An exhibit about the beginnings of the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), founded in 1962 as the first and only fine arts college for Native Americans, opens this week at the Saint Louis Art Museum (SLAM). Action/Abstraction Redefined: Modern Native American Art, 1940s to 1970s will see ancestral aesthetics dominate and merge with abstract expressionism, color field and hard-edge painting.
In its early years, IAIA was considered the epicenter of Native American art. Lloyd Kiva New, the fashion designer and co-founder of the IAIA, recruited a faculty of indigenous artists, many of whom were products of an era when the New York School of Abstract Expressionism dominated, including Fritz Scholder, whose work was inspired by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and others. Scholder’s works will be among more than 90 pieces in the exhibit, which will also feature IAIA alumni like printmaker and painter Linda Lomahaftewa.
The exhibit originated at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 2018. When Alexander Brier Marr, Assistant Curator of Native American Art at SLAM, saw this exhibit, he was surprised and excited by the depth of abstraction during this exhibit. period. The museum worked closely with the IAIA to expand the exhibit, nearly doubling in size. “We felt it was important to go deeper into the presentation of some of the key artists,” says Marr. One of them, Anita Fields, is a ceramic and textile artist who attended the IAIA in the early 1970s and is closely associated with the St Louis area.
Like many American museums, SLAM had acquired contemporary Native American art to augment its historical material. “We were missing part of the story,” says Marr. In 2010, the museum received the Danforth Collection, which included over 250 Plains Indian artifacts. Shortly thereafter, SLAM hired its first Native American art curator.
The exhibit also prompted the museum to “look and see what’s missing” in its collections, Marr says, and in March SLAM purchased Scholder’s New Mexico #45 (1966) – the first post-war painting by a Native American artist to join his collection.
- Action/Abstraction Redefined: Modern Native American Art, 1940s to 1970s, Saint Louis Art Museum, until September 3
