Reflexivity and Subjectivity in Early Native American Painting

Since the publication of J. J. Brody’s 1971 Indian Painters and White Patrons, a pioneering study on the rise of twentieth-century Native American painting, critical perspectives on the origins of this movement have focused almost exclusively on evaluating the primitivist beliefs of its patrons and their impact on works created in the Studio or Traditional style. With some important exceptions discussed below, elements of the subjectivity that the young Native American artists who originated this movement brought to their compositions remain beyond the breadth of these discussions, acknowledged principally through scattered observations. While the literature that has followed Brody’s work has provided this area of study with an increasingly satisfying level of theoretical and contextual richness, an immersion in its discourses leaves the reader conscious of a great unspoken divide that separates those elements of causation arid intentionality that they do and do not address. Aspects of the content, style, and even the medium of the watercolor paintings produced by Native painters in New Mexico and Oklahoma during the early twentieth century are rarely addressed with regard to the indigenous perspectives of the artists themselves. Instead, within a variety of analytical frameworks they are viewed as responses to their engagement with an assortment of well-intended but controlling patrons and promoters, including Indian Service teachers, anthropologists, and the prominent artistic and literary figures of the Taos and Santa Fe art colonies. While approaches that emphasize the importance of this relation offer valid paradigms for interpretation, the resulting picture is one-sided, implicitly suggesting that the characteristics of this art were solely determined by the nature of those interactions. Conspicuously missing is an exploration of reflexivity as it pertains both to the creative experience of the artist and the cultural viewpoint shared by the members of his or her tribal group. Scholarship has operated so far on the premise that this art served to communicate with one audience. The intention of this study is to suggest its relation to two others as well: the artist him- or herself, and his or her Native community

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