where history painting and landscape were the central focus. Less concerned with making literal portrayals of their subjects, Bierstadt and his contemporaries strove to evoke awe and inspiration. Here, Bierstadt uses classic Dusseldorf techniques— grand scale, craggy rocks, sensational skies of bold, contrasting colors, and attention to the minute detail in stones, plants, and wildlife — to convey to American viewers the greatness of their expanding nation. Because Bierstadt often altered the appearance of specific landscapes, one cannot be certain of the location, though the present work is very likely to be either Yosemite or Yellowstone. Both captured Americans’ imaginations in the 1870s, as new railroad lines drew tourists to these majestic locales, which became America’s most popular national parks. No. 2 Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902) The Buffalo Trail , c. 1867 Oil on canvas, 31.8 x 48 in. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Gift of Martha C. Karolik for the M. and M. Karolik Collection of American Paintings 1813-1865, 1947 47.1268 Bierstadt scholars speculate that this scene of an infinite trail of buffalo was painted in the British landscape tradition to resemble an English park: sky, trees, and lake form a circle, reflecting the stylistic balance of European Neoclassicism. In addition, Bierstadt’s characteristic rich glow emanating from an unidentified source recalls the British painter J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851). By rendering an open, green terrain, Bierstadt made the West seem less alien to European audiences. Bierstadt’s grand scale, sharp tonal contrasts, and attention to detail are con- sistent with the Dusseldorf style, as applied in Mountain Sunset (no. 1). Even without the dramatic peaks, cliffs, and waterfalls, Bierstadt conveys the grandeur and infinite abundance of the West that characterize his frontier paintings. No. 3 Karl Bodmer (1809-1893) Tableau #46: Chief of the Blood Indians, Ward '.hie f of the Piekann Indians, Koutani Indian, n.d. Aquatint on paper, 34.25 x 28.75 in. Collection of John J. McMullen, Colorado Karl Bodmer left his native Switzerland at age twenty-four to accompany German Prince Maximilian on an ethnographic study of American Indians. Bodmer’s work in the Great Plains yielded hundreds of watercolor portraits of Indians and images of their ceremonial practices. I Ie was highly critical of the ten- dency by other artists to romanticize Indian life. Ethnographers and curators praised his work, believing that he produced purely objective documents of Indian customs. After completing his travels with Prince Maximilian, Bodmer made group portraits of notable Indian leaders. Each tableau gives the viewer a sense of the diversity in tribal dress. In this print, each of the three chiefs wears plain clothing, unlike the ceremonial garb of Mato-Tope (no. 4). Stomick- Sosack, chief of the Blood Blackfeet (left), was in a hurry when Bodmer painted his portrait, so it lacks the elaborate detail characteristic of Bodmer’s work. The portrait shows a peace medal which Maximilian claimed had an image ofThomas Jefferson, suggesting it might have been given to Stomick- Sosack or one of his relatives by members of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Bodmer, however, described the medal as having the Native symbols of clasped hands, a tomahawk, and peace pipe. The Piegan Blackfeet Chief Spotted Elk (middle) was known for his skill in warfare against the Salish tribes, as well as his aggressiveness and arrogance, which offended Anglos and Indians alike. Here, however, Spotted Elk is in mourning for his nephew, who was recently killed by the Blood Blackfeet tribe. I Iis plain robe and shedding of ornamentation is an accurate depiction of Piegan mourning costume. I lomach Ksachkum, Chief of the Kootenai/Piekann (right, spelled by Bodmer as Koutani), is adorned here with a buckskin shirt and buffalo robe. He is ornamented only with a necklace of braided sweetgrass, which is indigenous to the area and had medicinal and ceremonial functions. 57 No. 2 Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902) The Buffalo Trail , c. 1867 Oil on canvas, 31.8 x 48 in. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Gi ft of Martha C. Karolik for the M. and M. Karolik Collection of American Paintings 1815-1865, 1947 47.1268 5 * No. 3 Karl Bodmer (1809-1893) Tableau #46: Chief of the Blood Indians, War-Chief of the Piekann Indians, Koutani Indian , n.d. Aquatint on paper, 34.25 x 28.75 in. Collection ofjohn J. McMullen, Colorado 59 No. 4 Karl Bodmer (1809-1893) Mato-Tope, c. 1843 Aquatint and engraving on paper, 12 x 8.25 in. Collection ofjohnj. McMullen, Colorado 60 No. 4 Karl Bodmer (1809-1893) Mato-Tope, c. 1843 Aquatint and engraving on paper, 12 x 8.23 in. Collection ofjohn J. McMullen, Colorado Mato-Tope (or Four Bears) was a Mandan chief revered for his success in warfare. Until the mid nineteenth century, the Mantlan lived near the mouth of the Knife River in the Dakotas. Bodmer and Maximilian spent the fall of 1833 and the winter of 1834 studying the tribe. The Mandan, who reportedly had light skin, blue eyes, and silver hair, fascinated European observers. Some Europeans concluded that the Mandan were long lost descen- dants of the Welsh. Modern scholars dismiss this theory, noting that prematurely graying hair was prevalent among other Plains Indian groups; rather they attribute the Mandans' unusual skin tone and eye color to intermarriage with non-Indians. Bodmer painted several portraits of