Who were the 'Indian Space Painters?'
By Chadd Scott on
Throughout the first half of the 20th century, New York’s Art Students League was the most important artistic training ground in the world. A who’s-who of preeminent American modernists occupied its classrooms.
Norman Rockwell, Georgia O’Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, Alexander Calder, and Mark Rothko. Helen Frankenthaler, George Bellows, Cy Twombly, Barnett Newman, and Romare Bearden. Instructors included Robert Henri, Thomas Hart Benton, and Jacob Lawrence.
A partial list.
Amazing.
Since its founding in 1962 as a high school, Santa Fe’s Institute of American Indian Arts has been as influential to contemporary American art as the Art Students League was to American modernism.
T.C. Cannon, Earl Biss, Doug Hyde, Linda Lomahaftewa, Kevin Red Star, Benjamin Harjo Jr., and Dan Namingha were among the early enrollees of the 1960s. They created the genre of contemporary Native American art alongside instructors like Fritz Scholder, Allan Houser, and Charles Loloma, arguably the greatest Native painter, sculptor, and jeweler ever.
Benjamin Harjo Jr. 'Honoring the Spirit of All Things.' Opaque watercolor 39 34 in. x 27 in.Oklahoma State University Museum of Art, Stillwater, Oklahoma.
Lloyd Kiva New was the guiding visionary behind the whole operation, a school for Native artists from around the nation to merge their various cultural heritages with the latest artistic trends.
“The future of Indian art lies in the future, not the past,” longtime IAIA Director New famously said.
In the 2000s, Cara Romero, Cannupa Hanksa Luger, Rose B. Simpson, Kathleen Wall, Dyani White Hawk, and Terran Last Gun are graduates. In between the first generation and more recent students, David Bradley, Anita Fields, Roxanne Swentzell, Patricia Michaels, Tony Abeyta, and Diego Romero.
A partial list.
Amazing.
Modern art in America doesn’t change the world the way it did without the Art Students League. Contemporary art in America doesn’t change the world the way it is without IAIA.
The two have a surprising connection. One man: Seymour Tubis (1919–1993).
Tubis is the central figure in an exhibition on view now through March 2, 2025, at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, “Space Makers: Indigenous Expression and a New American Art.”
'Space Makers' exhibition installation view from Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.
Indian Space Painters
The Indian Space Painters were not Indians. They were a short-lived group of white painters working in New York in the late 1940s. They were, however, influenced by Native American cultural heritage in their attempt to create a “new American art” untethered from European precedents.
“Indian Space” was flat, the group’s paintings further identified by all-over compositions borrowing ideas of abstract design from Pueblo pottery, Navajo weavings, and garments from the peoples indigenous to the Northwest Coast to name three examples. The Indian Space Painters were familiar with these patterns from textbooks and museum visits, prominently New York’s American Museum of Natural History.
“Indian space showed me the way of merging (Indigenous) and Western art together,” Indian Space Painters member Will Barnet explained of the movement. “It took me beyond Cubism in a search for American values.”
Seymour Tubis studied at the Art Students League following his service in World War II; he taught there throughout the 1950s. His study and instruction coincided with the Indian Space Painters, students and teachers at the school like Barnet, who taught there from the 30s through the 70s.
In 1963, Tubis took his vast knowledge of Modern art and headed west to the 1-year-old Institute of American Indian Arts. Who better to help students put New’s mandate for a forward-looking contemporary Native American artform into practice than Tubis, an Easterner trained in New York and Philadelphia and Paris and Florence with a reverence for Indigenous art and culture who’d already studied with and instructed scores of the nation’s leading modern artists?
Tubis taught painting and design at IAIA from 1963 to 1980, serving as the critical link in a chain connecting early 20th century Modern art in America, New York, and the Art Students League, with IAIA and the stunning success it would have in shaping contemporary Native art, contemporary Western art, contemporary American art.
Tubis, unlike most of the IAIA instructors, was white.
“Seymor Tubis is an outlier as an instructor, but I think in the best way, and his influence is certainly felt,” Jordan Poorman Cocker, curator of Indigenous art at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, AR where the “Space Makers” exhibition was organized and debuted, said. “People get into the trap of creating this false dichotomy between Indigenous artists and non-Indigenous artists, and there's this hard line drawn. Something that is really easy to do is slip into this binary way of thinking that communities are distinctly separate.”
“Space Makers” blows up that binary.
'Space Makers' exhibition installation view at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.
Consider George Morrison (Ojibwe; 1919–2008), often referred to as the first Native American abstract painter. He studied at the Art Students League and lived in New York, not at IAIA in Santa Fe. He was friends with Indian Space Painter Peter Busa. So, too, was Pollack – and there’s a Pollock painting included in exhibition – who was influenced by Navajo sand paintings. Pollack collected books about Native American art and culture.
As did Native artists with their European predecessors. The influence of van Gogh is unmissable in T.C. Cannon’s most famous paintings. Biss, Houser, Namingha – all of them visited Europe, visited the art museums there, and were deeply familiar with European art history.
Famed American modernist Stuart Davis taught at the Art Students League. In 1923 he visited New Mexico where surely he would have been exposed to Pueblo pottery and culture. Aesthetics it’s impossible believing wouldn’t have in some way been passed on to his students who included Pollock, Busa, and Barnet. Davis was a major influence on the Indian Space Painters.
Lomahaftewa, who advised on the exhibition, taught at IAIA from the mid-70s through 2017, passing on lessons learned from Tubis and Scholder.
Will Barnet to Stanley Tubis to Linda Lomahaftewa, nearly a century of artistic transfer connecting the Art Students League with the Institute of American Indian Arts, an endless spiderweb of influence touching hundreds of leading American artists – Native and non-Native – along the way.
“It's important to acknowledge how critical it is that we understand the influence of these schools, of these teachers, of these artists, on American art writ large,” Crystal Bridges Chief Curator Austen Barron Bailly said. “There are incredible, fertile ways of understanding – new ways of understanding – American Art because these connections haven't been identified and articulated as explicitly (as in ‘Space Makers’).” - George Morrison, Art Students League
