In Session: Jolene Rickard and Lucy Lippard In Conversation

“In Session: Conversations with Contemporary Native Artists and Scholars” is a lecture series organized by the Museum of Contemporary Arts. Jolene Rickard (Tuscarora) is an Associate Professor at Cornell University, a visual historian, artist, curator, and scholar of Indigeneity on a global scale. Lucy Lippard, art critic and curator, has written 21 books, is a Guggenheim fellow, and lives in Galisteo, New Mexico

Lippard met Rickard three decades ago at the American Indian Community House (AICH), when it was on Broadway in the SOHO strip of New York City. Rickard and Peter Jemison (Seneca) then introduced Lucy to the Native American art world. Native art history books don’t place time period in context, but Rickard observed a disempowerment of Native artists then, especially in comparison to African-American artists. She cites the lack of theoretical tools and a “lack of recognition of a discrete indigenous political space” as contributing factors to this disempowerment. Now, the art world’s strategy to deal with Native art is for “artists to be seamlessly integrated into the international art scene” without cultural context, which results in “erasure,” Rickard observes. However, Lippard frequently encounters Native artists who actively want to be part of the mainstream.

Rickard is currently at Cornell and focused on intercultural analysis — a center-fringe analysis. She has traveled to indigenous communities beyond those in Canada and United States, as well as exploring the biennial art circuit. She says the situations in Central and South America is dramatically different from the situation north of the Rio Grande. Indigeneity in Australia, Africa, and Indian are highly complex, especially in countries where ostensibly the indigenous population is the majority. Despite the challenges, “if we don’t mark spaces,” Rickard says, “the other side of it is erasure.” Land is the defining concept for indigenous peoples, and she says, “We need to maintain these land bases.” The Maori are ahead of theorizing their own work.

“There will always be artists directed towards satisfying collectors in a particular way,” but Rickard does not write about those artists. “Our work articulates our philosophy. If an artist has a thin knowledge of this philosophy, they aren’t serving their community.” Rickard says, “Inserting yourself back into your community and maintaining a dialogue, you effect the people around you.” She says her tribe is “always willing to take people back in,” but when one returns to their tribal community, they do not return as an expert.

No artists are unanimously accepted by their home communities, so Rickard points out that it’s wrong to expect that of Native artists. “Our communities aren’t perfect,” she says and wants the next generation of artists and writers to critique the problems and challenges the stereotypes. “That has to be an indigenous writer,” says Lippard. Rickard disagrees, but that would have to be an incredibly thick-skinned non-Native writer to try to write about what’s wrong with a Native community

Native Americans are a comparatively small percentage of the United States’ population, globally indigenous people are a huge population and merit serious scholarship. The primary texts are still lacking in the indigenous art world. Lippard points out that the scholarship is happening in other fields, but points out, “Art is decontextualized when it enters the art world.” Once the underlying information is broached, people complain because, “they aren’t talking art.” A challenge of discussing indigenous art in the Americas, Rickard observes, one has to talk about colonialism—which the art world is reluctant to do.

"To be a post-colonial scholar is dubious,” Rickard says. “To the powers that be,” Lippard concludes. The public is happy enough to look at contemporary indigenous art but is not always prepared or willing to deconstruct colonialism, as it is seen as being too divisive. Lippard wonders if artists have more “wiggle room” on the subject than writers, and notices that post-colonial writers are going into teaching or art making.

Native artists in the United States maintain an adversarial relationship with the government. Rickard feels that First Nations artists in Canada, with the exception of the Haudenosaunee, appear to be more integrated with their government and part of the Crown. Continuing with the idea of sovereignty, Rickard points out that the Czech Republic has allowed a Six Nations girl’s team enter the country with their Six Nations passports. Hillary Clinton was supportive of other countries honoring Six Nations passports, but the United Kingdom refused — possibly due to an Anglo-Canadian agreement. “Canadian indigenous peoples have less rights than indigenous peoples in the United States,” she says.

Some indigenous groups that Rickard has observed, such as the Brazilian Yanonamo “don’t care what the rest of the world is doing. They move ahead with their own cultural projects.” The indigenous people of Taiwan have their own television station and are better versed about current issues of indigenous peoples across the globe than anyone else.

Rickard was asked about her plans for an upcoming scholarly journal of indigenous arts, and she says she is working on a website and wants to write about artists that don’t already have a monograph book about them. Certainly something to look forward to in the future!

Wheel: Polly Nordstrand

Looking Back to Look Forward
Polly Nordstrand (Hopi-Norwegian)

Polly Nordstrand examines Native art writing published since 1990 as a means of assessing progress in Native art. She begins with Lucy Lippard’s 1990, Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America, which looks at Asian-, African-, and Latin American art, as well as Native American art. It stands out because it is not a catalog and covers contemporary and experimental Native artists that have been underrepresented.

Since Native art is left out of mainstream art history texts, exhibit catalogs are particularly important. Rennard Strickland and Margaret Archuleta’s 1993 Shared Visions: Native American Painters and Sculptors in the Twentieth Century is a catalog accompanying a major exhibit responding to the quincentennial of Columbus’ arrival in the American. Strickland and Archuleta voice the desire for Native artists to achieve visibility, an ongoing sentiment, echoed in David W. Penney’s 2004 North American Indian Art. Shared Visions traces the influence of federal Indian policy on 20th century Native arts, and Nordstrand feels this casts the artists in the role of the victim (146). She wonders if survival narratives are compelling or relevant to mainstream society.

