The Art and Artists of “The Indian New Deal”
Four Artists’ Perspectives
Native artists who got their starts during the New Deal continued to advance the tradition of creativity beyond its conclusion. Some did so by expanding upon the Studio Style. Others did so by renouncing and rejecting it.
Allan Houser
“Dorothy Dunn was the first teacher I had,” Houser told Santa Fe Living Treasures, a repository of oral histories, but he “wanted more. I had something else in mind when I came here. I didn’t want to do Indian-style paintings. I didn’t care for it at all, but that was the only way that I could get into the arts.” After the New Deal, Houser went on to expand his painting style, eventually moving into the abstracted sculptures for which he is most famous. This piece is an example of his later work.
Do you think most people would refer to the sculpture at left as “authentic” Native art or “Indian art”? Why or why not?
Harrison Begay
“Art teacher Dorothy Dunn . . . was a very good teacher and helped a great deal to promote Indian art, especially paintings,” an older Harrison Begay told photographer Gary Auerbach for his book We Walk in Beauty (published in 2005). Begay found the Studio Style readily adaptable to commercial screen printing and founded Tewa Enterprises in 1951 with fellow Diné/Navajo artist Gerald Nailor. Tewa Enterprises was very successful in producing silkscreen prints for the tourist market. “Having obtained the ideals from my art training I find that my tribal art is well worth preserving,” Begay explained to a newspaper reporter in 1940. “I believe Indian art should be characterized by the same styles and effects which our forefathers developed. In my paintings I preserve the adaptation of the characteristics of my tribal art. I am greatly interested in the sand paintings, examples of the most highly developed painting of my own tribe.”12
Jose Rey Toledo painting the Turtle Rain Dance mural at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center in Albuquerque, NM, in October 1977.
Jose Rey Toledo
“The characteristics. . .[of contemporary Indian painting] are the sincerity of effort to express ideas using all available art techniques and to express any mood of the times without inhibition by criticisms from the public, as to whether or not it is traditionally Indian or not. If an Indian is doing the artwork, naturally it will be Indian. Contemporary Indian paintings are works of art elaborating interpretations of Indian thinking and doings of the past.” —Jose Rey Toledo, 196913
Jerry Brown
Diné (Navajo) painter Jerry Brown, an IAIA graduate, reflects on the legacy of Dunn’s Studio Style in his Guest-Curated Tour.
Jerry Brown pictured at work on a canvas.
