A temporary exhibit featuring a little known 1940s American art movement is nearing the end of its run at the Heard Museum in Phoenix. The show highlights the interconnection of Native and non-Native artists as they separately looked to redefine American and Native art.
The "Space Makers: Indigenous Expression and a New American Art" exhibit has traditional Native art displayed next to both modern Native and non-Native modern art of similar design.
The initial intersection of these works can be traced back to right after World War II. A small, loosely-affiliated group of artists in New York looked to tribal art in local museums for inspiration to sever American art’s Eurocentric ties, and create a new landscape exploring negative and positive space. One of them later coined the group as the Indian Space Painters.
“And these were non-Native artists who were only exhibited together once in most of their lifetimes in 1946,” says Christopher Green, guest curator of the exhibit.
He also says the movement never gained much momentum. Critics called it “too literal” and “too directly borrowed” from its sources, preferring other kinds of art coming out at that time.
So the artists splintered off into new projects. But the movement didn’t die there.
"So much of the impact of the Indian Space Painters wasn't necessarily in their mainstream coverage or in their exhibition history, as in major museums, but really in the lives and the artistic and professional impacts that their individual members had moving forward,” Green said.
Fast forward to 1962, when the Institute of American Indian Art was created in Santa Fe. Founder Lloyd Kiva New was Cherokee and also one of the artists who helped make Scottsdale “into a western center of handcrafted arts.”
Green says this institute was the first fine arts school dedicated to creating modern Native American art and training Native artists. He also found a crucial link: One of its first teachers was the Indian Space Painter Seymour Tubis.
“And so through this connection from New York to Santa Fe, we have this relationship that suddenly isn't about just how the Indian Space Painters were looking at Native American art for inspiration. But then how their techniques and modes of being modern abstract artists were taught back to Native artists,” Green said.
But the institute faced its own uphill battle, with scrutiny from both Natives and others.
“People were really angered of what was going on and didn't like these contemporary modern pieces coming out of the institute,” says Tatiana Lomahaftewa-Singer, who is Hopi and Choctaw.
She is also curator of collections at the Institute’s Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, and in this exhibit’s advisory group.
She says some felt the new Native art was challenging the original imagery and many of those known art forms were in “threat of being lost.”
“The decline of the arts and crafts in Native America, were seeing the effects of the U.S. government and Christianity – efforts to basically wipe out Native cultural practices. So the arts were kind of the visual reflective of that,” Lomahaftewa-Singer said.
But she says the institute continued to push the definition of Native art, allowing artists to “explore and experiment with medium and with ideas.”
Some of Tubis’ students went on to become renowned artists – like the late Benjamin Harjo Jr. of Absentee Shawnee and Seminole.
His wife, Barbara Harjo, who lives in Oklahoma, says Tubis’ beret that he wore at the institute hung over her husband’s studio until he died in 2023.
“I always knew that they were very close because he always spoke so kindly of Seymour and how much he loved him and how he attributed so much of his own career to Seymour,” Harjo said.
She also says she doesn’t think her husband was aware of any artistic movement happening, and that he made art to suit himself.
“I always used to tease that, you know, we could be driving out to Santa Fe and he would see a smudge on the back of a semi and he'd ask me to take the wheel, just temporarily, so that he could just briefly sketch something,” Harjo said.
Another one of Tubis’ students is Nathan Jackson, an Alaska Native artist who calls both Haines and Ketchikan his home. He had found himself at the institute in his mid-20s.
Jackson learned how to make prints under Tubis. One in particular made in the class is featured in the exhibit. It’s called “Kooshta,” and it has an Arizona connection.
The Space Makers exhibit shows the interconnection between inspiration and culture across time through artwork grouped in threes. The Naaxein (Chilkat robe) is by an unknown Native artist between 1840-1860. The painting is Untitled (Don Quixote) by Space Painter Robert Barrell (1944). The print on the right is Kooshta by renowned Native artist Nathan Jackson (1963).
“That one print, Seymour was really all excited about this whole thing. And so we entered it, entered in this show in Scottsdale. It ended up getting the Arizonian award,” Jackson said.
Green said in a lecture that Jackson had won “best of show” in the 1964 Scottsdale National Indian Expedition.
Later, Jackson moved away from printing and into carving, which he had a background in, and is what he is currently known for.
“The one issue that bothered me especially with the silk screening was the acetone, having to deal with acetone,” Jackson said. “The gal that I had working with me, she had a little motorcycle … I’d say, 'well I’m going to check the mail, wonder if I could borrow your motorcycle,’ and I’d take off and I’d go the long way around because I need[ed] to get that air in my lungs.”
The exhibit holds pieces spanning three centuries, and was first shown at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas.
“What I think this show does is kind of eradicate assumptions about binaries in the art world ...” says Austen Barron Bailly, the chief curator at Crystal Bridges. “... And it’s those unexpected conversations between types of art, between time, between geographies, between generations that I think is incredibly powerful.”
Once it closes at the Heard, the art will be returned to its owners, both public and private.
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