Art By Indigenous Peoples

[Pursuant to my recent article about my parents’ art collecting (“A Passion for Art,” posted on 21 November), I wrote a little about my father’s connection to the then-private Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C.  I’ve also recently been planning a visit downtown to the New York City branch of the National Museum of the American Indian (a report on which should appear within a couple of weeks, though I’ve written on NMAI before on Rick On Theater).  These two preoccupations have prompted me to revive two archival reports, both brief, on exhibits at each of those museums that predate the start of ROT; to round out this post, I’ve added a report I never published on an exhibit of another aboriginal art collection, this time Australian, all under the title “Art by Indigenous Peoples.” ]

THE FIRST AMERICAN ART

(NMAI-New York, 2004)

On Friday, 30 April 2004, my mother and I went down to Bowling Green to the National Museum of the American Indian.  (You may know that a new NMAI is opening later this year on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.  The Smithsonian took over this private museum, then simply the Museum of the American Indian and located at 155th and Broadway, in 1989.  It moved into the former U.S. Custom House downtown in ’94.  I don’t remember when the Smithsonian started construction on the D.C. building, and I don’t know if the current collection at what’s called the George Gustav Heye Collection—named for the man who started the private museum with his own collection of American Indian art—will be moved to D.C. [it wasn’t], but the Custom House will remain a satellite facility of NMAI.) 

I caught the review of a show at NMAI just before I left D.C.—The First American Art: The Charles and Valerie Diker Collection of American Indian Art from 24 April 2004-29 May  2006 at the Heye Center—and suggested to Mom that we check it out when she was here.  Like the Maya exhibit at the National Gallery [4 April to 25 July 2004 in the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington; report posted on “Theater & Art,” 14 August 2014], the focus of this show is the artistic appeal of the items, not their ethnographic value. 

Of course, there are pots and bowls (including one gorgeous example of Maria Martinez’s black-on-black Pueblo pottery!), baskets, beadwork, carvings, katchina dolls, and such things that you would consider art, even though they were made for use rather than for aesthetic display, but there are also pieces of clothing, saddles and saddle bags, pouches, and other items that would ordinarily be in an anthropological exhibit.  But it was their aesthetics that was under consideration—both in the show at NMAI and in the private collection at the couple’s New York home. 

I was also surprised to see several drawings on paper—pages from books made and illustrated by Indians in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, clearly under the influence—and even at the behest—of Euro-Americans.  These illustrations were of Indian subjects, of course, and from an Indian perspective.  As such, they included not only depictions of Indian ceremonies, but also of Indian victories over white invaders.  They may have taken the lead of the dominant European culture, but they didn’t cop out!  I never knew the Indians did this kind of thing—at least not until modern times when Indian artists adopted and adapted Western techniques for their own themes.

The First American Art is a medium-sized show—200 objects, but all in one room.  (There are other exhibits, part of the permanent collection, all around, of course, so there’s a lot to see if you want to hang about.  That depends, of course, on how interested you are in Indian art and artifacts.)  Much of the stuff dates from the late 19th to early 20th centuries, but there are some really old things here and there.  A couple of pots from the Pueblo Ancestors (who used to be called Anasazi until the Pueblos objected—it’s apparently really a put-down from another native culture) which were not only beautiful, but in incredibly good condition for crockery that’s over 1000 years old!  (There were also a couple of carved implements from before that—back into BCE and double-digit CE. 

American Indian stuff wasn’t made to last—it was intended to be used until it was used up.  They weren’t made of stuff that stood up against time—no metal or stone; it’s mostly pottery, wood, skins, straw.  Stuff that old is really, really rare!)  I was delighted to find a number of pieces from the Pacific Northwest—work I like very much—and there were even some Inuit/Eskimo items (even though they’re not actually Indians). 

One thing I found annoying, because the exhibit focused on the aesthetics and not the cultural implications, was that, though the items were identified by tribe/culture, there was no indication where these people lived or anything to identify them except their names.  I know some of the peoples exhibited, but many were strange names to me, and it would have been interesting to me to know what part of the country they came from.  Items were grouped strangely—not by region or tribe, not by similarity of the objects or of technique or medium/material—so I couldn’t guess who might have been close to whom when techniques looked alike.  I guess the curators didn’t think that was significant, but I was curious.  Even a map with the tribal areas marked would have been sufficient, or a note on the labels telling the area inhabited by the culture. 

Nonetheless, the objects themselves were really beautiful—many of them truly exquisite.  This show is well worth a visit (I saw a number of things I’d come back for after the place closes for the night—one of Mom’s and my fantasy “midnight shopping trips”!) and the building itself is wonderful—a terrific (re)use of an old Beaux Arts building whose original purpose has expired.  (The customs function moved out in 1973 and the 1907 building was slated for demolition.)  The Smithsonian did an excellent job turning the Custom House into a beautiful exhibit space while preserving the original interior, sort of like a ghost of the building’s past life hovering over its present.  (The southern tip of Manhattan has lots of things to explore.  It’s easily a day’s outing, and on a nice day it’s a good place to spend time wandering around the streets and parks seeking out little-known monuments and historic sites.  NMAI couldn’t be easier to get to—the exit of the Bowling Green subway station on the IRT Lexington Avenue Line is right in front of the building’s entrance.) 

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AFRICAN VISION

(NMAfA, 2007)

On the afternoon of Thursday, 15 February 2007, my mother and I drove down to the National  Mall in Washington and checked out a small exhibit of the Walt Disney-Tishman Collection which had opened at the National Museum of African Art that day.  The exhibit, African Vision: The Walt Disney-Tishman African Art Collection, consists of 88 items from the 525-piece collection which Disney donated to the Smithsonian in 2005. 

After my father returned in 1967 from serving at the embassy in Bonn, he was introduced to Warren Robbins (1923-2008), a man who had had the same job there, cultural attaché, prior to my dad.  (Robbins had the job from 1958 to 1960; Dad had held the post from 1965 to 1967.)  When he retired from the Foreign Service, Robbins settled in Washington, and one day he read that the townhouse that had been the Capitol Hill home of Frederick Douglass, Lincoln’s Recorder of Deeds for Washington, was up for sale.  He decided it would be a shame if the house were sold and torn down or converted into a condominium, losing the original historic residence forever. 

Robbins had some family money so he bought the Douglass house without knowing what he was going to do with it at first.  He ultimately determined that it should house African art, which he himself had collected for some time, and he set about establishing the Museum of African Art in 1964, the first museum in the United States devoted exclusively to the art and culture of Africa.  Eventually, with the help of a Rockefeller Foundation grant, the MAA expanded to the nearby houses—nine ultimately—and included a display of modern Western art alongside the African pieces that had inspired them—works by artists like Amedeo Modigliani and Pablo Picasso.  (There was also a room that had been Douglass’s office in the house that was furnished as it might have been in his day.) 

