Art: Little Magic

For U.S. Indians, the art world centers far from Manhattan’s 57th Street, in the luxurious Tulsa palace of Oil Millionaire Waite Phillips. There the works of more than 100 Indian artists went on display last week. Some 3,000 Tulsans, some of them art lovers, the rest just curious, jammed into the former Phillips palace on opening night.

What they saw, at the second annual exhibit of American Indian painting, were mostly bright, flat watercolors of tribal life and lore, like the prizewinning Dakota Duck Hunt by a Dakota Sioux named Oscar Howe. Jemez Indian José Rey Toledo entered a thoroughly detailed illustration of the sacred Zuñi Shalako dance, but Ma-Pe-Wi, a Zia Pueblo, forbidden by his tribe to paint ceremonials, contented himself with a cocktail-bar rendering of a buffalo hunt.

There was one thing missing from the exhibits: they had little magic about them. The ancestors of the exhibiting artists had made pictures to heal the sick, encourage the warriors, and bring rain for the harvest. Their art was designed for a purpose, not for show, and was full of symbolic force. But the Indians who sent their works to Tulsa learned painting from schoolteachers. Their pictures were art for art’s sake, or at best, art for the record.