Gender and Native American Art

American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 2009

Oklahoma Indian Women and Their Art, 1993

The art works of Oklahoma Indian women have received no attention as a category in this century or in any other—no specific study describes the collective effect of these women upon the visual arts or their corresponding aesthetics. This work is a beginning step towards filling that void. Questions to be addressed are: What are the cultural values and corresponding aesthetics of Oklahoma Indian women artists? What were and are the influences on Indian women during this century which have impacted and shaped their lives? What has their collective contribution to their past, present, and future environments. Ultimately, the factor which determine the assessment are the women's sense of beauty and the cultural values placed other art by the community of which they are a part.

The Question of Gender: Joan W. Scott's Critical Feminism, edited Judith Butler and Elisabeth Weed (Bloomington, University of Indiana Press, 2011), 161-86, 2011

Katsi George left her reservation to go to university when she was eighteen. She decided to study art because she had always had a passion for making things. As a teenager she had worked with her grandmother and uncles gathering and preparing basket materials so that her grandmother could supplement the family income by making baskets. She also worked with one of her grandmother's sisters learning to bead the edges of leggings and skirts worn for ceremonies in the longhouse. While she was still in high school, because it was clear that she had the interest and patience, she began to work making husk dolls in traditional dress and then gajesa or Husk Faces for use in the longhouse. She loved making things that were used to keep the cultural life of the people alive. She also loved to draw and paint pictures that made references to traditional stories handed down for generations. Her interest in making things made art seem like the perfect choice for a major in college. As a freshman student, Katsi was advised to take a 3 credit course called Introductory Design for Art Majors and another called Introduction to the History of Western Art along with three other courses to satisfy her general education requirements. She found these classes interesting, but it was clear that none of her courses related to her cultural life or the values she had learned on the reservation. In her Introductory Design course, all of her assignments, while they taught her skills in a variety of art media, did not allow her space to use the media she had learned growing up at home. Indeed, she was told for the first time in her life that basket making and beadworking were considered crafts and were valued less than painting and sculpture. She was given an assignment to draw a paper bag, and several to do various types of figure drawing. She did twenty, five-minute, ink paintings of a towering still life set up on a table, and a detailed, forty minute pencil drawing of a surreal still life built in a box and lit so that objects cast strong dramatic shadows. Other assignments taught her to design a series of small abstract sculptures out of paper, cardboard, and various odd blocks of wood. She was instructed to glue the blocks to one another and to a base and to paint her composition in a single color. She also learned about perspective, and did a drawing of a hall in the art building that used a vanishing point. Finally, she did a series of abstract color studies. She did not find the assignments difficult, and generally got A's on her assignments and praise from her professors. There was, however, no space to produce works that thematically related to her culture, and she really missed the connections she had experienced between her artwork and her culture when she was living with her family. 1 Gail Tremblay is a Member of the Faculty at The Evergreen State College and a member of the Onadoga tribe. Copyright held by The Evergreen State College. Please use appropriate attribution when using and quoting this cases. Cases are available at the Enduring Legacies Native Cases website at: www.evergreen.edu/tribal/cases. All images are used with permission of the artists.

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In assessing the state of the field of contemporary American Indian art, the most astounding discovery I have made thus far is that it is not a “field” as far as “TheArt Bulletin” is concerned. There are four “Art Bulletin” categories into which contemporary American Indian art might fall: Art of the United States, Contemporary Art, Art of the Twentieth Century, and Native American Art. However, the only category that Art Bulletin seems comfortable placing contemporary American Indian art is Native American Art, even though the span of Native American art in total can be tens of thousands of years. This might lead one to assume that contemporary American Indian art is not a legitimate category that deserves its own space at all, but I will put forth that it is indeed, and one to which more than a dozen academics have been contributing solid material for over a decade. One possible reason for the ambiguity of this subject may be as simple as the broader field of art history not having created a space for it yet, and there are probably many reasons for not settling on a single category yet, which could possibly lie in our discomfort with where to place American Indians as persons. Nevertheless, I leave it to actual art historians to sort out the reasons for the omission. However, this difficulty is one that rests solely within the field of art history, and not with the authors who have been writing about the Native Americans who have been making contemporary art for quite some time now. It is my hope that this paper will not only assist in establishing a solid and clearly defined space in the field of art history for contemporary American Indian art, but will also provide a thorough overview as to the scholarship contained within the field.

2019

This seminar examines the changing conceptualizations and theorizations of gender and sex in the contemporary artistic practices of the Americas. Crucial to the constitution of both individual and collective identity, for contemporary artists gender and sexuality have become primary sites to rethink and reinvent the paradigms of self-expression, creativity, and art-making, and to challenge and contest the (social) body politics at large. We will explore these practices through the prism of the evolution of the notions of gender and sex in a broad range of disciplines during the key historical moments such as the emergence of second-wave feminism and gay rights' movement, critique of "mainstream" feminism by the feminists of color, AIDS crisis, and rise of postmodernist and queer theories, among others. We will pay special attention to the intersections of gender and sexuality with race and class, particularly germane in context of the ideologies of progress and development, and the shifts in capitalism during the last fifty years. Finally, we will probe how the notions of gender and sex have been deployed to reconsider and problematize the established art historical canons. Weekly readings and leading class discussion will guide you in crafting a research paper proposal and its development (in consultation with the instructor). Artists pursuing an MFA degree who participate in the seminar are invited to contextualize their own practice through a similar project and an accompanying research-based statement.

2006

Este ensayo analiza la evolucion del arte americano realizado por mujeres en un periodo que cobre desde las primeras decadas hasta el final del siglo xx. La primera artista que se estudia es Georgia O'Keefe, quien se convirtio en simbolo de la mujer artista y en un modelo a seguir por su relacion con las cuestiones de genero durante la segunda mitad de ese siglo. La fotografa Diane Arbus representa a la generacion prefeminista que aparecio tras las ss Guerra Mundial, mientras que la pintora Judy Chicago fue una pionera de lo que se deonmino como la Segunda Ola Feminista en los anos sesenta. Otras artistas calificadas como posrfeministas a pattir de los anos ochenta, como la escultora Maya Lin, Cindy Shermao y la fotografa Sally Mano, se han manifestado a traves de nuevas sensibilidades en cuanto al genero y han llevado a cabo practicas artisticas diferentes a las generaciones anteriores