My father worked for Robbins in these years on a volunteer basis as director of development, and we became very interested in African art as a consequence.  (After the expansion and redesign financed by the Rockefeller grant, the museum had a reopening gala in the spring of 1971, the time I was stationed at Fort Holabird in nearby Baltimore.  Hubert Humphrey (1911-78), the former vice president, was an honorary chairman of the museum board; Senator Humphrey—he returned to the Senate in 1970—couldn’t attend, so, attired in my army dress blues, I escorted Muriel (1912-98), his wife, to the reopening.  Now that was a formidable—and delightful—lady, in the full meaning of that word!) 

In August 1979, the Smithsonian Institution acquired the MAA and established a home for it on the Mall in an underground facility (next to the similarly-constructed Sackler Gallery of Asian Art) beside the old Smithsonian Castle.  The current museum was begun in 1983 and completed in 1987.  [I have posted an article on ROT, “The National Museum of African Art,” recounting this history in more detail on 19 January 2015.]

I hadn’t visited the NMAfA for long time, and this new exhibit sounded exciting—the Disney-Tishman collection became famous for two reasons.  The first is that, lacking a home of its own, it has often been out of sight for long periods, making it a sort of legend among African-art enthusiasts.  The second, and more significant, is that it contains some unique examples of art from the African cultures of, mostly, West Africa from Liberia to Nigeria.  The collection had been assembled over decades by New York real-estate developer Paul Tishman (If I were a Tishman . . . .) who sold it in 1984 to the Walt Disney Company.  Disney had planned to exhibit it in a specially-built facility at EPCOT Center in Florida, but that pavilion was never built and the collection remained in limbo, going out on loan (to Paris, Jerusalem, L.A., and New York’s Met) from a climate-controlled storage warehouse in California where it was available to scholars and researchers (such as the animators for Disney’s 1994 Lion King), but not publicly open to viewers on a regular basis. 

In 2005, Disney donated the collection to the Smithsonian and the NMAfA has been curating it since then.  The small sample of the collection in African Vision covers 75 cultures from 20 countries; most of the objects are from the 19th and early 20th centuries, but a few are from the 16th through the 18th centuries.  (Objects of African art, like those of Native Americans, seldom last very long for two reasons: they are made for use, not aesthetic or decorative display, and they are made mostly of perishable materials.  Very old objects are rare.) 

Some of the objects in African Vision were familiar from the years my folks were involved in the original African art museum, like the Bakota reliquary figure, a stunning stylized face of brass and wood from Gabon, and others were new to me, such as one virtually naturalistic figure from Madagascar of a warrior carved from wood and painted.  Needless to say, there are lots of masks and carved figurines, mostly of women, though they differ greatly in iconography, size, and style from culture to culture.  There are several carved doors, a symbol of status in an African village, and one carved stool, usually the perch of the headman. 

There are several pieces that clearly show the influence of European exploration, including the oldest item in the exhibit, a hunting horn from Sierra Leone carved from a single elephant’s tusk which is dated to about 1500.  Not only are there carvings of letters from the Latin alphabet, but the horn displays the coats-of-arms of both Spain and Portugal.  (It was apparently commissioned by the crown prince of Portugal as a gift for the king of Spain.)  

The most curious piece of this kind is a small 17th-century copper-alloy sculpture from the Congo of a man in a crucifixion-like posture.  The museum label explains that the cross (which is missing from this item) is a portentous design in Bakongo iconography.  The crucifixes worn by the European missionaries caught the attention of the Africans, and they appropriated the form, without necessarily the religious implication, for their own uses.  (This figure was almost certainly mounted on a wooden cross, which has been lost or decayed.)  

Among the most beautiful and intricate works, however, are the few beaded pieces, including a Yoruba crown (Nigeria) and an elaborate scabbard for a ceremonial staff, covered in the glass beads that are the frequent medium for African beadwork.  Unlike American Indian beadwork I’ve seen, the African beadwork here is not flat; it’s full of relief, some of it quite high, with full human figures and faces of both people and animals raised from the surface. 

Western artists of the early years of the 20th century discovered the imagery of Africa, but it astonishes me that the general public, even the art-consuming public, relegated African art to the realms of anthropology and ethnology rather than art until relatively late in the 20th century.  Remember that Warren Robbins’s museum, started in the last third of the century, was the first of its kind; even American Indian art had by then been long accepted as an extraordinary aesthetic accomplishment.  I remember being immediately taken with the sophistication, not to mention the pure beauty, of the pieces I saw when my parents first took me over to the MAA on Capitol Hill.  The Bakota reliquaries I saw then and the Bambara antelopes from Mali remain among the most stunning pieces of art I have ever seen still today.  How could anyone overlook that?  (Yes, I know: it’s ethnocentrism and racism—I still don’t get it.)

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AUSTRALIAN INDIGENOUS ART TRIENNIAL: CULTURE WARRIORS

(Katzen Arts Center, 2009)

On Saturday, 26 September 2009, Mom and I drove over to the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center on Ward Circle to have a look at an exhibit that was of interest to my mother (John Dreyfuss: Inventions, an exhibit of sculpture by a Washington artist with whose parents and grandparents Mother had been acquainted), but which underwhelmed me, to put it succinctly.  The Katzen Center, however, had several other collections on exhibit and we wandered through the museum to see what we could see. 

Of most interest was a display called Australian Indigenous Art Triennial: Culture Warriors (10 September-8 December 2009), on tour from the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra.  (This is an abbreviated exhibit—90 works by 31 artists; the full show, which often contained included nearly twice as many artworks, toured Australia starting in 2007.)  It’s an assembly of pieces by Aboriginal artists from every state and territory of Australia.  It’s not entirely accurate to call it “indigenous” art because, like the Inuit whom I discussed recently on my blog (see “Pudlo Pudlat, Inuit Artist,” 28 September 2009), some native Australians didn’t have much in the way of decorative art before colonialism.  The works shown here, though entirely sui generis, are frequently derived from styles and techniques learned from Europeans (including video art).  The materials used are indigenous (several pieces were works on bark), though, and application of the techniques is unique. 

What is most fascinating about the collection is that all the works express some sort of political point, often about the displacement of the tribe from which the artist comes or the destruction of the habitat and environment in which the people were living.  The exhibition’s “very existence acknowledges a country’s history of state-mandated racism,” observed Jessica Dawson in her Washington Post review.  That’s why the exhibit was subtitled Culture Warriors.