In the 2002 After the Storm: The Eiteljorg Fellowship for Native American Fine Art, 2001, edited by Jackson Rushing, writer Colleen Cutschall (Oglala Lakota) compares cross-cultural communication in art as aboriginal multi-lingualism” (151).

Nordstrand points out the lack of critical review of Native American art by the art world, but looks at one art magazine with an issue dedicated to Native art: the 1992 volume of Art Journal Vol. 51 (1992) No. 3 (Fall), co-edited by Jackson Rushing and Kay WalkingStick (Cherokee/Winnebago). The lack of art criticism and lack of judgments is a widespread problem that exists throughout the art world. Nancy Mithlo (Chiricahua Apache) writes, “the purpose of contemporary Native arts criticism in a more proactive frame of reference is less about what others think (getting in and being witnessed by others as in a ceremony) and more about what we thinking of ourselves in relationship with others” (152).

Since catalogs are geared towards a general readership, Nordstrom argues that they are no substitute for scholarly art history. She criticizes Janet Berlo and Ruth Phillips’ 1998 Native North American Art for bending interpretations of art terminology, specific the term “modern,” in respect to Native art.

She mentions the catalog for the 2004 National Museum of the American Indian exhibit, Native Modernisms: The Art of George Morrison and Allan Houser, edited by Truman Lowe, 2005. Finally looking at Linda B. Eaton’s 1990 A Separate Vision: Case Studies of Four Contemporary Indian Artists, Nordstrand asks, “Can we identify true movements and aesthetics in history of art by American Indians?” (156).

The last two decades have seen a groundswell of books about Native art, including an increasing number of monographs. More Native writers are publishing and some tribes and tribal schools have their own presses. This bodes well for generating realistic art histories, and there are far more works than could ever be examined in a single essay.

Wheel: Lucy Lippard

All Six Legs
Lucy Lippard (European-American)

Lucy Lippard examines the factors that make Native art partly invisible in her essay “All Six Legs.” Lippard is sensitive to the challenges of being a non-Native writing about Native art and wonders if Native perspectives are “even available to non-Indians?” (128) She points out something very crucial in Native art writing, that “non-Indian writers tend to depend on our own culturally approved taste, education, and background, which is rooted in Western civilization” (128), which, possibly unconsciously, promotes assimilation to the Western mainstream. She encourages Native writers to examine and question Western influences on their work.

The space between cultures is a liminal space — a threshold or, in Gerald McMaster’s Reservation X, “a socially ambiguous zone” (133) African, Asian, Latin, as well as Native American artists move around the long-entrenched Eurocentrism of the art world. Oscar Howe demonstrated this by creating new expressions of abstraction that drew upon his own tribe’s art history. “It is history, whether or not it’s written down by white people” (131) – Lippard pretty well nails it with that statement. Most tribes have predominantly oral cultures, and Native scholars have struggled for decades to have oral histories recognized as valid in academia. Tribes reflected upon the art they created, even if they did not write everything down.

Lippard brings up the reoccurring notion of the indigenous artist versus the artist who “happens to be indigenous” (131) (kill the Indian, save the artist, to paraphrase Captain Richard Pratt). I’ve long noticed how the artists who say that they are “artists who happen to be Native” tend to show in Native venues and speak to Native audiences quite a bit. Lippard observes that Fritz Scholder was a prime example of “a non-Indian Indian but was not adverse to reaping the rewards of Native affiliation” (139).

Agreeing with Mithlo that modernism (or post-modernism) and tribal traditions are not incompatible, Lippard writes, “…for many Native artists, tradition is not the antithesis of modernism, but its mulch” (131). Sometimes what passes for “traditional art” becomes so romanticized in non-Indian circles that some young artists break away from their traditional arts just to avoid the sentimentalization, commercialization, and trivialization of those arts.

Ghettoization is a concern among many different groups, not just Native Americans, and while some Native artists aspire to show in the global art world, Native art shows and venues still hold value. “[I]f a woman artist makes a big reputation under a male name or Native artists never mention their tribal affiliation, nothing is gained for the constituencies we care most about” (133). Artists should not have to hide who they are to make it in the mainstream.

"One of the most effective weapons against stereotypes," Lippard writes, "is recontextualization" (136). She agrees with Mithlo that stereotypes can be springboards for new communication; however, she also warns that, “Obsession with the cruelties and stupidities of the dominant culture—even as it remains meaningful as a warning—is related to what we in the feminist movement used to call ‘being ruled by the opposition,’ or forced into a position that’s reactive rather than proactive, cliché rather insight. At some point it may become more challenging to construct intricate criticisms of internal as well as external problems, fueled less by individualism then by collective energy” (136). Being simply reactionary is throwing away much of our power as artists. Native artists face the question of art world individualism and tribal collectivism, but “[o]ver the centuries, tribal traditions themselves have been flexible and open to change without damaging the core” (139, 142).

Although identity politics have detractors in the mainstream art world, identity remains an important, reoccurring theme. Lippard suggests that if identity is a central part of an artist’s work, it should be analyzed, not ignored. “The problem of too much attention being paid to Native identity and to little to art” (142) can be solved by bypassing romanticism and nostalgia and studying contemporary Native art in its indigenous art historical context.

As an aside, on the subject of liminality, Edward De Bono’s great and accessible book, I Am Right, You Are Wrong, demonstrates how the grammar of English language that hinges on anagrams (opposites) encourages artificial dichotomies.

Image: Act, Don't React, America Meredith, gouache on paper.