Oscar Howe

Thom and I met at the National Museum of the American Indian in Bowling Green for a long walk north along the East River.  Few places in New York City are as grand as the museum's lobby in the former Alexander Hamilton U. S. Custom House.  Reginald Marsh painted the murals that line the rotunda.  They depict the history of shipping in the ports of New York and New Jersey. 

When it comes to art appreciation, I take my marching orders from The New Yorker's  Peter Schjeldahl.  Dakota Modern:  The Art of Oscar Howe reminded me yet again how many talented men and women have painted in near obscurity, and how our relatively recent emphasis on the importance of representation has begun to change that, often posthumously.

"Dancers" (1969)

Howe couldn't win.  Although he began his career with work that reflected his Sioux roots, once he embraced abstraction--"not cubism," he insisted emphatically--galleries specializing in traditional Native American art refused to show his paintings while the rest of the art world pigeonholed him as a regional artist.

“Sioux Water Boy” (1939)

Howe ended up fulfilling commissions for the Works Progress Administration and teaching art at the University of South Dakota.  Although he died in 1983 his brightly colored paintings look remarkably contemporary.

"Day Figure of the Buffalo Dance" (1964)

"Ghost Dance" (1960)

"Courting" (1970)

Like Dali, Howe painted Jesus from a different perspective.

"Indian Christ" (1972)

It's a sad commentary on our nation's racist history that Native Americans fleeing massacres bring to mind hamsters going round and round on wheels in their cages.

"Fleeing A  Massacre" (1969) 

"Ceremonial Dancer" (1968)

"Cunka Wakan (Dakota Horse)" (1966)

Call me crazy, but I see our most disgraceful president in this eerie abstraction.  

"Abstraction After Wakapana" (1973)

It is my greatest hope that my paintings may serve to bring the best things of Indian culture into the  modern way of life.  Oscar Howe, 1970

 

DC Museum Marathon

Standing in line isn't my thing but I did it for more than an hour to see Barack and Michelle Obama at the National Portrait Gallery on President's Day.  Credit my lost time to the resistance.

President Barack Obama by Kehinde Wiley (2018)

Michelle La Vaughn Robinson Obama by Amy Sherald (2018)

From there I headed to the Mall, walking past the Newseum ("There's more to every story"), a privately funded institution that's rumored to be closing.    We've never needed to enshrine a free press more but a $25 admission charge is a tough sell in a city where most museums are free.

The US government has erected some gorgeous buildings in the nation's capital.

A rave review in The New Yorker of an exhibit sent me to the National Museum of the American Indian for the first time.

"Americans" most definitely didn't disappoint although it did make me feel deeply ashamed of my ignorance of our country's indigenous population.  The largest gallery depicts how Native Americans have been portrayed in popular culture.

They're found literally everywhere.

 

Even if they're portrayed by mostly white men in the movies.  I mean Elvis, maybe, but casting Joey Bishop as an Indian ("half brave and half chicken") in a Dean Martin turkey called Texas Across The River?  C'mon now!

Powerful machines and weapons have been named after Native Americans, too.

The exhibit explores three distinct themes, beginning with Little Big Horn which marked a major turning point in American history.  Despite the best efforts of a well-armed US military, the Indians, led by Crazy Horse, prevailed big time.  Victory instantly changed their stereotype in the public imagination from losers to winners.

Somehow General Custer ended up a "Happy Meal" toy at McDonalds' more than a century later.  Go figure!

But Native arts and crafts dominate much of the display.  It shocked me to realize I know more about ancient Egypt than I do the people who first settled the United States.

Look no further than appropriation of Native American lands by the federal government for evidence that money always trumps justice, even in a democracy.  Despite his oratorical skills, Opothle Yoholo, a Muscogee Creek Indian chief, couldn't prevent passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830.  He and members of his tribe were among the hundred thousand Native Americans who left behind a Trail of Tears when King Cotton forced tribes living in the southeastern United States west of the Mississippi.

The uplifting but phony tale of Pocahontas illuminates 500 years of white myth making.   This sculpture depicts the barely pubescent princess preventing her father, a powerful Algonquian Indian chief, from whacking Captain John Smith at Jamestown in the early 17th century.

Young red girl rescues older white guy.  Soon after, she marries a tobacco farmer and converts to Christianity.  The couple sails to England where the "civilized savage" charms London society but dies before her 21st birthday.  No wonder Disney turned her into a revisionist icon while she means virtually nothing to her own people.  Of course that hasn't stopped our ignorant President from using Pocahontas as a slur.  She's arguably the most famous Native American on the planet even if it seems no two images of her look alike!

Washington looked pretty blah after "Americans."

 

I had time for one more stop:  the East Wing of the National Gallery.

"Outliers and American Vanguard Art" posits that self-taught artists blossomed three times over the last century, producing works during periods of cultural upheaval that didn't differ so much from what  many galleries were showing.  Any exhibit that includes Marsden Hartley commands my attention.

Kara Walker and Horace Pippin were the only other artists I recognized.  

Pippin painted this portrait of Marian Andersen who sang "My Country Tis Of Thee" at the Lincoln Memorial in 1939 after the Daughters of the American Revolution prevented her from performing a concert at Constitution Hall.

Loved his dogs in "The Den!"

But the works of many completely unfamiliar and mostly marginalized artists, working in a variety of media, left me rejecting the often arbitrary distinctions the "art world" (critics, gallery owners, curators and historians) often makes.

"Girl With Pigeons" by Morris Hirshfield:

 "Contrail Crucifix" by Roger Brown:

"Toot-Toot Woo" by Jim Nutt.

Creepy but compelling sculptures by James "Son Ford" Thomas.  He sings the blues, too.

"Love (Martin Luther King, Jr.)" by Elijah Pierce:

And its opposite, "Untitled (Hunter and Victim)" by Steve Ashby, who died in 1980:

"In The Wings" by Nancy Shaver:

"117 At Jennie Richie. To avoid being out in the open when storm renews they take chance going through farm possessed by Glandelin" by Henry Darger:

"Untitled" quilt detail by Al Loving:

Two more quilt details by Mary Lee Bendolph.  "Blocks and Strips":

And "Blocks, Strips, Strings and Half-Squares":

"Jackie O" by Greer Lankton:

(Paradise) from the "Fall of Man" series by Edgar Tolson: