Who invented modern art? Or, more specifically, abstract art?
We all know the answer. It was the free-thinking American and European painters of the mid-20th century, heroes like Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollack and Clyfford Still who get all the credit for helping us see a whole new world of painting when they began emphasizing form and color over figurative imagery.
But artist Dyani White Hawk has a different point of view. She sees abstraction in generations of hand-made objects created by Native Americans in North America, in the patterns and shapes of fabrics and beadwork created by Indigenous women for centuries.
The Lakota artist conjures all sorts of evidence for this theory in her show, "Speaking to Relatives," now at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, presenting paintings, hand-stitched beadwork and videos that recall traditional "crafts" and invite convincing comparisons to the famous and revered easel painters who came about later.
Those of us accustomed to encountering work by names like Rothko and Picasso and O'Keeffe in contemporary art museums - but almost never the work of makers from Ingenious tribes in the Northern Plains - will see the similarities in the forms that appear colorfully on her canvases.
The word "crafts" goes into quotes here because "Speaking to Relatives," as it is presented at the MCA, argues that these Indigenous objects should be thought of as art rather than the "artifacts" that they are often categorized as.
This is not just a matter of semantics. it suggests an entire reordering of the history of art, and elevating Native American art to the same status as art made in the post-colonial continent. In that way, "Speaking to Relatives" honors and preserves Native American history but also attempts to rewrite it.
White Hawk's "Moccasin" series, from the early 2010s, offers the sharpest example. The artist's abstract, acrylic-on-canvas works evoke the shapes of this particular footwear and the design patterns associated with traditional decoration of various apparel, blankets and jewelry. These decorations recall Native American arrangements of thread, beads and fabric, but they are rendered in sharp lines and hard edges and reduced to rectangles and circles. She places these images on backgrounds of solid color.
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