Rita Letendre’s Astral Abstractions

Abstract:This article proposes the first systematic analysis of the celestial narrative structures visualized by the hard-edge abstractions of Rita Letendre (b. 1928), elucidating their nimble translation of spoken word into nonrepresentational visual form. It explores the artist’s fluent negotiation between the star stories of her Abenaki and Iroquoian cultural heritage and modernist visual rhetorics. In their Indigenization of the 1969 Apollo moon landing, Letendre’s “arrow” paintings perform a decolonizing intervention within the territorial contest that propelled the Space Race. Letendre’s astral abstractions are contextualized within the storytelling conventions of Eastern Woodlands ethnoastronomies as well as the cosmototemic statements of fellow Indigenous modernists Alex Janvier (b. 1935) and Leon Polk Smith (1906–1996). Like Smith, Letendre Indigenizes Euro-American historiographies of abstraction, reimagining the allegorical origins of painting for contemporary viewers.