Action/Abstraction Redefined
Action/Abstraction Redefined
Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center
30 West Dale Street, Colorado Springs, CO 80903
July 29, 2022-January 7, 2023
Organized by IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe, NM
Admission: $10 Non-Member Adults
Review by José Antonio Arellano
Action/Abstraction Redefined, on view at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, offers a visual lesson in art history. It is part of the ongoing reexamination of the stories we tell ourselves about our collective past. The show’s title asks us to reconsider how art historical terms, such as “Action Painting” and “Abstract Art,” achieve traction and how institutions, including museums and galleries, help establish and distribute definitions.
A view of the gallery with Abstract Expressionist works in the exhibition Action/Abstraction Redefined at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. Image by Gray Warrior.
This exhibit features over 50 pieces, mostly paintings, by Native American modernist artists working from the 1940s through the 1970s. Many of the artists were associated with the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe. As students—several of whom were high school age—they were encouraged to explore and develop their identity as Native Americans by IAIA cofounder Lloyd Henri “Kiva” New (Cherokee) and instructors including Neil Parsons (Piikani) and Fritz Scholder (Luiseño).
The instructors, well-known modernist painters themselves, prompted the students to incorporate their cultural familiarity into formal explorations in color and shape and to experiment with large canvases. [1] Geometric patterns have long been a staple in Navajo blankets and Plains Indians’ beadwork and parfleches (rawhide containers), and isometric designs have been visible in Pueblo pottery long before the influence of European geometric abstract movements. The works displayed in Action/Abstraction Redefined demonstrate an active engagement (what I consider a dialogue) between two distinct understandings of cultural production.
A view of Redstar Price’s (Crow) Crow Parfleche, 1967, acrylic on canvas, 24.75 x 24.74 inches, from the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts Collection, on display in the Hard-Edge section of Action/Abstraction Redefined. Image by José Antonio Arellano.
Take, for example, the Hard-Edge paintings by Redstar Price (Crow). As a student earning her high school degree, Price’s exceptional skill was recognized early by IAIA instructors. She created such works as Crow Parfleche (1967). The turquoise chevrons in the painting indicate the four corners of the frame and lock the painting into its material support by gesturing toward a center that simultaneously radiates out and operates as a centering anchor.
The turquoise color, a significant choice in this context of earth tones, is repeated in latitudinal borders within the work and in the rectangular shapes that echo the framing effect of the material support. The vibrant red shapes reverberate the painting’s forms, emphasizing the internal logic of the interlocked, geometric formal relationships. Modernist art critics could describe this dynamic between canvas and frame as one creating a unified whole—a singular expression of the singular vision of Redstar Price.
Redstar Price (Crow), Crow Parfleche, 1967, acrylic on canvas, 24.75 x 24.74 inches, from the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts Collection. Image by José Antonio Arellano.
Price later described how such designs “came to her,” a revelation that she would characterize as her cultural birthright. She learned that her grandmother was one of the highly skilled women who painted parfleches—essential tools for the nomadic ways of life of the Great Plains peoples. Such rawhide containers helped transport food and protect valuable belongings.
Women, including Price’s grandmother, painted the surfaces of the parfleches with a breathtaking interplay of subtle, symmetrical but never mechanical designs. But these women did not sign their names to their work. As Gaylord Torrence reminds us, “Words for ‘art’ and ‘artist’ do not exist in the languages of parfleche-making peoples because the creation of aesthetic objects was an integral part of life.” [2]
A view of Redstar Price’s (Crow) Crow Parfleche on display in the foreground in the Action/Abstraction Redefined exhibition. Image by Gray Warrior.
These communal, useful containers that were crucial to a nomadic way of life were integrated into the livelihood of a people. In Crow Parfleche (1967), we see the interplay between two ways of considering a term like “aesthetic.” Price’s painting attracts our gaze as a painting while paying homage to its provenance, inviting us to do the same.
A view of the gallery with Color Field and Hard-Edge works in the exhibition Action/Abstraction Redefined. Image by Gray Warrior.