Mato-Tope, who will- ingly donned his elaborate garments, headdresses, and weapons for each sitting because he, too, was a prolific painter of Indian life. Instead ofwatercolor portraits, Mato-Tope recorded Mandan battle scenes on buffalo hides and as body art. Here, Mato-Tope displays his history as a warrior. His hair is adorned with a wooden knife, which is a replica of one he took from a Cheyenne warrior he defeated in battle. Each split turkey feather represents an arrow injury, and each of the six colored sticks signifies a gunshot wound. Other feathers denote victories in warfare and membership in elite warrior societies. The painted yellow stripes on Mato-Tope’s arm stand for his major battles and the handprint on his left breast indicates that he took captives. Mato-Tope’s rich life as a warrior, tribal leader, artist, and histo- rian ended three years after Bodmer painted this portrait. He was one of dozens of Mandan who died of smallpox transmitted by white settlers. No. 3 Frederic Remington (1861-1909) Saddling I'resh I lorses, c. 1890 Pen and ink on paper, 31 x 26 in. Collection ofjohn J. McMullen, Colorado Of all the early Western Realists, Frederic Remington most influenced America’s view of the West. I Ie became interested in western scenes while working as an illustrator for the national magazines Harper’s Weekly, The Century Illustrated , and Scribner’s Magazine. Readers were eager to see what the West and its people were like. In order to meet this demand, Remington made fre- quent, extended tours of the West, where he observed cavalry officers, cowboys, and Indians. Increasingly, Remington infused his work with action and drama to honor the initiative of the cowboys he met. In this uncharacteristically static scene, cowboys prepare for action. Viewers can easily picture what will come next. The popular pictorial works of Remington and his followers (including Charles Russell and 1 1 . W. I lansen, no. 8) are vivid images of cowboys roping cattle or chasing Indians atop galloping horses. No. 6 Frederic Remington (1861-1909) The Bronco Buster, 1895 Bronze, 23 in. Collection of John J. McMullen, Colorado Remington initially saw little future in making sculpture (which he disparagingly called “muds”), and only began working in three- dimensional media late in his career. As his first major sculpted work, The Bronco Buster was, a yearlong experiment in the dra- matic possibilities of three-dimensional composition. Working from meticulous drawings of cowboys and horses in action, Remington pushed the boundaries of bronze-casting techniques to heighten the tension in this image of a man taming a wild horse. The asymmetrical poses of the horse and rider challenge the laws of gravity; in reality, this cowboy’s ride would end in a spill. Remington believed, however, that the men who tamed the West had superhuman gifts of initiative, courage, and resilience. Here, he depicts the heroic western character. 61 No. 5 Frederic Remington (1861-1909) Saddling Fresh Ilorses , c. 1890 Pen and ink on paper, 31 x 26 in. Collection ofjohnj. McMullen, Colorado 62 ■ . No. 6 Frederic Remington (1861-1909) The Bronco Buster, 1895 Bronze, 23 in. Collection ofjohn J. McMullen, Colorado 63 No. - Will 1.1m Robinson Leigh (1866-1955) I he Gambler: End of the P/ay, 1892 Oil on canvas, 58 x 50 in. Collection ofjohnj. McMullen, Colorado Know n bv his contemporaries as the “Sagebrush Rembrandt,” William Robinson Leigh was best known tor his magazine illustrations ot cowboys and Indians. The Gambler: End of the P/ay is tvpical ot Leigh's work, which usually features cowboys, Indians, or wild animals in a flurrv of action. Gambling embodies the western ideals ot taking chances and living by one’s own wits and. as seen here, can often end in violence and conflict. In an unusual interior scene, Leigh captures an outburst ot gunplay in a saloon. W ith a cow boy's agility the gambler shoots dow n his opponents, who presumably objected to a wily card play. Lacking the established courts and police forces of the East, residents of w estern mining and cattle towns occasionally resorted to gunfights tor conflict resolution. In both western literature and I lollyw ood cinema, the dramatic action of the shootout came to represent a ritualized defense of male honor. No. 8 I lerman W. I lansen (1854-1924) Cowboy Race (Going to Town), 1902 Oil on canvas, 36.75 x 30.5 in. Collection ofjohnj. McMullen, Colorado Building on Remington’s definitive images of the West, I lansen painted w estern scenes with subtle coloring and a strong narra- tive trajectory. I lis work shows his intimate knowledge of Arizona, where he spent summers sketching. I lansen was one of the first Western Realists to introduce a whimsical element to cowboy life. Paintings of cowboys at work often transform their subjects into mythic figures, solitary men testing their strength against the challenges of an unforgiving land. I Iere, in a race to town, cowboys playing together emphasize mischievous and boy- ish behavior, revealing the humanity of these heroic icons. No. 9 John Clymcr (1907-1989) Green River Rendezvous, n.d. Oil on canvas, 30 x 48 in. Collection ofjohnj. McMullen, Colorado Green River Rendezvous memorializes the annual gathering of the fur traders in the Green River Valley, Wyoming, a typical early nineteenth century event in the West. The first Rendezvous was organized in 1825 by a trapper, William Ashley, who brought efficiency to the fur trade’s network of lone mountain men fre- quenting remote trading posts. Ashley divided his expedition into small groups