A group of white New York painters blended modernist and Native-inspired aesthetics. Space Makers at the Heard Museum pairs them with historical and contemporary Native artists.
Space Makers: Indigenous Expression and a New American Art
November 8, 2024–March 2, 2025
Heard Museum, Phoenix
Not much is Indigenous in Indian Space Painting, a style developed by a group of white New York painters studying at the Art Students League in the late 1940s. To distinguish American modern art from its European counterpart, the painters took inspiration from the all-over compositions of Pueblo pottery, Navajo weavings, and patterns in the work of cultures Indigenous to the Northwest Coast—which they learned about in textbooks and during visits to the American Museum of Natural History.
“Indian space showed me the way of merging [Indigenous] and Western art together,” Will Barnet, a founder of the movement and teacher at the Art Students League, told The New York Times in 1996. “It took me beyond Cubism in a search for American values.” Whether rooted in cultural reverence or cultural appropriation, those “values” have rendered the movement contentious. Critics and scholars have called Indian Space Painting (Howard Daum, a student at the League, coined the term in 1946) a form of “modernist primitivism” and “cultural nationalism,” with Hyperallergic declaring the name “decidedly un-PC.”
In 2024, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, mounted the exhibition Space Makers: Indigenous Expression and a New American Art, with work by Indian Space Painters including Barnet, Daum, Ruth Lewin, Jackson Pollock, Stuart Davis, and Seymour Tubis, alongside Native American artifacts and work by such modern and contemporary Indigenous artists as George Morrison (Ojibwe), Dyani White Hawk (Sičánǧu Lakota), and Cara Romero (Chemehuevi).
The link is Tubis, who, in 1963, moved west to teach at the newly founded Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Among the Indigenous students he influenced were T.C. Cannon (Kiowa/Caddo) and Linda Lomahaftewa (Hopi/Choctaw), whose works are also in the exhibition.
Now at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, the exhibition is at once ambitious and confounding. Didactics attempt to connect myriad threads between Indigenous painterly expression past and present, to erase the Indigenous-vs-colonialist “binaries” of appropriation and influence; and to elevate the importance of the Indian Space Painting movement in “reconfigur[ing] the history of American art [and] grounding it in Indigenous aesthetics, geography, and socio-political contexts.”
The organization of the works—groupings that tug together objects across the show’s dizzying timeline, heavily relying on the didactics to strengthen their links—add to the sense of disjointedness the exhibition is trying earnestly to avoid. Still, there is a sense of things coming full circle, from ancient Indigenous craft to contemporary Native art via Tubis’s influence; an influence that encapsulates and emphasizes the pervasive effects of the colonialist enterprise, which, as the exhibition reveals, is integral to the story of Indigenous history and art, a story in need of further clarity and untangling.
