University Press of Florida

Chapter Title: Pueblo Cosmopolitanism: Modernism and Tribal Ceremonial Dance

Chapter Author(s): GENEVA M. GANO

Book Title: Modernist Communities across Cultures and Media

Book Editor(s): Caroline Pollentier and Sarah Wilson
Published by: University Press of Florida

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 8

•
Pueblo Cosmopolitanism
Modernism and Tribal Ceremonial Dance

Geneva M. Gano

The metropolis is central to, if not synonymous with, descriptions of

modernist culture across the globe. Yet modernism flourished not only
among the streets and skyscrapers of the city but on rural backroads and
in village squares. This essay reconsiders the constitution and cultural
production of modernist communities by examining one of the periph-
eral sites of modernism: that of the little arts colony that convened near
Santa Fe and Taos, New Mexico. Through a consideration of representa-
tive artworks produced here between World War I and World War II, this
essay brings forward a differential articulation of modernism that was
regionally distinctive while also nationally and internationally resonant:
these writings and paintings that focused on Native American dance
reproduced, modified, and challenged a metropolitan-based, Western
European–defined modernism that had come to define the goals and di-
rection for innovative artistic practice. This set of artworks produced in
and around Santa Fe and Taos highlights the ways in which a modern-
ist worldview was defined and redefined on the ground, from within a
proximate, though complex, community.
Though typically situated at the geographical peripheries of metro-
politan-based modernist networks, little arts colonies such as the one
around Santa Fe and Taos were particularly modern community forma-
tions. The emergence and sustenance of these sites depended on modern

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160 · Geneva M. Gano

communications and transportation networks that connected rural and

urban locales and circulated ideas, people, and objects; these networks
were critical to the development of modernism outside of the major
European metropolises. The residents and visitors to Santa Fe, Carmel-
by-the-Sea, Provincetown, and Key West—some of the best-known,
thriving little arts colonies that developed and flourished in the early
twentieth century—did not imagine themselves as stuck in the back-
ward, static, and confining towns of Winesburg, Ohio, or Gopher Prai-
rie, Minnesota, but instead as active revolutionaries making a break with
tradition and the past to participate in social and aesthetic experiments.
Rather than focus on the production of singular masterpieces, they in-
stead emphasized the process of art-making, viewing their collective lives
as art and their aesthetic endeavors as constituting all-encompassing,
beautiful lifeways.
The writings and artworks produced in and around this community
articulated a modernist idiom that could be described as translocal: they
drew simultaneously from cosmopolitan ideas about art and community
and from particular, well-established, community-based customs and
relationships. In this portrait of the complex and unevenly integrated
community at Santa Fe and Taos, I focus on works by Anglo-American
modernists such as Marsden Hartley, Harriet Monroe, Ted Shawn, D. H.
Lawrence, and John Sloan, whose interest in the nearby Pueblo peoples
and their artways extended beyond the limited boundaries of primitiv-
ist “inspiration,” which typically positioned Native Americans outside of
and in opposition to modern, Western European and American culture
(Carr; Hutchinson; Torgovnick). In writing and in visual art, these mod-
ernists attempted to position Pueblo tribal groups within transnational
modernist networks as exemplary communities that cultivated and val-
ued art-making as a vital and integral component of all aspects of life and
circulated artworks by and about Native Americans as objects of study or
enthusiasm within these networks. As this essay indicates, though, many
Native Americans also participated actively in this distinctive modern-
ist community as political actors, commercial producers and consumers,
artists and performers, and social companions—that is, as full partici-
pants in an “actually existing” transnational and cosmopolitan modernist
community that was based in Santa Fe and characterized by its “mutual,

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 Pueblo Cosmopolitanism: Modernism and Tribal Ceremonial Dance · 161

palpable, interactive, frictional” forms of exchange and contact (Lyon,

“Cosmopolitan” 389).
In Santa Fe and Taos, both the Anglo-American and the Native
American artists worked in a range of media that collectively construed
a translocal modernist idiom of aesthetic production and community
engagement; this crystallized and came into focus most prominently
in written and pictorial representations of Native American ceremonial
dance. According to historians Julia Foulkes, Mark Franko, and Susan
Manning, dance occupied a special place in the modernist imagination
during the early years of the twentieth century as an important mode of
cultural expression that brought together a variety of art forms and ex-
tended beyond aesthetics into social and spiritual realms. In Santa Fe and
Taos, as in the other little arts colonies that flourished at the beginning of
the twentieth century, conversations about the importance of dance and
theater in community building, aesthetic experimentalism, and the fu-
ture of the arts in general abounded, marking it as a privileged, important
modernist art form.
Because of the ephemeral nature of a dance performance, however, it
resisted circulation within a modernist network. As the modernists who
witnessed the dances largely understood, this was emphatically true of
Native American dances: each occurrence of each dance was site-specific
and dependent on varying components, including its particular temporal
and social context. Painter Marsden Hartley acknowledged this in one
of the earliest articles about the aesthetic aspects of Native American
dances, proposing that they would be received with a “furore of amaze-
ment . . . if they were brought for a single performance to our metropoli-
tan stage. But,” he demurred, “they will never be seen away from the soil
on which they have been conceived and perpetuated” (22). This made
the dances inaccessible to many but also made the exclusive act of wit-
nessing and appreciating dances an important, constituting component
of this modernist community: Native American dance came to signify its
shared values and goals.
Even though experiencing Native American dance in person was un-
derstood to be a superior way to engage with it, advocates and enthu-
siasts of Native American dance nonetheless made many attempts to
represent Indian dances ekphrastically: it was widely written about and