that would trap independently throughout the spring and then meet at I lenry’s Fork on the Green River in late summer. Much to Ashley’s surprise, the gathering drew free- trappers as well as Indians. In this image, Clymer depicts the meeting ot two worlds by the contrasting dwellings (teepees vs. huts) and by the large void that separates the two groups. Despite their physical separation in the painting, the Indians and white trappers and fur traders have joined together as a community for a brief period of time to partake in a celebration of their com- mon natural environment. Until the 1840s, the Rendezvous replaced trading company agents as the hub of frontier commercial activity. The meetings, lasting a full day, had a festive atmosphere, with food, drink, music, and cards. Anglo trappers and Indians informally traded manufactured goods for handmade artifacts. I No. 7 William Robinson Leigh (1866-1955) The Gambler: End of the Play , 1892 Oil on canvas, 38 x 50 in. Collection ofjohn J. McMullen, Colorado 65 No. 8 I lerman W. Hansen (1854-1924) Cowboy Race (Going to Town), 1902 Oil on canvas, 36.75 x 30.5 in. Collection ofjohn J. McMullen, Colorado 66 No. 9 John Clymer (1907-1989) Green River Rendezvous, n.d. Oil on canvas, 30 x 48 in. Collection ofjohn J. McMullen, Colorado . 67 No. io John Clymer (1907-1989) Crazy Horse , 1975 Oil on canvas, ;8 x 34.6 in. Collection ofjohn J. McMullen, Colorado 68 No. io John Clymer (1907-1989) Crazy Horse, 1975 Oil on canvas, 58 x 34.6 in. Collection ofjohn J. McMullen, Colorado Crazy Horse (1849-1877) was a young Lakota warrior who, at age thirteen, led his first war party. He fought under Oglala Chief Red Cloud against Anglo interlopers in present-day Wyoming, and played a vital role in the defeat ofWilliam J. Fetterman’s cavalry brigade at Fort Kearny in 1867. As suggested by Clymer’s elaborate depiction of him, Crazy Horse was a notorious war- rior. He is shown here in an impassioned state of belligerence, adorned in Native clothes and body paint reserved for warfare. Resisting the United States government’s attempt to remove the Lakota people from the gold-rich Black Hills to reserva- tions, Crazy Horse gathered 1,200 men from Cheyenne and Oglala villages to drive out U.S. forces. He eventually helped Sitting Bull defeat Custer’s Seventh Cavalry in the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876. Although the Lakota won at Little Bighorn, the U.S. cav- alry continued its attempts to drive the tribe off its homeland. They harassed Indian villagers and eventually starved the Lakota people by slaughtering entire buffalo herds. Crazy Horse went to war against General Nelson Miles in 1876-77, but the hungry Lakota were unable to mount a forceful resistance. The Lakota were moved to a reservation, which they were unable to leave without the U.S. government’s approval. When Crazy Horse attempted to take his ailing wife to her parents, the Army arrested him. When he struggled, the two arresting officers held his arms firmly behind his back, and a soldier fatally stabbed him with a bayonet. No. 11 Frank McCarthy (b. 1924) Forming the Hostile Circle , 1983 Oil on canvas, 34.3 x 35 in. Collection ofjohn J. McMullen, Colorado During his childhood on the east coast, Frank McCarthy was a great fan of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, I Iollywood Westerns, and the western-themed paintings of N.C. Wyeth. McCarthy developed his own Western Realist style during his studies at the Art Students’ League and went on to illustrate movie posters and the covers of novels. Like other Western Realists, McCarthy bases his work “in truth” and their settings “in reality,” while also striving to “redesign. ..the beauty and character of God’s creation in the West.” McCarthy employs mountain men, cavalry, cow- boys, and Indians in high-speed action scenes, as seen in Forming the Hostile Circle. His backdrop of mountains and plains evokes the Technicolor Westerns of the 1950s and 1960s, while his realis- tic technique highlights the actual topography of the western country. This painting captures the moment of heightened ten- sion before a clash between Anglo settlers and Indians. The contrast between the two sides is clearly delineated by the inclu- sion of a covered wagon in the background, which is recognized as the mode of transportation for white settlers. The suspense and threat created in the scene by the approaching Indians is intensified by the polarity in size between the predators and their prey. No. 12 Howard Terpning (b. 1927) War Cry to the Sun, 1980 Oil on canvas, 30 x 50 in. Collection ofjohn J. McMullen, Colorado One of Hollywood’s leading poster artists, Howard Terpning cre- ated images for such well-known films as Lawrence of Arabia, The Guns ofNavarrone, and the re-release of Gone With the Wind. In the mid-1970s, Terpning abandoned commercial graphics and moved to Arizona. His interactions with Indians in the area piqued his interest in Native history, leading him to paint scenes of Native life at the turn of the century. Terpning’s depictions of ceremonies and traditional life are the product of extensive archival research. This painting depicts a war recounting about their victory as they return home. The scalp locks in the fore- ground indicate success in battle. Terpning’s careful detail, bold color, majestic landscapes, dramatic action, and poignant facial expressions have garnered him the epithet “The Storyteller of the Native American People.” 