Interpreting Early 20th-Century Paintings by Pueblo Artists of the American Southwest

FAIN: FT-259718-18

Sascha Thyme Scott
Syracuse University (Syracuse, NY 13244-0001)

Research and preparation of a book on paintings by 20th-century Pueblo artists of the southwestern United States.

My book explores how early 20th-century Pueblo painters navigated the simultaneously generative and perilous confluence of modernity and tradition. I build on while challenging scholarship on American Indian art produced in colonial contexts, which is largely focused on the support and interventions of white patrons and on market forces. Instead, my book foregrounds individual Pueblo artists, highlighting their “aesthetic agency,” or how they creatively adopted, resisted, confronted, transformed, and subverted colonial political, economic, and cultural forces. Each chapter is focused on one Pueblo artist, seeking to understand the aesthetics and politics at play in his or her art. The method for doing so is through careful archival research, through dialogue with the artists’ home communities, and by attending to a rich body of theoretical work produced by indigenous thinkers. As such, the book aims to provide a productive model for writing about transcultural indigenous arts.