Today, as scholars across disciplines are recovering a broad range of “global modernisms,” we return with a critical eye to a moment when Native art impacted understandings of American art in an international framework. The envelope enclosing narratives of American art history expands and contracts with the cultural politics of a given present. On the eve of the New Deal, when the country’s economy and morale were at an all-time low, a New York Times critic assessed contemporary Native art as “American art, and of the most important kind.” As we write in 2014, most surveys of American art do not even mention that in the 1920s and 1930s a small but influential Pueblo and Kiowa painting movement sparked imaginations on both sides of the Atlantic. Szwedzicki released a lavish portfolio of prints titled Pueblo Indian Painting. The Whitney Museum of American Art purchased a painting by Pueblo artist Tonita Peña for a record sum of $225. Davies, and other well-known American artists. The American Pavilion of the Venice Biennale featured Pueblo painters without formal arts training alongside George Bellows, John Sloan, Arthur B. The year 1932: contemporary American Indian paintings traveled coast to coast in the Exposition of Indian Tribal Arts, the largest touring exhibition of Native American art in US history until 1976. In creating these objects, Crescencio benefited from the ethnographic desire to know and record Pueblo life, and yet he only represented aspects of his culture appropriate for outsider consumption, refusing to share protected knowledge. Crescencio's paintings and tiles are paradigmatically ana-ethnographic. Early Pueblo paintings can, thus, be understood as "ana-ethnographic", a representational mode through which the artists worked both through and against ethnographic norms in order to simultaneously benefit from, manipulate, and resist scientific colonialism. Many Pueblo laborers refused to share esoteric knowledge with anthropologists, a tactic adopted by those laborers who became artists. Among the most powerful of these tactics is what Audra Simpson calls "refusal". In countering this new colonial threat, Pueblo communities deployed long-developed tactics of resistance. While Pueblo laborers benefited financially from working with anthropologists, they nevertheless understood anthropology as a threat to their communities, as scientists disrupted sacred sites and the dead, collected sensitive material, and pushed informants for esoteric information. Before Crescencio and his San Ildefonso peers began creating images of ceremonial and daily life for sale to outsiders, they were hired as day laborers at archaeological excavations. The paintings, called the Crescencio Set, mark a formative moment in the development of a new genre of art, modern Pueblo painting. Hewett: A set of paintings and a series of tiles. In 1918, San Ildefonso Pueblo artist Crescencio Martinez completed two commissions for the anthropologist Edgar L.
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