“My Mind Restore For Me”: Navajo Healing Ceremonies

SANDPAINTINGS

 

“It is art that makes life,” wrote Henry James, adding that art “makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.”  In many Native American cultures, my late friend Leonardo Shapiro, who spent most of his life learning about Indian art, religion, and culture, determined, “art was an ever present part of life, it was the connection between the sacred realms beyond appearance and the everyday necessities of survival.”  Among some Native American peoples of the southwest, the Navajo and the Zuni for example, life is inextricably bound to their ceremonial art and performances.  (See my article on ROT, “‘May You Be Blessed With Light’: The Zuni Shalako Rite,” 22 October 2010.)  Next to the Zuni shalako ceremony, the Navajo healing ceremonies, which also include prayers, sweat baths, and ritual bathing, are superb examples of this phenomenon.  Though there are several reasons for conducting sings, as they’re commonly known among the Navajo, and making sandpaintings, the Navajo ceremonials exist principally to cure specific ailments through songs, sandpaintings, and face- and body-painting: performance and art. 

 

Most Native American ceremonials involve the whole community so everyone participates in the artistry and performances; they’re not just the provinces of specialized groups, fraternities, or individuals.  Though Navajo singer-healers or Pueblo Black Eyes may belong to special groups within the society, most of the participants in these rites are ordinary members of the village.  (For a description of a Pueblo ceremony, the Festival of San Gerónimo at Taos, see my article, “Taos & Taos Pueblo: Background,” 24 May 2012.)  Some, like the Zuni shalako personators, are selected a year in advance and prepare extensively for the ceremonies; others simply join in as the familiar ritual unfolds.  Still others, including outsiders, participate merely by being present.  The Navajo sandpaintings are executed by volunteers under the guidance of the hataali, or healer, who’s a trained specialist but who mostly directs the work, making corrections and coaching from the sidelines.  The chants, too, are led by this healer, but the singers and dancers are just villagers—members of the community.  What’s more, the healing rite can’t even take place unless it’s requested by someone in the community who needs its power: the audience initiates the performance. 

 

Many American Indian societies don’t see disease as biological, physiological, or psychological maladies, but as a reflection of disharmony, hochxo in the Navajo language, in society or the world, which is then manifested in a person’s illness.  Healing requires repairing or restructuring this environmental disorder.  Among Navajos, transgressing the rules of behavior that keep society in balance disrupts individuals, their families, their goods, and their overall wellbeing, and, by extension, all Diné (‘human being(s)’ or ‘person’/‘people,’ the name Navajo call themselves).  Both elements of the healing ceremony, though they contain clear aesthetic and social aspects, are primarily transformative and communal.  All these Indian rites have a shamanistic aspect in the use of incantatorial magic to address the forces of nature and effect the world around us.  The healing chants, though specifically tailored to cure the illness of a particular patient—known as bik’i nahagha, ‘the one-sung-over’—also benefit the patient’s family, everyone else who attends the ceremony, and the entire Navajo Nation.  The healing comes about because the ceremony attracts the appropriate spirits who return balance and harmony, called hozho in Navajo and includes concepts like ‘beauty,’ ‘blessing,’ and ‘holy,’ to the society or the world which has been put into hochxo, causing the illness.  The society is thus transformed by the performance.  The sick person is also transformed into a Holy Person by the application of the colored powders from designated parts of the sandpainting, which has been inhabited by the spirits depicted in it, to various parts of his or her body.

 

The elaborate Navajo sandpaintings, one art historian asserted, “reached a lofty expression in which ancient religious significance and high aesthetic value mingled.”  The art “probably reached its highest perfection in North America among the Navaho Indians,” declared another scholar.  Also known as dry-painting or ground-painting, the pictures drawn on the ground with colored sand are made from pigments crushed from minerals from nearby cliffs into white, blue, yellow, black, and red powder.  (Mixing these primary sands creates other colors: red and black makes brown; white and red makes pink.)  More than an art form, they are part of some healing ceremonies, serving as a temporary altar on the ground or the floor of the specially-constructed hogan, the traditional round structure of the Navajo people.  Varying in size, some sandpaintings may be as large as ten to more than 12 feet in diameter and can require the work of as many as 40 village men from dawn until midday.  Sandpaintings—iikaah in Navajo, meaning ‘a place where the gods come and go’—can include conventionalized and stylized images of Holy People and humans as well as other mythical or traditional elements such as arrows, lightning, snakes, earth, sky, wind, rain, clouds, sunbeams, rainbows, stars, comets, thunder, water monsters, animals, plants, herbs, seeds, pollen, and the underworld.   The complicated designs, which can appear as delicate as lace, are abstract, angular, geometric, and elongated representations of Navajo legends and the Diné’s creation story forming a symbolic picture of the hero of the myths that explains the particular ceremonial being performed.

 

As we’ll see, there are numerous healing ceremonials in the Navajo ritual life (Nightway, Blessingway, Mountainway, and so on), so every painting is linked to a specific one and the traditional creation narrative on which it’s based.  (Not all ceremonial sings include sand-painting.  Sings vary in length, but in an eight-day, nine-night ceremony in which sand-painting occurs, the paintings are made on the last four days of the ceremonial.)  The sandpainting is an image of a design the chant’s hero figure received from the spirits during one of his legendary adventures.  Sandpaintings depict the creation story of the yei (“the terrible ones”), Navajo spirits who emerged from the netherworld before the creation of the human race and then appeared as helpful advisers; Holy People, Navajo deities who have the power to aid or harm; the Earth Surface People; birds and animals; plants; and mountains, celebrating episodes in the legend of the hero.

 

For a sing that includes sand-painting, the hataali and his (or her—some hataali are women) helpers start at sunrise on days when one is made and work until noon.  The participants create the design by pinching some of the colored sands between their thumbs and index fingers and, squatting or kneeling next to the painting, dribbling it in the pattern dictated by the hataali onto the spot on the ground or the hogan floor prepared with a base of clean, tan sand.  The work, which demands exquisite dexterity, progresses from the center outward for practical reasons and in a “sun-wise” sequence (east to south to west to north to east again) for religious reasons.  Any man who knows how may work on a painting under the supervision of the healer-chanter who rarely participates himself aside from laying out some preliminary lines.  (Though some healers are women and both men and women can be sung over, only initiated males may make a sandpainting or chant in a ceremony.)  The volunteers, each of whom works on a different part of the painting, must have been initiated into the tribe but they don’t have to be priests or shamans.  There are as many as 30 patterns that can be applied to each healing ceremony and the selected sandpainting is replicated from memory by the healer.  Though each healer is permitted to make variations in small details, he must reproduce the image precisely without varying the sacred overall design the spirits taught the chant’s protagonist in the legend.  The healer must strictly follow tradition for composition as well as for the individual figures.  The Diné believe that the Holy People had made pictures, which they kept rolled up in black clouds, and the sandpaintings were imitations of these for the healing ceremonies.  If anyone makes a mistake, the error isn’t erased, but it’s covered with base sand and a new design is made with fresh powder.  Though a limited number of sandpaintings have been photographed by anthropologists and scholars, there’s no practical catalogue of the designs to which the healers can refer even though there are from 600 to 1000 existing patterns.

