Modern Native American Art: Angel DeCora's Transcultural Aesthetics
Angel DeCora was the best-known Native American artist of her generation but she is generally omitted from histories of “modern” Native American art. Working at a time when United States Indian policy was dedicated to eradicating Native identity, DeCora fought for the participation of Native Americans in modern American cultural and political life. This essay demonstrates the formal and conceptual modernity of DeCora's work. It explores her sophisticated engagement with contemporary social and aesthetic theory and argues that her paintings, illustrations, and designs draw on these ideas to represent the transcultural condition that defines modern Native American experience.
Subversive Beauty: Reading and Creating Culture
Subversive Beauty Reading and Creating Culture “...the world is a place where beauty and grace exist alongside sordidness and violenceand that it is on behalf of expanding the domain of the former that we denounce and resist the latter.” Paul Rogat Loeb The Impossible Will Take A Little While: A Citizen’s Guide To Hope In a Time Of Fear This thesis represents an exploration into the meaning of artifacts from the point of view that artifacts may be considered living testaments to the culture of a community and thereby become a source of revelation, knowledge, resistance, empowerment and
The American Image as Indian Princess 1765-1783
rom the moment when the New World first captured the European imagination, artists sought to personify the strange, portentious, new culture which came to be known as "America." Their efforts are well documented in the graphic and decorative arts. These arts reflect five stages in the evolution of the allegorical figure used to represent "America" and that part of America which became the United States. These stages may be assigned dates that are somewhat arbitrary but nonetheless reflect their principal period of development. During the first, from 1575 to 1765, the "America" symbolized in the arts was the entire western hemisphere conceived as one of "the four continents." Its emblem was an Indian Queen with the attributes of a Caribbean culture. From 1765 to 1783, "America" not only continued to signify one of "the four continents" but also came to denote the thirteen Atlantic seaboard colonies of Great Britain. Personified by an Indian Princess presented as the daughter of Britannia, her attributes now pertained to the American colonies. After 1783, this later "America" signified the independent United States of America and was represented until about 1815 by an Indian Princess whose attributes were the symbols of United States sovereignty. This third stage was overlapped by a fourth in which the Indian Princess gradually was metamorphosed into a Greek goddess. The fifth stage, in the early nineteenth century, saw both the Indian Princess and the Greek goddess replaced, in the popular arts, by the masculine figures of Brother Jonathan and Uncle Sam. The first stage of this development of the American image, the Indian Queen of "The Four Continents" theme, has been surveyed several times.' The rise of Uncle Sam has received enthusiastic treatment.2 The intervening chapters in the story of the American image have not been given the same attention. It is the purpose of this study to present some notes on the second stage, the American image as an Indian Princess from 1765 to 1783.