69 No. ii Frank McCarthy (b. 1924) Forming the Hostile Circle , 1983 Oil on canvas, 34.3 x 35 in. Collection ofjohnj. McMullen, Colorado 70 No. 12 Howard Terpning (b. 1927) War Cry to the Sun, 1980 Oil on canvas, 30 x 50 in. Collection ofjohnj. McMullen, Colorado 71 CONTEMPORARY LANDSCAPES URING THE INTERWAR PERIOD in America, artists began migrating westward, away from the flourishing art scene of the east coast to visually interpret the landscapes and peoples of the West. They problematized the tradi- tional definition of western art by using the techniques of the New York and European avant-garde artists into their portray- als of the West. Although the Taos Modernists are the best known (no. 13), there are many other artists following in this tradition today including artists from the West’s diverse ethnic communi- ties. What unifies them is their desire to express an individualized and subjective experience in the western landscape. Whether working in collage, ceramic, or the more traditional oil on canvas, the artists push the conventions of western art and contemporary western landscape. They address issues like urban- ization, nuclear testing, and the treatment of nature as a commod- ity as well as environmental threats caused by these developments. Concerned with the threat of nuclear testing by the federal gov- ernment, Liz Lerma (no. 17) and Karen Rice (no. 18) visually fight back against the desecration of their homeland. The art of con- temporary western artists is not one of documentation or nostal- gia, but is an ardent attempt to provocatively convey political, cultural, and social messages specific to the West. While their Cowboy Artists of America contemporaries depict an optimistic and ideal western civilization, the artists in this section draw on the negative outgrowth that has taken place due to western expansion in the second half of the twentieth century. 73 No. 13 Agnes Martin (b. 1912) Untitled # n - Collection of the artist In 1995, the U.S. Postal Service issued a set of stamps commemo- rating the heroes of the American West. Missing from the pantheon of Indian, African American, and Anglo men and women were Mexican Americans. Missing Legends raises ques- tions about Mexicans’ place in western history, and the reason for his/her exclusion from this otherwise inclusive tribute. Here, Robert Buitron has staged a scenario in which the characters, Pancho (the Cisco Kid’s amiable sidekick, who ate too much and struggled with the English language) and Tonto (whose “Native” skills in fighting and navigating the open terrain got the Lone Ranger out of deadly scrapes), design their own stamps to com- plete the postal service’s philatelic pantheon. Their model, an older Mexican man in serape and sombrero (portrayed by Chicano artist Carlos Cortez), brings to mind Hollywood cos- tuming, if not nineteenth-century ethnic clothing styles. In this image, Pancho and Tonto reflect on Joaquin Murrieta (a “bandit,” or Chicano freedom fighter who resisted encroachment by Anglo miners on Mexican land), Juan Cortina (who captured the city of Brownsville, Texas to assert Mexicans’ “sacred right of self-preservation”), and the thousands of unknown vaqueros and Indian guides who taught Anglo cowboys how to thrive on the western frontier, only to be dispossessed and erased from recorded history. 95 No. 27 Robert C. Buitron (b. 1953) Missing Legends of the American West, 1995 f rom the series Id Corrida de llappy Trails (starring Panchoy Tonto) Chromogcnic print, 13.75 x 17.5 in. Collection of the artist 96 No. 28 Robert C. Buitron (b. 1953) Leccion 34 , 1999 (From the series Mai burro, man ) Chromogenic print, 13.625 x 17.125 in. Collection of the artist 97 No. ’S Robert C. Buitron (b. 1933) Leeeion 34, 1099 (From the series .\L/ burro, man) Chromogenic print. 13.02^ \ 1-.123 in. Collection of the artist f ramed bv the Chicago skyline rather than the expansive west- ern frontier, the cowboy is dressed as the Marlboro man being taught hv two vaqueros to rope a shim, red plastic bull labeled "Azucar" (Azticar, meaning “sugar”). In this strange scene, Robert Buitron brings humor to his investigation of the com- modified. kitschified, mythic West. The Marlboro man, unlike the vaquero. is an urban creature, borne of advertising genius instead of the rugged frontier spirit. The artist notes of him that, “the clothes are clean, pressed, and not a bead of sweat around the shirt collar.” as one might expect at the end of the cattle trail, where steers are purchased, processed, and distrib- uted by Chicago capitalists. Similarly, the capitalists’ white col- lars also show no traces of sweat. The “lection” to be learned from this scene has as much to do with class as with race. Recognized bv Advertising Age as the leading advertising icon of the twentieth centurv, the Marlboro Man’s luster issues from his wealth, instead of from his hard work, rugged individualism, and western roots. No. 29 Frank Romero (b. 1941) Vaquero, 1994 Serigraph, 30 x 39.3 in. Courtesy of Ikon Ltd. and Kay Richards, Santa Monica The label Chicano, initially a pejorative term and later adopted by young Mexicans in the 1960s, was a means of identifying their neo- indigenous stance. Chicano artists did not develop a unified, identifiable style, but a bicultural one that fused American and Mexican sources. Some Chicano artists, influenced by farmworker organization campaigns in California and Texas, developed the specialized imagery of labor culture. Many others sought to reclaim elements of Mexican culture and identity that had been subsumed into more general “western culture. ’’The cultural figure most lost to historv is the vaquero, or