Native American tradition meets modern art in Westmoreland Museum exhibit

Past meets present in “Action/Abstraction Redefined: Modern Native Art, 1945-1975,” running through May 28 at The Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg.

With 52 paintings, sculptures and works on paper by 32 artists, the traveling exhibition is the first of its kind exploring the innovation and experimentation present in modern Native American art.

“This is the prehistory of contemporary Native American art,” said Jeremiah William McCarthy, The Westmoreland’s chief curator. “This is the first time a group of people in a very specific place, at a very specific time, say, ‘We’re going to create something new that both acknowledges the past and updates it, brings it into the present and deals with the broader — and very American — ideas about sovereignty and individualism and everything that abstract expressionism is thought to be about.’ ”

The featured artists explored new forms of expression while challenging the stereotypes expected of Native art, McCarthy said.

The exhibition comes from the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, N.M.

The institute started in 1962 as an arts high school for Native American students and is now a public tribal land-grant college.

“(The founders) realized, because of government policies like assimilation, termination and those really awful years, that if they didn’t do anything, a lot of Native art, culture and history would be lost,” said Manuela Well-Off-Man, chief curator at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts.

Most of the works in the exhibition were made by early instructors and students, some as young as 15.

“When you look at these artworks, they hold up against any modern American artists. They are that strong,” Well-Off-Man said.

Among featured artists is the late Lloyd Kiva New, a Cherokee and pioneer of modern Native American fashion design and a co-founder and president emeritus of the IAIA.

“His clients included Lady Bird Johnson, so really high society came to his studio in Flagstaff,” Well-Off-Man said. “Then he quit at the peak of his career to go back to his other passion, teaching art.

“Because of teachers like him and (featured artist) Fritz Scholder, we have this really unusual education approach where you don’t tell young Native students, ‘This is what authentic Native art looks like, so you have to paint sentimental camp sites or hunting scenes.’ They exposed our young Native students to art movements like color field and action painting and really encouraged them to experiment.”

Changing landscape

Their approach was indicative of the changing landscape of education during the 1960s, McCarthy said.

“There were people like John Dewey and (Jean) Piaget and new studies saying it’s not just about memorization, you can’t just drill things into kids, it’s more about the actual lived experience of people,” he said. “That starts to inform this pedagogy, when you have people starting to think about Native aesthetics and Native culture — in this rapidly changing world, what aspects of our culture do we preserve and what aspects of our culture do we want to meaningfully merge with these broader moments in American culture?

“In a short amount of time, they create this new school that is influenced by pop art and abstraction.”

Though “Action/Abstraction Redefined” reveals outside influences on Native artists, it also reveals the little-known influences of Native arts on mainstream artists like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko.

“Mark Rothko and other abstract expressionists traveled to the Southwest and were inspired by Pueblo Indian artists,” Well-Off-Man said. “Both sides inspired each other; the only thing is, the abstract expressionists never gave credit to Native artists and cultures. But that was the times.”

Abstraction has a long tradition in Native arts and culture, evident in the geometric designs of early paintings, pottery and baskets, she said.

“I think that will be a surprise for many visitors, that Native art had this abstract tradition all along,” Well-Off-Man said. “The exhibition is a great opportunity to learn that there were indigenous people here first and what their style looked like.”

The exhibition will give visitors to The Westmoreland an opportunity to think about both the history and the present-day experience of America’s Native peoples, McCarthy said.

“In Santa Fe, the context, the struggle, the daily life, everything about Native peoples is much more present and on your mind, as opposed to Southwestern Pennsylvania,” he said. “That doesn’t mean those people don’t exist in this area. As a museum dedicated to American art, we have to think about what the first American art was and what it looks like in the present time.”

The traveling exhibition is supported by the Art Bridges Foundation, the Hillman Exhibition Fund of The Westmoreland Museum of American Art and the Heinz Endowments.