Issues in Contemporary American Indian Art: An Iroquois Example 1 (original) (raw)

Katsi George left her reservation to go to university when she was eighteen. She decided to study art because she had always had a passion for making things. As a teenager she had worked with her grandmother and uncles gathering and preparing basket materials so that her grandmother could supplement the family income by making baskets. She also worked with one of her grandmother's sisters learning to bead the edges of leggings and skirts worn for ceremonies in the longhouse. While she was still in high school, because it was clear that she had the interest and patience, she began to work making husk dolls in traditional dress and then gajesa or Husk Faces for use in the longhouse. She loved making things that were used to keep the cultural life of the people alive. She also loved to draw and paint pictures that made references to traditional stories handed down for generations. Her interest in making things made art seem like the perfect choice for a major in college. As a freshman student, Katsi was advised to take a 3 credit course called Introductory Design for Art Majors and another called Introduction to the History of Western Art along with three other courses to satisfy her general education requirements. She found these classes interesting, but it was clear that none of her courses related to her cultural life or the values she had learned on the reservation. In her Introductory Design course, all of her assignments, while they taught her skills in a variety of art media, did not allow her space to use the media she had learned growing up at home. Indeed, she was told for the first time in her life that basket making and beadworking were considered crafts and were valued less than painting and sculpture. She was given an assignment to draw a paper bag, and several to do various types of figure drawing. She did twenty, five-minute, ink paintings of a towering still life set up on a table, and a detailed, forty minute pencil drawing of a surreal still life built in a box and lit so that objects cast strong dramatic shadows. Other assignments taught her to design a series of small abstract sculptures out of paper, cardboard, and various odd blocks of wood. She was instructed to glue the blocks to one another and to a base and to paint her composition in a single color. She also learned about perspective, and did a drawing of a hall in the art building that used a vanishing point. Finally, she did a series of abstract color studies. She did not find the assignments difficult, and generally got A's on her assignments and praise from her professors. There was, however, no space to produce works that thematically related to her culture, and she really missed the connections she had experienced between her artwork and her culture when she was living with her family. 1 Gail Tremblay is a Member of the Faculty at The Evergreen State College and a member of the Onadoga tribe. Copyright held by The Evergreen State College. Please use appropriate attribution when using and quoting this cases. Cases are available at the Enduring Legacies Native Cases website at: www.evergreen.edu/tribal/cases. All images are used with permission of the artists.