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162 · Geneva M. Gano

represented visually in this period by non-Natives and Natives alike.

Modernist print culture brought together an eclectic mix of arts genres
and traditions across national and cultural lines and regularly featured
written and pictorial representations of Indian dance. Well-known little
magazines that served as arbiters of a decidedly cosmopolitan modernist
aesthetic including Chicago’s Poetry, New York’s The Dial, and London’s
The Adelphi all included features on Native American dance, as did other
magazines that were founded in the teens and straddled the now more
established divisions between art and aesthetics and culture and the so-
cial sciences such as Art and Archaeology and Theatre Arts Monthly.
Though modernists admired Native American dance because of its
social, spiritual, and aesthetic functions, they were adamant that it not
be perceived solely as an aspect of culture, fit primarily for anthropolo-
gists and social scientists to describe and preserve. Rather, they argued
that Native American dance is a beautiful, living, participatory, complex
art form on par with the best of the world’s art of the past and the pres-
ent. As such, its representation and interpretation to the world beyond
required the aesthetic expertise to which they laid claim as poets, art-
ists, and dancers. For example, Harriet Monroe, editor of the influential
little magazine Poetry, described the Pueblo dances that she witnessed
during a visit to Santa Fe in terms that precisely articulated why this art
form held so much interest to the modernists. She enthused to her read-
ers, “[the Pueblo Indian dances] assemble all the arts . . . to the unified
expression of a race and its earthly and spiritual life” (327). The dance
practices of Pueblo peoples served as models of the kind of community
endeavors that she and other modernists idealized: the dances involved
each member of the community, such that community was created, re-
created, distinguished, and affirmed with each dance. Pueblo ceremo-
nial dance was envisioned as an art that was not reserved only for artists,
“stars,” or society’s elite to perform and enjoy, but was performed by and
for the entire community as part of daily or seasonal life. For these mod-
ernists, dance, the theater arts, and art in general were ideally supposed
to have a wide significance and impact on people’s lives.
Santa Fe colonist Alice Corbin Henderson, coeditor of Poetry with
Monroe, elaborated along these lines, asserting the preeminence of
Southwest Indian dance within a broadly cosmopolitan, modernist

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 Pueblo Cosmopolitanism: Modernism and Tribal Ceremonial Dance · 163

context. Though “a comparison [of Pueblo dance] with our more artifi-
cial art is almost impossible,” she conceded, she insisted that
the Eagle dance, performed by the San Ildefonso or the Tesuque
Pueblo, has all the delicacy and finesse of Pavlova’s “Death of the
Swan”; and that any of the Pueblo dances however difficult in spirit,
compare favorably with the massed effects of the Russian Ballet. If
the new-comer expects to find in these Pueblo dances something
“savage” and unformed and chaotic, he will soon recognize his mis-
take. They are as highly formalized as the Japanese Noh. (Hender-
son 110)
In addition to exotic, rigorous Russian and Japanese dance forms, she de-
scribes the dances in San Felipe as having a wide spiritual significance:
they are “the Pueblo counterpart to [the festival of] Shiva” (111). Her es-
say, published in 1923 in Theatre Arts Magazine, is clearly written for an
audience of cosmopolitan “moderns” who would be familiar with the
Hindu deity, Pavlova, and Japanese theater. Further, she claims, this art
synthesizes artistic and religious impulses behind both Greek drama
and the modern sculpture art of Auguste Rodin (114). After a visit to the
Pueblos in the 1920s, Ted Shawn, “father of modern dance,” similarly ar-
gued that “the Pueblo Indians have dances whose choreographic form is
equal to anything the Russians have ever done, costumed with an under-
standing of color as great as that of Bakst” (18). Shawn and Henderson’s
broad, transcultural comparisons typified the modernists’ celebration of
Native American dancing and identified Pueblo dance traditions in par-
ticular as occupying a significant place within an international, modern-
ist, inter-arts canon.
By way of strategic comparisons and well-chosen contexts, then, those
modernists who saw Native American dance as a particularly flexible,
living, and modern art form aligned it with a supranationalist cosmo-
politanism, an artistic and broadly political ethos uncircumscribed by
nationalist ideologies. This was sometimes a tricky business, since what
Hartley described as “the living esthetic splendors” of Indian dance
were being actively suppressed and outlawed during this period by the
U.S. government: government Indian agents and a number of progres-
sive reformers believed that these dances hindered the Americanization