the original Mexican cowboy who is part of the heritage of many Mexican Americans. In con- r rast to Anglo depictions of anonymous, caricatured vaqueros frenetically looping lassos, f rank Romero’s Vaquero sits in contem- plation. The layered blues and reds of Mexican arte folklorico form an ambiguous facial expression, which can be read as sadness, anger, resignation, or even boredom, while the carefree brush strokes forming the cowboy hat add a whimsical quality to the composition. Though fixed in space, Romero’s vaquero is not a static, idealized figure of the past, but one embodying layered identities as a worker, a Mexican, and an American which have been shaped by his historical epoch, as well as ours. No. 30 Frank Romero (b. 1941) Freeway Wars , 1990 34-color silkscreen, 31.5 x 38 in. Courtesy oflkon Ltd. and Kay Richards, Santa Monica Freeway Wars , like Van Nuys (no. 19) and Cinderella Story (no. 23), has the independent spirit of Los Angeles art which presents pop cultural subjects in bold colors and materials. Drawing inspira- tion from folk art and from images of heroic scale, Frank Romero’s reconfigurations of old mythologies are also suggestive and, sometimes darkly humorous. Los Angeles art, particularly Chicano art, which Romero pioneered, is strongly influenced by the city’s multicultural milieu. A native of Southern California, Romero studied art through high school and college, and in 1973 co-founded the Chicano artists’ collective “Los Four.” Los Four drew on the style of the Mexican muralists to make collaborative, large-scale images addressing issues specific to Mexican Angelinos. In its bright imagery and dark subject matter, Freeway Wars unifies Romero’s seemingly disparate array of concerns about being a Hispanic artist living in Los Angeles, New Mexico, and Mexico. In contrast to Alexander’s aerial perspective of Los Angeles (no. 19), Romero’s paintings capture the city from street level, where Angelinos resolve conflict swiftly and independently at the point of a gun. Unlike William Leigh’s The Gambler (no. 7), or even Smith’s Cinderella Story (no. 23), Romero’s urban “cowboys” fight urban overcrowding and the impersonal battles against the Californian culture that relies heavily on the freedom offered by the car. However, as in Leigh’s The Gambler, Freeway Wars may be read alternatively as the modern shootout in which minority youth, pushed to America’s margins (instead of beckoned to new frontiers), engage in sporadic gunplay to establish territory, mete out justice, and restore masculine honor. No. 29 Frank Romero (b. 1941) Vaquero , 1994 Serigraph, 30 x 39.5 in. Courtesy of Ikon Ltd. and Kay Richards, Santa Monica 99 No. 30 Frank Romero (b. 1941) Freeway Wars, 1990 34-color silkscreen, 31.5 x 38 in. Courtesy of Ikon Ltd. and Kay Richards, Santa Monica 100 CONTEMPORARY NATIVE AMERICANS S INCE THEIR FIRST ENCOUNTER with Europeans, Native Americans have negotiated conflicting definitions of their identity. Rather than the freedom to express their identity as they experience it, Native artists encounter restrictive categories and standards of “Indianness” by fed- eral officials and the Indian art market that pose both creative and political challenges. Mainstream American culture expects Native artists to remain historical relics, producing only tradi- tional crafts or images of the past. The artists in this section challenge stereotypical images of Indians, forcing the viewer to acknowledge Native Americans as fellow members of modern society. Combining Modern and Postmodern art techniques with traditional forms, these artists reveal the vibrancy of contemporary Native culture. They also use imagery from Native mythology to address past and present injus- tices, from the Spanish conquest and the Trail ofTears to the grow- ing commodification of Native art. Together, these works offer a more complete picture of Native American identity today. No. 31 Dan Lomahaftewa (!>. 1951) Kiva Dreams, 1996 Acrylic on canvas, 28 x 36 in. Montclair Art Museum; Museum purchase; prior gifts of Mrs. T. P. Adler, Mrs. LcRoy Christy, and Acquisition Fund, 1996.51 102 No. 31 Dan Lomahaftewa (b. 1931) Kivu Dreams, 1996 Acrylic on canvas, 28 x 36 in. Montclair Art Museum; Museum purchase; prior gifts of Mrs. T. P. Adler, Mrs. LeRoy Christy, and Acquisition Fund, 1996. 51 Dan Lomahaftewa was raised in Phoenix, Arizona, where his parents were active in the urban intertribal community. He spent summers with his father’s relatives on the Hopi reservation, where he learned Hopi traditions and ceremonies. Here, Lomahaftewa depicts a woman with the traditional Hopi squash-blossom hairstyle and a katsina figure. Katsinas are central to Hopi religious and family life. Represented by masked dancers and specially crafted dolls, katsinas connect the Hopi to the spirit world. In katsina rituals, there is no boundary between the spirits and the human participants. The katsina dancers simultaneously pray to the spirits and embody them. Through the katsinas , the Hopi communicate with their ancestors and pray to the gods for rain, good harvests, turquoise, and for harmony within the community. Lomahaftewa ’s thickly layered, vividly colored acrylics convey both joy and nostalgia. This mixture of emotions is often unexpected to the western viewer, since European cultures usually associate nostalgia with melancholy. The woman and the katsina are rendered in the style of ancient pictographs, evoking the timelessness of the Hopi culture. At the same time, the color and movement suggest that Hopi culture remains vibrant