 

The painting designs highlight the four corners of the earth where the four sacred mountains stand (demarking Dinétah, the traditional homeland of the Diné in the Four Corners, where the boundaries of Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah meet), the four seasons, and the four parts of day.  The colors in the painting are symbolic of many aspects of Navajo beliefs and culture, a few of which are:

·   white (ground from gypsum): represents the east, Tsisnaasjini (Sacred Mountain of the East: Mt. Blanca, near Alamosa in the San Luis Valley, Colo.), spring, day, dawn of life (birth/emergence)

·   blue (criscola): south, Tsoodzil (Sacred Mountain of the South: Mt. Taylor, north of Laguna, N.M.), summer, dawn, youth

·   yellow (ochre): west, Doko’oosliid (Sacred Mountain of the West: San Francisco Peaks, near Flagstaff, Ariz.), autumn/fall, dusk, maturity

·   black (magnetite): north, Dibé Nitsaa (Sacred Mountain of the North: Mt. Hesperus, La Plata Mountains, Colo.), winter, night, death

·   red (sandstone): sunshine, the spiritual life

 

When the sandpainting is completed right before noon, the healing ceremony begins as the hataali blesses the painting by sprinkling cornmeal on it in the four cardinal directions: east, south, west, and north (always following the ceremonial progression echoing the path of the sun). This brings the figures to life and attracts the Holy People depicted to look at their portraits. They imbue the painting with their power and strength. The person for whom the ritual is performed sits in the middle of the painting facing east and accompanied by singing, prayer, and ritual, the healer-chanter applies sands from the painted figures to parts of the patient’s body in the ceremonial sequence: feet, legs, body, and head. This identifies the one-sung-over with the Holy People in the painting, making the bik’i nahagha strong and immune to further harm like the spirits themselves and transfers the illness from the patient into the painting. In fact, the person in need of healing is turned into a Holy Person for a time and shares their power, replacing evil with good. This acquired power is dangerous and could harm others until it’s removed by prayer and other post-ceremonial procedures.

 

When the healing ceremony is completed, the one-sung-over leaves the hogan.  The painting has been destroyed in the process of applying the sands from the images in it to the healing subject, but the hochxo that caused the sick person’s illness has now infected the sands.  Because the powers manifest in the sands are unsafe if handled improperly, when the cure is complete they’re removed and returned to nature.  The singer obliterates the now-defaced painting and the hazardous sand is taken from the hogan before sunset and returned to the desert to the north where it can’t do any harm. 

 

When the Holy People taught the legendary heroes how to make the sacred paintings, they prohibited the people to make permanent copies of the pictures to prevent damage or contamination.  As a consequence, there are no actual sandpaintings that survive the ritual.  (In the 1930s, Navajo singer Hosteen Klah, 1867-1937, defied custom and wove a number of rugs using sandpaintings as motifs.  Though some Navajo even today see this as a sacrilege, Klah's hope was that this would be a way to record the tradition for posterity.)  The only renderings I’ve ever seen are either photos—mostly old ones, and therefore black and white or sepia, by anthropologists since taking pictures at the ceremony today is frowned upon (no permanent reproduction, remember)—or non-ceremonial replicas made as art and sealed in some kind of preservative gel or plastic treatment to keep them intact.  These aesthetic versions, much smaller than real ones, are sanitized of any spiritually powerful imagery and display little more than pretty colors for tourists and the curious like me.  The authenticity of the iconography is clearly suspect (for art objects and museum demonstrations, the painter often makes small, deliberate errors such as transposing colors or leaving out a figure so as not to offend the spirits), but combining in my mind’s eye the colors from the artificial paintings with the images of old photos have given me a vague idea of what a ritual sandpainting might look like.  

 

To the outsider like me, the paintings are little more than highly stylized, brilliantly colored, delicate images, however aesthetically stunning.  With some knowledge of Navajo heroes, legends, and creation story, someone like me might recognize some of the symbols and the references to the narrative, but to a Navajo, the paintings are said to be full of symbolically depicted movement and action.  The sand art has no aesthetic value for the Navajo who have no interest in preserving the paintings or reproducing them for artistic appreciation.  In the words of Frank Waters, a writer of Indian (Cheyenne) heritage himself and a chronicler in both non-fiction and fiction of Native American culture and life in the Four Corners, as an art form, Navajo sandpaintings are “perhaps the most transient the world has known.  They do not last a full day.”  (For more on Waters, see “Frank Waters,” posted on ROT on 4 May 2012.)  To Euro-American eyes, however, they’re unequalled on the continent:

 

No other indigenous American art surpasses it in unique technique, in purity of style and emotional depth.  Beside it primitive and pseudo-primitive art shows itself to be only crude and undeveloped.  Modern abstractions seem childish.  For these sand-paintings, so highly developed and rigidly stylized, are abstractions as pure as any ever known.  Always symmetrical, equated to the four directions and perfectly balanced with the four primary colors, they are strikingly original designs of form and color whose origin can be felt as far as they can be seen.  They are more sophisticated than the latest importations from the Beaux Arts of Paris and the newest innovations seen in the exclusive ateliers of Fifty-seventh Street.  And yet they are realistic pictures so childlike, simple, and direct that they defy description.

 

HEALING CHANTS

 

Sand-painting is only one part of the Navajo healing ceremonials that also include singing, dancing, pollen blessings, pressing of prayer bundles to the head and body of the patient, drinking herbal infusions, face-painting, masking, sweat baths, offerings, and prayer chants, among other ritual activities.  During these rites, music, theater, dance, poetry, and the graphic arts are brought together to prevent danger and restore hozho for the one-sung-over, everyone present, and for the whole Navajo people.  For the Navajo, the ceremonial sings have two main goals: purification—removing what are referred to as “ugly things”: ridding the bik’i nahagha and the community of an object, creature, or spirit that has infected them—and identification with the Holy People to promote spiritual harmony (hozho) between the patient and the natural and supernatural world around her or him.  Purification occurs from sweating, emesis, eating sacred food or herbal medicine, and ritual bathing; identification happens through the chants, sandpaintings, masking and body-painting, medicine bundles and prayer sticks, and other ritual actions. 