Displayed in a meaningful visual interchange, with each painting and sculpture echoing the gestures of neighboring pieces or negating their impulses by presenting a competing sensibility, the exhibition groups the work within three major art movements of the 1940s-1970s period. Upon reaching the second floor of the Fine Arts Center, spend time in the main corridor before going into the gallery spaces.
The main corridor of the Action/Abstraction Redefined at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. Image by Gray Warrior.
This corridor serves as an informative guide featuring key examples of Abstract Expressionism, Color Field, and Hard-Edge painting. The gallery introduces viewers to how the walls are painted to help group together works from each movement, with a soft grey hue gathering the Abstract Expressionist paintings and a much darker charcoal shade holding the Hard-Edge paintings. The walls behind the Color Field paintings are left the standard off-white, allowing the immersive hues of the Color Field paintings to absorb the viewer.
A view of the intentionally unfinished wall paint in the Abstract Expressionist gallery of the Action/Abstraction Redefined exhibition, with Forms in Beadwork by Earl Elder (Tancan Hanska, Longchase) (Yanktonai Sioux), 1963, oil on canvas. Image by José Antonio Arellano.
The transitional spaces between each gallery visually demonstrate the advancement of one movement against the influence of the previous, with bold, expressive strokes signifying Abstract Expressionism’s celebration of the spontaneous, emotive use of paint. The rectilinear designs on the walls demonstrate Hard-Edge painters’ preference for meticulously-executed geometric designs.
A view of the demarcation between the Hard-Edge section of the Action/Abstraction Redefined exhibition in dark gray and the Color Field section in white. In the foreground, Juanita Waukazo (Chippewa), Untitled, 1966, acrylic on canvas. Image by José Antonio Arellano.
What distinguishes the work displayed is the active engagement by the artists in modernist art’s aspirational dimension. This aspiration amounted to a new understanding of the creation and appreciation of art. Art as art, in this understanding, discloses something akin to a distinct modality of experience otherwise unavailable. It is distinct from other realms of value, from the spiritual to the economic.
Such a description sounds justifiably ideological. The writer Gloria Anzaldúa, for example, rejects what she characterizes as a Eurocentric, imperialist notion of “art” detached from ritual and use. “My people, the Indians,” she writes, “did not split the artistic from the functional, the sacred from the secular, art from everyday life. The religious, social and aesthetic purposes of art were all intertwined.” [3]
The elevation of “art” as “self-contained,” as modeling and enabling that ever elusive concept of “self-determination” (however defined), could be seen as but another means of self-serving colonial control. Indeed, some viewers might consider the displayed works’ exploration of Indigenous identity as too subdued and contained.
Mike Medicine Horse Zillioux (Akimel O’Odham/Cheyenne/Pawnee), The Day Jackson Pollock Became a Christian, 1974, acrylic, rawhide, and salt on canvas, 52 x 48.25 inches, from the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts Collection. Image by José Antonio Arellano.
The pieces on display, though, are neither derivative nor reverential. Mike Medicine Horse Zillioux’s (Akimel O’odham/Cheyenne/Pawnee) work titled The Day Jackson Pollock Became a Christian (1974) implies the (often violent) contacts that take place within history, from religious conversion to the diffusion of visual and practical sensibilities. Zillioux’s piece alludes to Pollock’s drip paintings, but it does so, as he puts it, “kinda tongue in cheek.” [4]
A detail image of Mike Medicine Horse Zillioux’s The Day Jackson Pollock Became a Christian, 1974, acrylic, rawhide, and salt on canvas, 52 x 48.25 inches, from the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts Collection. Image by José Antonio Arellano.
