An art movement inspired by Indigenous visual forms is back on display at the Heard Museum’s latest exhibition, Space Makers: Indigenous Expression and a New American Art.
A midcentury art movement is now back in the spotlight, bringing with it a greater understanding of how modern American art was influenced by Indigenous visual forms. The Indian Space Painting movement focused on a balance of flattened geometric and organic forms, and filled-to-the-edges abstract designs — visual attributes that a small group of innovative artists in New York also saw in Indigenous art and so termed Indian space. The avant-garde Indian Space Painters, who came together in the wake of cubism, mounted just one exhibit in New York, then went their separate ways. Now, decades later, that original eight-person show has inspired the exhibition Space Makers: Indigenous Expression and a New American Art, which brings together three dozen artists, most of them Indigenous, and reconsiders modern American art.
Linda Lomahaftewa, Sustenance, late 1960s. Oil on canvas, 71 x 42½ inches. Courtesy of Logan Slock and Ana Kuny. © Linda Lomahaftewa. Photo by Jason S. Ordaz.
“The exhibition begins with a group that emerged in New York in the 1940s called the Indian Space Painters, who were connected through the Art Students League and in the same milieu as more famous movements like the abstract expressionists. They were working toward the same thing, which was to try to find a new art for the United States that could break free of the legacy of European art,” says Space Makers curator Christopher Green. “The legacy of their explorations also led to some surprising directions and networks.”
Seymour Tubis, who studied at the Art Students League and was a peer of the Indian Space Painters, went on to espouse their concepts of deconstructed pictorial space while later teaching at Santa Fe’s Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), where he influenced many future prestigious modern Indigenous artists, including the late Absentee Shawnee/Seminole artist Benjamin Harjo Jr. (“a fabulous mentor in the contemporary art movement,” Green says), Nathan Jackson (“one of the greatest living Tlingit carvers”), Hopi-Choctaw artist Linda Lomahaftewa (“such a matriarch of the movement”), and Sicangu Lakota artist Dyani White Hawk (“exploring these connections between Indigenous visual heritage and large-scale modernist painting”). All are included in Space Makers.
Peter Busa, Children’s Hour, ca. 1948. Oil on canvas, 72 x 51 inches. Charles and Valerie Diker Collection.
Heard Museum chief curator Diana Pardue commends the exhibit for “showing the intersection of Native American art with other artforms.” And in so doing, it shows the power and potency of Indigenous artforms to influence non-Indigenous painters. Peter Busa, who in spite of his Sicilian heritage is considered one of the innovators of Indian space painting, revered surrealism and haunted natural history museums to discover tribal forms and motifs. Busa’s Art Students League colleague Jackson Pollock, who would become a major figure in abstract expressionism with his novel dripping technique, is said to have hit on the idea of painting on the floor after discovering Navajo sand painting.
“This exhibit brings together three moments in time: the Indian Space Painters in New York, the historic Indigenous art that inspired them, and the modern and contemporary Native American artists connected through the IAIA, who were all mutually imbricated in this network of creativity,” Green says. “The new American art includes these much more diverse and expansive histories and visual traditions.”
Linda Lomahaftewa, Untitled, 1970s. Oil on canvas, 36 x 48 inches. Collection of the artist. © Linda Lomahaftewa. Photo by Jason S. Ordaz.
Space Makers: Indigenous Expression and a New American Art is on view November 8, 2024–March 2, 2025 at the Heard Museum in Phoenix (heard.org).
From our January 2025 issue.
PHOTOGRAPHY: Courtesy of the Heard Museum, Phoenix, and exhibition organizer Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas
HEADER IMAGE: Steve Wheeler, Woman Eating a Hot Dog, 1950 – 1975. Oil on canvas, 30 x 30 inches. Charles and Valerie Diker Collection.