 

Among the Diné, singing and ritual are major parts of everyday living.  The Navajo have ritual songs for every life event: house-building, travel, the harvest, birth, marriage, illness, and death.  In the healing ceremonials, song, dance, and pantomime combine to make simple dramas—like most Native American cultures, the Navajo don’t have a traditional form of theater.  They didn’t have a written language, either (alphabets were invented for some Indian tongues in the 19th and 20th centuries), so the ritual songs and the ceremonies that go with them comprise a series of what Frank Waters called  “myth-dramas” which are passed orally from one generation to the next to preserve the legends and traditional history of the tribe.  The texts of the chants are long, epic passages about the legendary heroes, Holy People, and yei of the Navajo people.  Put together, all these separate sagas, each of which tells part of the Navajo evolutionary story, combine to depict the creation myth of the Diné.  These myth-based dramas are a kind of mystery or miracle play, but they don’t merely perpetuate the mythological history of the Diné.  They also inculcate the fundamental truths of Navajo religion and philosophy, not unlike the medieval morality plays of Europe or the myths of Greece, Egypt, and India, only in the vernacular of the Navajo tradition.  Waters expounded his own observations:

 

There is a great difference between such mystery plays and the European morality plays as we know them.  Navaho ceremonialism is not concerned with morality   But it is concerned with the fact that the deeds of individuals are not confined to their own spheres of social action; they vitally affect the earth, the waters, the mountains—the whole web of life.  Nor is the influence of a character restricted to the term of his physical life.  It continues through his ghost to be a psychical force.  This interrelation of parts within the solidarity of the whole living universe, the psychic effects resulting from physical causes, the correspondence of inner and outer forms of life, and the continuance of causal action through the realms of life and death, all combine to give meaning and validity to the sings as profound mysteries.

 

The chants, however, are also important for quotidian communal and tribal life.  They are enormous social events when the far-flung tribe comes together by the thousands.  (The Navajo Nation, the reservation in northeastern Arizona, southeastern Utah, and northwestern New Mexico, is a little under 25,000 square miles, the area of West Virginia.  There are over 300,000 enrolled members of the Navajo tribe, about 175,000 of whom live in the Navajo Nation.)  Between the ceremonial events, there are open meetings to discuss matters affecting the whole community and, during some chantways, young Navajos are initiated into the tribe.  A pervasive atmosphere of friendliness suffuses the community; everyone, even traditional enemies, is welcome and both public and private wrongs are forgotten for the duration of the ceremony.  It’s a time when Navajos share thoughts, gifts, and food with family, friends, strangers, and the spirits alike and a sense of generosity and hospitality pervades the Navajo Nation.  Celebrants say prayers for all Diné and even for Anglos (that is, anyone who’s neither Indian nor Hispanic) and Latinos.  All Navajos try to mend their spiritual connection to the Holy People and they pray for rain, crops, health, and general prosperity.  As the singers entreat:

 

In beauty (happiness) may I dwell.

In beauty may I walk.

In beauty may my male kindred dwell.

In beauty may my female kindred dwell.

 

But the sings are more than rituals and community gatherings; they’re great fairs, social events where friends and family exchange gossip, and renew their tribal commonality.  For every Indian child growing up in the Four Corners, they have the same allure as the county fair holds for a farm kid and a street fair has for a city child.  Alongside the solemn prayers and sacred songs and dances, there are gambling, games, horse racing, and great feasts.  Low humor and feats of daring are established parts of the ceremony.  Because their basic purpose is creating happiness, the clowns, also known as “delight makers,” have broad leeway for their antics.  Throughout the long, somber ritual, the clowns might satirize the visiting dignitaries (even from the Anglo world) or even the dancers themselves.  Other entertainers swallow arrows or perform a fire dance in which young men leap through flames and bathe each other in flaming torches.  The Navajo have the reputation for being great magicians and there are magical performances which have a serious religious foundation: the hataali does a solo dance with an enchanted feather that floats opposite him and another performer makes a yucca plant sprout, grow, bloom, and wither within a half an hour.  Later, when the children have been initiated into the tribal secrets and the boys can participate in the rituals of the sings, the childhood sense of celebration and delight never completely leaves them. 

 

The Navajo chantways are, above all, solemn religious ceremonies the main purpose of which is to heal the bik’i nahagha, who, with his family, pays all the expenses of the ceremonial.  (This includes the hataali, who gets a fee of from $500 to $1000 for a nine-night rite.)  That intention overrides all the others in the end.  By far the largest group of chantways is used for curing or preventing illness and for each physical or mental disorder there’s an appropriate healing ceremonial.  For instance, the two-night Blessingway ceremony, whose narrative recounts the Navajo story of creation after emergence (the arrival of the Diné on the Earth’s surface from the underworld), prevents disharmony and disorder and preserves hozho, or blessing.  Other chantways fall into three procedural patterns: Lifeway, used to treat injuries resulting from accidents (and usually simpler than other sings); Evilway, intended to exorcise indigenous ghosts (there is a specific sing, Enemyway, for dispelling the ghost of an outsider such as an Anglo or some other non-Navajo like a member of some other Indian tribe) and combating the effects of witchcraft; and Holyway, directed at the Holy People and concerned with the attraction of good and the restoration of the patient.  Most chants are performed according to Holyway rituals, which may be two, five, or nine nights long, frequently ending in a night-long sing on the last night. 

 

The hataali, who spends his life learning the tribe’s rituals as well as the healing properties of the plants and minerals in the Four Corners, is considered a man of great spirituality.  He’s a combination of priest; cantor and choir director; physician, especially diagnostician; psychiatrist; and showman and stage magician.  His ability to conduct each of the ceremonials, every last detail of which he must know perfectly by heart, comes from years of study and training at the feet of his predecessor.  As with the sandpaintings, there are no records of the texts and procedures of a chantway; the healer learned what he knows the same way he teaches it to his helpers and apprentices, a position that’s assumed in childhood and is a lifelong pursuit: by oral transmission.  Just as a skilled hataali probably only knows some few dozen painting patterns, however, he may know a handful of chant ceremonies, each of which may include hundreds of songs, from each type, perhaps two or three from the shorter, simpler rites and one or two each from the longer, more complex ones like the nine-night Nightway chant, arguably the best known beyond the tribe because of the spectacular dances and stirring singing of the last night and public performances of the dances as demonstrations outside of ceremonial practice.  In the Nightway chant alone, there are over four hundred songs, plus the sandpaintings, dances, and all the ritualistic details of the masks, prayer sticks, and other ceremonial trappings. 

