Painting culture: art and ethnography at a school for native americans

Abstract

During the mid-twentieth century in Oklahoma, young artists at a school for American Indians selectively used ethnographic accounts of Native American cultures written by anthropologists to enhance their artistic representations. While creating Indian art became an important means of preserving knowledge of tribal cultures, cultural preservation took on a larger significance in the school's goal to train professional Indian artists whose livelihoods depended on the patronage of private collectors and museums. Art students utilized anthropological accounts of Indian cultures to help them succeed, but they and their teachers ultimately rejected anthropologists as final authorities on their cultures. Through their participation in art competitions that demanded specific representations of Indianness, their use of ethnography, and their rejection of anthropologists, young Indian artists created new indigenous identities.