Zillioux’s restrained use of Pollock’s “Action” approach allows for shades of figuration to enter into the otherwise abstract plane (what he calls “shadow people”). [5] In this work, acrylic paint splatters a rawhide geometric cross, echoing a tradition of rawhide painting, while a faint trace of salt covers the painting’s surface. This addition of salt, presumably added while the canvas was horizontally placed on the floor, should remind viewers of Navajo sand painting techniques. [6] Famously, when Pollock saw a demonstration of these techniques at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, he began to lay his canvases on the floor. Thus one of the most famous abstract painters, one whose name is practically synonymous with Action Painting, would not have emerged as such without the influence of Navajo practices. [7]
For decades, historians have described New York as having replaced Paris as the world’s art capital during the mid-twentieth century. Contemporary exhibitions such as Action/Abstraction explore the peripheries that a term like “capital” necessarily implies—the regions and influences absorbed into the orbit of the “New York School.”
A view of the gallery with Abstract Expressionist works in Action/Abstraction Redefined. Image by Gray Warrior.
We are in the process of asking why only certain names circulate as the paragons of a particular art movement, especially one like Abstract Expressionism, which was touted as the paradigm of American artistic expression during the mid-twentieth century. We are beginning to pose questions such as: what names have been considered representatively American? What names are associated with innovation when they incorporate others’ techniques into their practice? And what names are charged with inauthenticity and “selling out” when they do the same?
If the category “Native American modernist art” appears as a contradiction in terms, it does so because of art historical misconceptions and expectations concerning a Native cultural “authenticity” tied to a static past. When Native American cultural objects have appeared in museums, they have often been displayed as ethnographic artifacts of a way of life that is no longer viable. As art historians have commented, this understanding of Native American cultural expression places contemporary Native Americans within a seemingly insurmountable contradiction: to be alive is to exist beyond the confines of the authentic past. [8]
A view of the gallery with Color Field works in Action/Abstraction Redefined. Image by Gray Warrior.
The artists in this exhibition do not choose between authentic expression and formal experimentation. They take up modernist impulses and use them. Culture, however we may define the term, is not static. And “art” has always encompassed a set of relationships within each work as well as sensibilities and groups of people seeking to find an adequate means of expression. A show like Action/Abstraction Redefined gestures toward the possibility of mutual recognition among equals engaged in dialogue. If this description strikes my readers as naïve, perhaps we can collectively imagine what would make it seem less so.
José Antonio Arellano (he/his) is an Assistant Professor of English and Fine Arts at the United States Air Force Academy. He holds a Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from the University of Chicago. He is currently working on two manuscripts titled Race Class: Reading Mexican American Literature in the Era of Neoliberalism, 1981-1984 and Life in Search of Form: 20th Century Mexican American Literature and the Problem of Art.
[1] Earl Eder describes this encouragement during an interview available on the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center website: https://fac.coloradocollege.edu/exhibits/action-abstraction-redefined/ and on Youtube: “Earl Eder (Tancan Hanska, Longchase)” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNbHs3l2FII&t=42s.
[2] Gaylord Torrence, The American Indian Parfleche: A Tradition of Abstract Painting (University of Washington Press in Association with the Des Moines Art Center, 1994), 24.
[3] Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987), 88.
[4] Quoted in Ryan S. Flahive “Cultural Constructivism,” Action/Abstraction Redefined: Modern Native Art, 1940s to 1970s (IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, 2018), 23.
[5] Zillioux’s description that such “shadow people“ become visible once you “close your eyes” suggests that even his description of the painting’s figuration is tongue in cheek as well. Quoted in “Cultural Constructivism,” 23.
[6] My thanks to Blair Huff of the Fine Arts Centers who invited a group of us to look at the painting from a severe angle to seek the shimmer of the salt crystals on the surface.
[7] See Manuela Well-Off-Man, “The New York Native Modern Art Movement,” Action/Abstraction Redefined: Modern Native Art. Well-Off-Man also quotes Noah G. Hoffman who suggests that Mark Rothko—a name practically synonymous with Color Field Painting—developed his “signature compositional format” after having seen a “Native American dance board which he sketched in detail at a Pueblo dance near Santa Fe, New Mexico” (31).
[8] See Bill Anthes, Native Moderns American Indian Painting, 1940-1960 (Duke University Press, 2006).