 

Each chant is concerned with the source of a specific disease or complex of diseases, such as eye, ear, and throat trouble; paralysis; distortion of the limbs; mental disturbances; and even bad dreams or “a troubled spirit.”  The ceremonial is intended to exorcise the underlying spiritual cause rather than to treat the physical symptoms of the illness itself, as in Western medicine.  One way to see the difference is that Western treatments cure the disease while the Navajo cures heal the patient.  The hataali determines what the origin of an individual ailment is, though certain circumstances are believed more likely to cause particular conditions, then selects the chant most closely associated with that imbalance.  (Chants traditionally offered for specific illnesses may be used for others if the hataali determines the etiologies are related.)  One chant (as transcribed by Washington Matthews, 1843-1905, an ethnographer and linguist known for his studies of Native Americans, especially the Navajo) gives an idea of the breadth of the curing powers of the sing:

 

My feet restore for me.

My legs restore for me.

My body restore for me.

My mind restore for me.

My voice restore for me.

 

While the hataali diagnoses the condition and chooses the appropriate chant, he may only provide what the patient requests.  The patient also decides what parts of the ceremony should be performed before the public on the final night of the rite—if any: the patient may choose to have a closed ceremony with no public exhibition.  So along with initiating the healing to start with, the one-sung-over has considerable control over its shape as well.

 

The sings usually take place in a ceremonial hogan, which is round like the horizon.  (Most hogans are also domed, which seems sky-like to me, though I’ve never read that symbolism anywhere.  It may, indeed, be insignificant since the Navajo, like many Indian cultures, believe that life began beneath the Earth’s surface and that the spirits live below rather than in a heaven above.  Among the Pueblos, who share many beliefs and practices with the Navajo—sand-painting is, in fact, a Pueblo practice that the Navajos refined—and the Hopi, the place through which both human souls and spiritual beings emerge is called the sipapu.)  Movement during a ritual, just as it is in sand-painting, is always in the direction the sun travels: east to south to west to north.  Men sit on the south side of the hogan; women sit on the north side.  Prayer sticks and other offerings are placed in the east and items that were pressed against the patient in order to remove evil are placed in the north.

 

Healing ceremonies usually last from one to nine nights, but the duration of a sing isn’t really fixed since a curing ceremonial continues as long as necessary to treat the patient.  Partial sings, a single event, or a few rituals from a chantway taking a few hours of a day or night may be performed as a kind of diagnostic to see if the bik’i nahagha benefits, then the entire ceremonial may be given for him or her.  Traditionally, a sing that’s cured a patient is performed four times.  The repetition of a sing, however, may be extended over many years or omitted altogether.  Failure to cure the patient is attributed to misdiagnosis and selecting the wrong ceremony.  Even tiny mistakes in the correct chant can damage its therapeutic effectiveness.  Certain rituals may only be performed at particular times of the year.  No Navajo believer will even sing songs from such a chant out of season for fear that bad fortune will befall him like being bitten by a snake or struck by lightning.  (In many Indian religions, the words of the rituals alone are considered so powerful that merely uttering them, even by an outsider and out of context, has potentially perilous consequences.  Chantway songs performed as demonstrations are, therefore, sanitized of their spiritual content, just as sandpaintings created for museum displays are, so as not to anger the gods.)

 

The procedure varies somewhat depending on which healing chant is being performed, of course, but a general pattern holds.  A typical sing starts at sundown the first evening with the consecration of the hogan. The participants include the singer and his assistants, the one-sung-over, members of the patient’s family, friends of the patient, and, of course, the Holy People; the public comes only to the last night of the sing.  In a nine-night ceremonial, the first night then includes one or two hours of singing and ritual.  Before sunrise on the first four mornings, when sandpaintings will be made, a ceremony announces to both humans and Holy People that a rite will be performed in the hogan.  The early hours of those days are devoted to sweat and emetic rites to expel evil and cleanse both the patient and all participants.  On the first four afternoons, prayer sticks are made, prayed over, and then placed at designated points to compel the Holy People to attend the ceremony.  At dawn on the fifth day, the hataali lays out the contents of his medicine bundle, praying over each object, and the one-sung-over touches each of them as they are placed on the altar.  The Navajo healing chants, like the sandpaintings, are transformative and these are ritual articles that will be pressed against the patient’s body during the cure to transform the one-sung-over into a Holy Person temporarily.  On each of the next four days, a sandpainting is made inside the hogan and the one-sung-over undergoes a ritual bath to purify him further.  When the painting is finished around noon, the sandpainting rite is performed.

 

A typical Holyway chant, the dominant type, consists of about a dozen ritual events separated by interludes (during which various communal activities may take place).  Certain procedures occur throughout all chants, most importantly, the singing led by the hataali but joined by all (usually men) who know how.  The singing, which accompanies nearly every Navajo ritual act and without which there can’t be a cure, continues every night during the rite, getting longer each night.  At intervals, prayers are offered.  On the final night, the singing lasts until dawn, summarizing all the purification, invocation, attraction of power, and identification of the preceding rites.  Throughout the vigil the patient concentrates on all the singing and ritual.  Early in the morning on the last day of the cure, the patient’s relatives help him shampoo his hair, bathe his body in suds made from yucca roots, and dry himself with ritually-ground cornmeal.  Then the singer paints the patient’s body from head to toe with symbolic designs to identify the one-sung-over further with the Holy People, as a mark of recognition for them and a guard against further danger, and ties symbolic tokens in his hair.   As the final dance begins, the yei enter, each shaking a gourd rattle in his right hand and holding two eagle feathers in his left.  These are masked dancers who personate the yei spirits, chanting an eerie song described as “piercingly powerful” with “hypnotic power” as the performers are “displaying almost acrobatic feats of bounding back and forth between octaves.”  (Yei interchangeably refers to the dancers, whose masks echo the colors and designs of the figures depicted in the sandpaintings; their dance; and the gods who live in rocks, caves, mountains, canyons, and are etiological factors in the bik’i nahagha’s condition.  The yei, who are speechless Holy People, are believed to visit the homes of sick people and perform over them to remove the cause of the illness.)  The public is admitted only to this culmination of all the sacred  ritualism of the preceding days and nights, considered the most dramatic of the Navajo rites, and visitors from all over come to share in the curative effects and the beauty of the pageant.  Clyde Kluckhohn (1905-60), an American anthropologist known for his field work among the Navajo, has described the peak of the “splendid public ritual” of the Mountainway sing, another nine-night ceremony which is, “if anything, more spectacular” than the more popular Nightway:

 

By the ninth day a huge crown has gathered and horses and covered wagons and (today) automobiles encircle the communal cooking shelter, and the  ceremonial hogan, the area in front of which has been leveled for the public exhibition.  All afternoon at isolated spots in the timber little groups gather to rehearse the ah leel, the vaudeville acts of the evening.  The performers are watched and encouraged by neighbors and relatives.  Meanwhile men and boys are cutting, hauling, and piling cedar and juniper for the great fires and to form the enormous corral with which the evening’s rituals will take place.