today. Combining ancient Hopi symbols with modern European painting, Lomahaftewa’s work becomes a meditation on the unity of peoples and places, and breaks down the divisions that Euro- American culture creates between body and spirit, nation and nation, and past and future. No. 32 John Nieto (b. 1936) Snake Dance, 1987 Acrylic on canvas, 48 x 60 in. Montclair Art Museum; Gift of Anita Stanford, 1994.43 John Nieto lives and works in New Mexico, where his Spanish, Navajo, and Apache relatives have lived for over three hundred years. He began studying Native cultures at the urging of his grandmother, who asked him to paint images that accurately portrayed Native identity and lifestyle. Identifying himself as an American artist who paints Indians, rather than as an Indian artist, Nieto strives to express the unity of all indigenous American people. The Indians represented in his work are not romanticized, imperiled, or conflicted. While his subjects are traditional, Nieto’s brilliantly colored geometric forms are strongly influenced by Fauvism, Expressionism, and Asian painting techniques. Performed every two years in strict secrecy, the I Iopi Snake- Dance culminates eight days of prayer for rain. The dance, which is rarely observed by non-Indians, involves highly hon- ored dancers holding live rattlesnakes in their mouths. With their devotion to historical authenticity, Bodmer (nos. 3 and 4), Clymer (nos. 9 and 10), andTerpning (no. 12) would have attempted to capture the minute details of the dancers’ cos- tumes and gestures. In contrast, Nieto ignores these identifying marks, and instead creates an iconic portrait of a single dancer’s spiritual experience. 103 No. 32 John Nieto (b. 1936) Snake Dance, 1987 Acrylic on canvas, 48 x 60 in. Montclair Art Museum; Gift of Anita Stanford, 1994.43 104 No. 33 I farry Fonseca (b. 1946) Saint Coyote , 1993 Acrylic on canvas, 48 x 36 in. Collection of the Fonseca Studio, Santa Fe 105 No. 33 l him Fonseca (b. 104(1) Suint Coyote, 1003 Acrvlic on canvas, 48 x 36 in. Collection of the Fonseca Studio, Santa Fe Since 1079 , 1 larrv Fonseca has painted the exploits of Coyote, the Native hero whose skill at disguising himself allows him to plav tricks on the powers that be. In Fonseca’s work, Coyote appears as a hip. contemporary figure who sings doo-wop, dances ballet, rides motorcycles, and sketches in Paris. By adorning the trickster with the trappings of American popular culture. Fonseca parodies the dominant culture’s narrow view of Indians. Coyote often acts as the artist’s alter ego, appearing as a biting satirist. Fonseca notes, “At times, Coyote is very plavtul and foolish-in that, there is a great freedom. However, I never forget he is wild, he is a dog, that he can bite very, very hard: he is a survivor.” In Saint Coyote, Coyote challenges the Catholic Church’s proposed canonization of Father Junipero Serra (1713-1784). While Serra is an iconic figure in California history, his efforts to colonize California for Spain and Christianize the natives con- tributed to the deaths of thousands of Indians. From 1769 to 1821. the indigenous population of California dropped from >0 to 200,000 due to epidemics, harsh work routines, and the execution of resisters. Fonseca’s play on Renaissance painting, with bemused, dog-faced putti floating above a check- ered floor, was originally titled “Sorry, Father Serra, Only the Best Coyotes Will Do.” Fonseca quips further that, “if anybody is going to get to sainthood, it’s going to be Coyote before Father Serra.” No. 34 Rick Bartow (b. 1946) Die A/tersscbwacbe, 2001 Pastel and graphite on paper, 40 x 26 in. Courtesy of Froelick Gallery, Portland, Oregon Most of the work produced by the Native American Fine Art movement focuses on the political, social, and economic forces that affect Native culture. Rick Bartow’s work, however, centers on deeply personal issues. The artist struggles to define his place in the world as a Yurok Indian who did not grow up on a reservation, as a Vietnam veteran, and as a non-traditional artist. As a result, Bartow’s images do not fit neatly into established ethnic, cultural, or stylistic categories. Drawing on expressionist works by Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud, and Horst Janson, Bartow’s self-portraits use Native and Furopean visual languages to describe the subtle and difficult processes of personal transformation. Bartow’s title is the German word for decay, dissolution, or decrepitude, but his figure does not appear in this state. Instead, the artist brings together his often-incompatible iden- tities into a single, coherent image. Many of Bartow’s self- portraits depict dramatic changes, merging the artist’s human figure with the bodies of sacred animals such as the raven, the coyote, and the salmon. Although Die Alterschwasse depicts a subtler shift from bespectacled artist to a headdress- wearing Indian, the vivid red and blue brushstrokes testify to the power of the transformation. 