Scott, Sascha T.. Paintings of Pueblo Indians and the politics of preservation in the American southwest. Retrieved from https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/T3571CCX
DescriptionThis dissertation investigates paintings of Pueblo Indians produced in the 1920s. Painted at a time when the federal policy of assimilation was being vigorously contested, many of these images are imbued with a preservationist perspective. Artists, such as Marsden Hartley, John Sloan, and Ernest L. Blumenschein, struggled to find a new visual language for representing the Pueblo people, one that would correspond to their protests against assimilationist policy. Through the efforts of artists in favor of the preservation of American Indian culture, a new concept of "Indianness" was popularized. An anthropological perspective, or one that recorded the customs of "vanishing" Indians, was displaced by a subjective vision, which attempted to evoke the abstract qualities of contemporary Indian rituals, such as their rhythms, communalism, and connection to nature. This new visual language, with its ideological complexities and paradoxes, permeates Georgia O'Keeffe's paintings of Indian ceremonials.
A study of the extent to which artists' preservationist stance framed their view of Pueblo Indians, and the visual manifestation of this view in their art, enriches the discourse concerning the art of the Southwest by adding a critical interpretive layer.