 

Just as the last lights flicker on the mesa, the song-priest marches around the corral, sprinkling meal and pollen and chanting prayers of consecration.  The waiting crowd throngs into the enclosure, carrying blankets and babies, coffee pots and food.  Complete darkness falls, and the tension grows momentarily more expectant.  At last the great piles are lighted.  Flames soar.  The heat scorches and the retreating spectators pack themselves close against the tree limbs which form the enclosure.  While the heat is still intense, the twelve Turn-to-White dancers rush in, their staves tipped with white eagle down.  They are twirling their staves tipped with white eagle down.  They are stripped to the g-string, but their bodies are plastered with white clay.  Nearer and nearer they circle to the blaze.  At last one dancer gets the tip of his stave in the fire.  “Turn to white!” shouts the crowd and he, quickly sliding the ring concealed in his hands down his stave, triumphantly exhibits the feathers that have just sprouted to replace those which were burned off.

 

There follows a series of ah leel.  A man rubs his hands, producing a sparkling, crackling flame; a turtle climbs a tree; there is the arrow-swallowing dance; feathers rise out of a basket and dance in the air before a young girl; green corn grows and yucca blossom, though it is December.  The plumed arrow dance is given by different teams to the whizzing of the bullroarer (which the Navajos call the “groaning stick”).  Here too, as in the Night Chant, there are elements of comic relief.  A dirty old man enters, stumbles about in the manner of the “low comedy”, disappears, reappears with a strapping man dressed as an hideous old crone.

 

As the first rays of the sun appear in the east on the last night, the rite culminates with an all-night singing of the dawn songs.  When the final song is completed, the patient leaves the hogan, faces east, and “breathes in the dawn” four times.  The healing ends with a prayer and a song to prevent bad aftereffects from any mistakes during the chant.  Following each ceremony, experienced assistants dispose of everything that served its purpose during the sing, just like the sand from the paintings.   For four days after the ritual, just as he must during the process, the one-sung-over observes numerous behavioral constraints such a ban on bathing to preserve the body paint, sexual continence, and, because he now possesses the powers of the Holy People and is therefore dangerous, care in everything he does so he doesn’t harm anyone. 

 

Washington Matthews summed up the Navajo healing ceremony:  “One idea the hymnist seeks to express is, that the gods, in response to prayer and sacrifice, descend from their lofty homes to cure the patient, and when they do so, assure the patient that his body is holy, i.e., that he is cured.”  Or, in the words of another song:

 

With beauty all around me, I walk.

 

 

Fritz Scholder

[I recently published “’May You Be Blessed With Light’: The Zuni Shalako Rite” (22 October 2010) which caught the attention of Jordan Richman, a retired professor who lives in Phoenix. Richman, who did his doctoral work at the University of New Mexico, was good enough to repost the article on his blog Art Legends (http://www.artlegends.org), which features some posts dedicated to Native American culture. One of the posted items was a self-portrait and other paintings by Fritz Scholder (1937-2005), an American Indian artist in whom my family and I have had an interest for some time. Back in 2008, my mother and I went to a retrospective of his work at the National Museum of the American Indian, both the New York segment of the exhibit at the New York City satellite down at Bowling Green and, later, the larger part at the NMAI on the Mall in Washington. Fritz Scholder: Indian/Not Indian ran from 1 November 2008 until 17 May 2009 in New York and 16 August in Washington. Here’s the report on those visits I wrote two years ago.]

On 30 November 2008, the Sunday after Thanksgiving, during an all-day drizzle here, Mom and I trucked down to the National Museum of the American Indian on Bowling Green. (It's now an annex of the main NMAI on the National Mall, but until that museum was opened in 2004, the George Gustav Heye Center was the NMAI, installed in the handsome Beaux Arts Alexander Hamilton Customs House in 1994.) NMAI was holding a two-part exhibit/retrospective of the work of Fritz Scholder, half here in New York and half in Washington; the smaller half here focused on Scholder's painting and sculpture of the 1980s and '90s when he concentrated on non-Indian subjects, including his "mystery woman," a recurring subject, as well as mythical and supernatural figures. Scholder’s an artist in whom my mother has a special interest, having first seen his work with my dad in Santa Fe at the artist's studio there and then again in Dallas, where they bought Another Mystery Woman (c. 1987), a bronze sculpture that’s one of his Mystery Woman series.

Fritz Scholder is, himself, something of a curious character quite aside from his art, which has always been controversial both among the art establishment and among Native Americans. He was born in Minnesota to an Anglo mother and a father who was half German-American and half Luiseño Indian; Scholder’s a member of the Luiseño tribe of Southern California, though he’s said that you can't be something when it's only a quarter of your heritage. Scholder grew up ambivalent about his Indian heritage; in fact, it was hardly mentioned in his home when he was growing up. His father was an administrator of Bureau of Indian Affairs schools but the family lived off the reservation and Fritz went to public schools instead of the BAI schools his father had attended. Scholder said of his father's attitude toward his native heritage that the elder Scholder "was the product of the old Indian schools—he was ashamed of being an Indian." (He also spoke of the Indian schools as being a brainwashing tool used by the Anglo society to erase Native American culture and language and turn Indians into Anglos. That's exactly what they were: their very philosophy was to assimilate the Indian students. It nearly worked, too.) The artist recounted that at their wedding, his mother and father had been given many Indian crafts, such as Maria Martinez pottery (very beautiful black-on-black, very famous, and very valuable), baskets, robes, and blankets, as wedding gifts, but that his father had thrown them all out.

So Scholder grew up essentially denying his own Indian heritage, and though he was determined to become an artist from an early age (his talent was first recognized as early as 1955), he was also determined not to paint Indians. In 1967, he broke his pledge, however, when he saw how badly the Indian was portrayed in art, even Indian art, and his earliest Indian works were immediately controversial for their break with the traditional view of Native Americans in art and their gritty and sometimes seamy portraits of his own people. That year, with Indian No. 16, a featureless Indian with a firm question mark floating over his headdress, “[P]eople just freaked out,” said the artist. “I knew they would.” After Scholder achieved considerable recognition, even if he was viewed as an iconoclast and rebel, in the Southwest, where he had settled, the artist decided he needed to be received by the Eastern art world in order to be a true success. After sojourns and exhibits around the world in places as exotic as Romania, Egypt (where he painted the Sphinx and the pyramids), and Paris, he moved to New York City in 1982 (he lived in the East Village) and vowed again never to paint Indians. For nearly a decade, Scholder kept to other subjects for his work—those "mystery woman" depictions and figures of myth and the spirit world—until he again turned to Indian portrayals in the 1990s, acknowledging that one should never make pledges of that nature. Hence the title for this two-part exhibit: Fritz Scholder: Indian/Not Indian. It alludes to both the man and his work.