106 No. 34 Rick Bartow (b. 1946) Die Altersschw ache , 2001 Pastel and graphite on paper, 40 x 26 in. Courtesy of Froelick Gallery, Portland, Oregon 107 wt* No. 35 G. Peter Jcmison (b. 1945) Made in Japan, 1994 Kgg tempera on coated rice paper, umbrella, 28 x 38 x 38 in. Collection of the artist 108 No. 35 G. Peter Jemison (b. 1945) Made in Japan, 1994 Egg tempera on coated rice paper, umbrella, 28x38x38 in. Collection of the artist According to the dominant archaeological model, humans came to North America across a now-submerged causeway between Asia and Alaska 12,000 years ago. Human skeletons that predate the first known remains of the northwestern tribes and appear to have Caucasian features support this Land-Bridge theory. Some Anglo groups in the West use the Land-Bridge theory to argue that Indians, as migrants from Asia, have no more claim to the land than later European settlers. In Northeast Indian creation myths, a turtle holds up the world. By painting a turtle on ajapanese parasol, Peter Jemison refers to the conflict between the scientific claim that humans entered the American Northwest from Asia and the Northwest Indian claim that their ancestors have lived in the region since the dawn of time. Made in Japan also investigates the Japanese exploitation of American Indian culture. Because the United States’ Indian Arts and Crafts laws do not apply to foreign manufacturers, Japan is now the primary source of cheap replicas of Indian artifacts. Indian art is far more lucrative for foreign companies than for Indians, who rarely produce sacred objects for sale. By reducing Native control over the production of Indian artifacts, Asian manufacturers enable Anglos to consume the exotic elements of Indian culture without grappling with the historic injustices and present-day inequalities that Indians experience. No. 36 Joe Cantrell (b. 1945) Authentic Indian II) Card , 2002 Mixed media, 22 x 26 in. Collection of the artist Rather than allowing individuals to determine their own ethnic identity, the federal government imposes legal definitions of indigenous heritage. Artists are required to prove official tribal membership or a “Certified Degree of Indian Blood” before they can identify their work as Indian art. While this law protects Native artists from cultural theft, the government’s use of a “blood quantum” as the standard for Native identity is problem- atic. Given that Native Americans have mixed with other peo- ples for 500 years, it is difficult to determine anyone’s exact degree of indigenous genetic material. Satirizing the government’s attempts to define his identity, Joe Cantrell creates in Authentic Indian ID Card his own docu mentation. The artist labels a photograph of himself with his Cherokee name, Agiyo. In his instructions for disposing of the bearer, Cantrell invents the “Treaty of I loaxalooser,” evoking the government’s repeated attempts to profit from its control of Indian people and their ancestral lands over the last 150 years. Cantrell’s self-portrait alludes to Edward Curtis’ widely criticized Indian photographs. Without regard for ethnographic accuracy, Curtis (1868-1954) dressed his subjects to match his idea of what an Indian should look like. Cantrell depicts himself in the familiar pose of the “blanket Indian,” surrounded by an incongruous assemblage of artifacts, including a Sony laptop, a Laguna Pueblo blanket coat, and the rifle, bag, and powder horns that his ancestors carried on the Trail of Tears. Cantrell undermines the stereotype that Indians use traditional objects rather than modern consumer goods, asking the viewer: do Nike shoes become Indian artifacts when worn by a contemporary Native American? 109 No. 3~ loc t anrreil (b. 104s) Road Sign on the Trad ofTears, 2002 Mixed media, approx. 8 \ 1 2 in. C ollection of the Artist R .... Sign on the Trail of Icon is a work-in-progress and a medita- tion on the distortions in America’s collective memory of the past. The artist assembles found objects, photographic images, and constructed pieces that encapsulate events in the relation- ship between Indians anti Anglo Americans. Echoing the form of a historic landmark. Roail Sign tells us more about America’s per- ception of the past rather than the actual events that took place. Cantrell begins with a photograph of the sign for Dead Indian Memorial 1 lighway. Though originally named to honor the lives of several slain Southern Oregon tribesmen, the name has an ambiguous w ording that could be understood as celebration for the deaths of anonvmous Indians. The lower marker features Andrew Jackson, who is simulta- neously one of the most beloved and the most reviled American presidents. I le is best remembered lor having democratized the American political process bv extending voting rights to white, working-class men. Native Americans, however remember Jackson for passing the Indian Removal Act of 1830. The Act forced 5,000 members of the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Seminole nations to evacuate their ancestral homelands and w alk 1,200 miles to Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma.) An estimated 4,000 Native Americans died from hunger, exposure, disease, and violence at the hands of soldiers. Cantrell, who is descended from one of the survivors, discovered in 1995 that his ancestor and namesake, Joe Martin, died along the Trail. Rood Sign on the Trail of Tears is Cantrell’s ironic tribute to his fallen ancestor and the beloved President. The piece renames the Trail ofTears the “Andrew Jackson Scenic Wilderness Trail.” The sign is shot through with a .50 caliber caplock (the assault rifle of choice in the 1830’s) like the pockmarked signs lining western highways. But Cantrell’s “vandalism” also involved stringing red plastic beads with mirrors through the holes, to commemorate the bloodshed and tears, and for viewers to see their reflection in that pool. Cantrell added the aluminum “head” that peers from behind t he signi well into the creative process. Like Bodmer’s Mato-Tope no 4;, Cantrell s Indian observer wears a turkey feather. l or the Mandan warrior, the feather denotes a wound sustained in battle. The turkey