Taylor Rose Payer

This project is about the key roles that Native American women artists have played in the movement for Indigenous forms of abstraction. I use the term “strategic abstraction” to argue that Native women artists of the twentieth century were deliberate in their use of pan-Indigenous and Western aesthetics as they created abstract art that enabled Native cultures to persist while preserving their right to not be completely understood or subsumed by settler viewers. My research challenges the idea of “modernism” as solely a set of Eurocentric artistic responses to the political, economic, and social conditions of modernity that definitively shaped modern life. I illuminate a breadth of lesser-known creative responses to the settler-colonial forces and waves of Indigenous resilience that made modern Native and American art. I consider the illustration, book design, and painting practices of four artists—Angel De Cora (1871–1919), Mary Sully (1896–1963), Rita Letendre (1928–2021), and Kay Walkingstick (b. 1935)—who have consciously engaged with their experiences of modernity by drawing on the textiles of their artistic foremothers to assert Native presence and visualize Indigenous futurity. These transcultural linkages elicit fresh inquiries into the political roles of Indigenous abstraction and Native women artists during key eras of settler-colonial policies in the United States and Canada, while situating modern Native art within the expanded horizons of twentieth-century American art.