Whether painting (he did few sculptures, and they’re often renditions of subjects he was painting) Indians, the "mystery woman," vampires, animals, or fallen angels, Scholder's art is frequently decidedly eerie and disturbing, albeit brightly colored. The painting that was the emblem for the New York exhibit, Purgatory (1996), one of the three-part series that also includes Heaven and Hell (all displayed on three walls of the same small gallery), is a large (almost 7'x6') bust of a man in a black shirt with a purple tie, wearing a pillbox hat that looks like a black fez. The figure's face is frightening, like something from an old horror movie (think Boris Karloff in The Mummy), set in a grimace revealing a row of sharp, dripping teeth. (Another of Scholder's recurring subjects is the vampire.) The face is half shadowed, but the eye in the light half, though blue, is obscured and dark as if the socket were excessively deep, while the eye in the dark half of the face stares out brightly with a dark iris surrounded by a white cornea. The subject of all three paintings in the series was identified as the artist, who made a self-portrait every year, often on his birthday. Though not all Scholder's work is so threatening, this was the impression his retrospective gave even as there were pleasanter images among the pieces on display. Scholder said he didn't like pretty pictures (a sentiment echoed by Joan Miró when he quoted Rembrandt: "I find rubies and emeralds in a dung heap"—cited at the exhibit of the Spanish surrealist's work at MoMA which I saw at this time also).

Later, I went to Washington for two weeks at the end of the year. We drove down to the Mall to see the larger half of the two-part Scholder show at NMAI on Monday afternoon, 22 December, the day after I arrived in town. As you recall, the works exhibited at the Heye Center focused on the period when Scholder worked out of New York City and painted non-Indian subjects. The exhibit in Washington was larger and while it covered the whole of Scholder's career, from his teenage start in abstract expressionism to his late works, it was dominated by the artist's paintings of Indian subjects, the work that made him famous and successful—if also controversial. From the very start, Scholder worked in bright, often dissonant colors; pinks, oranges, blues, yellows blast out from his canvases whether they’re the youthful experimentations of his teens and early twenties or the figurative works of his middle career. His earliest works, which clearly owe a debt to such abstractionists as Roberts Rauschenberg and Motherwell (and maybe Richard Diebenkorn), are broad swatches of color on large canvases. Scholder studiously avoided figurative painting in his early years, and the works have an air of deliberation and derivation that felt to me like a young artist consciously searching for a medium that could be his, but not having found it yet. (I once saw a small show of Diego Rivera's cubist works that felt the same way—like he was trying out stuff that wasn't really "him" yet.) Scholder named Francisco Goya, Edvard Munch, and Francis Bacon as some of his influences. Ironically, after breaking his (first) vow never to paint Indians, he seemed immediately to have come into his own when he began to do so. He not only had found the style he’d manifest for the rest of his career—what I have to call "abstract impressionism," though I don't know that any such form officially exists—but he had something to say. (It’s what he seemed to have to say that made him controversial among both artists/critics and Native Americans.) He was commenting on both the world of Native Americans—their contemporary lives—and the ways in which Indians had been (and were being) depicted in American art, including Native American art. Scholder's Indian paintings seem to have fallen into three vague categories, at least as I observed them. In one, he painted the Indians he saw on the streets and in the bars of Santa Fe or Tucson; in another, he parodied, deconstructed, or travestied the conventional artistic view of Indians from the 19th century to the late 20th—those Remington depictions of the Noble Savage, for instance; and in a third, he presented what might be interpreted as a combination of these in renderings of old photographs of Indians taken in the early years of the last century, often by anthropologists and sociologists. We know from the New York City exhibit that Scholder eschewed "pretty pictures," but his Indian paintings were often also unflattering as well. His contemporary portraits included drunken Indians or Indians asleep on the sidewalk, sprawled against a storefront—the men (there are almost no women among these pictures) he saw around him. (His most iconic work is Indian with Beer Can, 1969, a man in a wide-brimmed, black cowboy hat and sunglasses, slouching over a bar with a can of Coors at his elbow, his mask-like face baring pointed, feral teeth.) The Indian communities didn't appreciate this kind of truthful art—what van Gogh called l’art véridique.

Scholder's ambivalence about painting Indians is certainly understandable from his background, but it has to be said that not only are his Indian paintings the foundation of his reputation, they’re also by far the most interesting work of his career. Ironically, it was his students at the Institute of American Indian Art in Santa Fe who turned him onto Indian paintings. Though he had abjured the subject for himself, the young artists he was teaching were exploring different ways to depict their own people and this intrigued Scholder. Artistically, emotionally, and intellectually, they’re the most complex of his works.

[A little history of NMAI: George Gustav Heye opened his private Museum of the American Indian to the public in 1922 to house and display his own collection of Native American art. He’d started collecting in 1903 and he established the Heye Foundation in 1916 to oversee it and promote the study of Indian art and culture. The museum was located at 155th Street and Broadway in Harlem until it had been acquired by the Smithsonian Institution and moved to the Custom House in 1994. The Smithsonian took over Heye’s museum in 1989 and then opened the main building for the National Museum of the American Indian on the National Mall in 2004. The Heye Center, now a satellite of the larger NMAI, maintains its own permanent collection (based on Heye’s original holdings) and exhibits.

[As it happens, the Heye Center’s just undergone a reorganization. Housed in the 1907 Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House in lower Manhattan, it’s redesigned the exhibition for its permanent collection. I haven’t seen the new installation, but since the old one was interesting as it was, I can only recommend that anyone even remotely interested in the art of the American Indian, much of which is breathtakingly beautiful and all of which is eye-opening, pay a visit to this little-known museum at the southern tip of the island. It’s free (as are all Smithsonian facilities) and open every day (including Mondays, the traditional dark day for museums, and holidays except Christmas Day). The Customs House alone is worth the trip—it’s a magnificent Beaux Arts building in its own right, a Historic Landmark, and serves as a perfect example of terrific re-use of historic architecture.

[Thanks to Jordan Richman both for his compliment of republishing my Shalako article on Art Legends and for providing the impetus to publish this report on a fascinating American artist on ROT.]