feather may hold the same meaning for the figure constructed here by Cantrell. The metal head is riddled with bul- let holes, but his elimination from history is an enduring injury for this faceless warrior. While Robert Buitron (no. 27), Peter Jemison (no. 26), and Alexis Smith (no. 23) place themselves within the pantheon of western-American heroes, Cantrell positions himself in opposi- tion to the “heroic” Indian fighter. The artist’s weapon of choice is ironic humor, instead of bald anger. Cantrell refers to Road Sign as “just a joke thrown back at whoever created the jokes of treaties and promises.” No. 38 Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (b. 1940) War Shirt, 1992 Oil and mixed media collage on canvas diptych, 60 x 84 in. Montclair Art Museum; Museum purchase; funds pro- vided by Tamar and Emil Weiss and prior gifts of Ronald B. Swart, 1993.27 As early as the sixteenth century, prominent Plains Indian men decorated their buckskin shirts to commemorate their achieve- ments in battle. Elaborate stitching, thick fringe, swaths of green, blue, red, and yellow paint, feathers and locks of human hair from vanquished enemies adorned the shirts. As a result, the shirts became biographical records of the distinguished men who wore them. Quick-to-See Smith adorns her War Shirt with seem- ingly random images of Indians from Cold War era advertise- ments and product labels. The original shirt’s biographical richness is replaced with anonymous stereotypes. The shirt also appears to be standing, but there is no warrior to wear it. By sepa- rating the shirt from its owner, the artist emphasizes the efface- ment of the individual’s Indian identity. Today, the Indian war shirt has become a coveted commer- cial item. Specialty outlets sell buckskin war shirts for around $1,000, while other stores offer patterns based on museum pieces. This market feeds nostalgia for the Old West by allowing Anglos to purchase exotic objects without coming into contact with contemporary Plains Indians. Just as the logos on Quick-to- See Smith’s shirt are more present than the figure wearing it, the commercial war shirts make Native Americans even less visible in our culture. IK) Agiyo: His mark IN K U.S. GOVERNMENT CERTIFIED INDIAN Under the Treaty of Hoaxalooser, 1623, as amended in various subsequent documents, the U.v. certifies this person to be a genuine indigenous person of the Oklahoma Cherokee persuasion, number: CO130814. The Great White Bushwhacker avers that every sex- ual encounter of all this person’s ancestors since 1492 has been recorded and the heritage of all those folks was absolutely known, and the results verified, and recorded. GWB further promises, honest Injun, that THIS time, he ain’t lying, no shit. Please treat this Indian in the correct way. If he gets uppity, he should be disciplined like any sealawag. If he has to be shot or lynched, preserve the ears and check for tattoos. They eould be collectible, might even be worth something. BAR CODE: moonshine Useful facts about this Indian He/His tribe has/ain’t got (eirele as applicable) 1. Casino^-Casino that makes money 2. Land worth taking, mining, storing nucular waste or nerve gas, growing blackberries, ehiggers and poison snakes on, or just worthless reservation to bomb for practice. 3. Communicable diseases or the ones not to be worried about like drinking, drugging, depression, genetie PTSD and other natural processes: nature’s way of killing off lesser speeies 4. Tattoos worth tanning for 01’ Hickry House 5. A tin pony newer than 1982 or a color other than brown 6. Anything else of value to sivilized people t. Visible traditions worth stealing No. 36 Joe Cantrell (b. 1945) Authentic Indian ID Card , 2002 Mixed media, 22 x 26 in. Collection of" the artist No. 37 Joe Cantrell (b. 1945) Road Sign on the Trail of Tears, 2002 Mixed media, approx. 8x12 in. Collection of the Artist I 12 No. 3 8 Jaunc Quick-to-See Smith (b. 1940) War Shirt, 1992 Oil and mixed media collage on canvas diptych, 60 x 84 in. Montclair Art Museum; Museum purchase; funds provided by Tamar and Emil Weiss and prior gifts of Ronald B. Swart, 1993.27 113 PHOTOGRAPHS HAVE BEEN PROVIDED COURTESY OF: Gan’ Gilbert, Office of Marketing Communications, Boston College; nos.i, 24, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; no. 2 Dann Coffey, John J. McMullen Collection; nos. 3-12. Montclair Art Museum; nos. 32 and 38 and Peter Jacobs; no. 31 Joe Cantrell; nos. 36, 37. Liz Lerma; no. 17 Robert Buitron; nos. 27, 28. Adam Reich; no. 21 Earl Kage; no. 35 Kevin Vickers; no. 26 Paula Goldman; no. 22 Douglas M. Parker Studio; no. 23 Ikon Ltd., Santa Monica, CA; nos. 29, 30. Scott Lindgren; no. 19 Chris Autio; no. 18 Kim Harrington; no. 14 Rebekah Johnson; no. 34 Dana Salvo; no. 13 University of Michigan Museum of Art; fig. 1 National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.,Paul Mellon Collection; fig. 2 Keep America Beautiful, Inc.; fig. 3 The Anschutz Collection, Malcomb Varon; fig. 4 Office of Marketing and Communications, Boston College; figs. 5, 15. Newberry Library, Chicago; fig. 6 Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, U of Texas, Austin, Rick Hall; fig 7 Buffalo Bill Historical Society, Cody, WY; figs. 8, 11, 13. Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, TX; figs. 9, 10. Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH; fig. 12 Arlington Gallery, Santa Barbara, CA; fig. 14 Cowboy Artists of America Museum, Kerrville, TX; fig. 16 E AN MCMULLEN MUSEUM OF ART BOSTON COLLEGE j USA $30.00 ISBN 1-892850-04-4 9 781892 850041 5 3 5 00 >