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164 · Geneva M. Gano

policies of the Office of Indian Affairs (28). As historian Tisa Wenger has
shown, Indian dance in particular was singled out specifically by reform-
ers and U.S. government officials as emblematic of a backward heathen-
ism that prevented Native Americans from full assimilation. In an effort
to counter this, local authorities actively suppressed Native ritual dance
traditions in the Southwest and across the United States. For some en-
thusiasts of Native American dance, including Hartley, an effective de-
fense of Pueblo dance within this urgent, political context seemed to
hinge on whether or not it might be able to be claimed as an “Ameri-
can” inheritance or as a source of nationalist pride. In this particularly
heated moment, thoroughly cosmopolitan modernists such as Hartley
(who had recently returned to America from a sojourn amongst an inter-
national coterie of modern artists in prewar Berlin) and Lawrence (who
consistently described his exile from England as an anti-nationalist act)
found themselves stressing—quite ham-handedly at times—the quintes-
sentially “American” nature of the dances and their value as a national
asset.
One of the earliest essays published on Native American dance, Hart-
ley’s 1920 essay “Red Man Ceremonials: An American Plea for American
Esthetics,” registers a tension between the necessity to defend Pueblo
dance upon the grounds it was being attacked—its Americanism—while
also pleading for an expanded, supranationalist, modern vision for art.
As the essay’s title indicates, Hartley hammers hard on the “American”
theme. Admonishing his readers, he declares: “You will travel over many
continents to find a more beautifully synthesized artistry than our red-
man offers. In times of peace we go about the world seeking every spe-
cies of life foreign to ourselves for our own esthetic or intellectual diver-
sion, but we neglect on our very doorstep the perhaps most remarkable
realization of beauty that can be found anywhere” (16). Anticipating
Tom Outland, the Anglo-American hero of Willa Cather’s 1925 novel
The Professor’s House, who thinks of the Pueblo peoples as his own kin
and their art as his rightful inheritances, Hartley utilizes the rhetoric
of Americanism to lay claim to “the redman as a gift” in possessive, na-
tionalist terms (16). “As Americans we should accept the one American
genius we possess, with genuine alacrity,” he writes. “We have upon our
own soil something to show the world as our own, while it lives” (28). At
the same time, Hartley argues that appreciation and acclaim, rather than

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 Pueblo Cosmopolitanism: Modernism and Tribal Ceremonial Dance · 165

suppression, of Native American dance would constitute the proper,

“modern” attitude for Americans, one that would improve the image of
all Americans in a modern, cosmopolitan context: it “would help at least
a little toward proving to the world around us that we are not so young
a country as we might seem, nor yet as diffident as our national attitude
would seem to indicate” (27).
Like D. H. Lawrence, John Sloan, Mabel Dodge Luhan, and other
Anglo-American modernists who witnessed, depicted, and wrote about
Pueblo dance during this period, Hartley asserted the primacy of cosmo-
politan standards for art and culture over national ones. Acutely sensitive
to the broader, competing visions of the meaning of Native American
dance, Hartley straddles the divide between those who celebrated the
dances as supremely American inheritances and those who rejected even
a rhetorical assimilation of Native American art and culture into a na-
tionalist vision. This latter group, which poet Robinson Jeffers described
as “pilgrims from the vacuum,” flocked to Native American dances in
hopes of finding a wide variety of things, most of which served very
particular functions within their own worldviews, but which had only
marginal bases in Native American life (158). They comprised the coun-
terculture of their day, and, like their descendants in the 1960s, looked
to (and, at times, emulated) Native Americans as a way to express their
resistance to World War I–era 100 percent Americanism; for many, their
appreciation and support of Native American dance was at least partly
propelled by the fact that the U.S. government, officially, did not (Delo-
ria). These competing desires, projected on and through Native Ameri-
can dance, were reconciled unevenly within the arts colony around Santa
Fe and Taos and complicated attempts to engage with the local Pueblo
peoples as allies and friends.
Within the region, the Pueblo peoples’ long history of resistance to
colonial oppressors, from the early Spanish priests to the current U.S.
government, was well-known: these Indians were not beautiful, passive
symbols of a dying culture but living, dynamic agitators for action and
change that these moderns wished to emulate and assist. Strategies of
resistance developed by the Pueblo peoples over centuries of occupa-
tion included convening an all-Pueblo council to respond to legal land
grabs, maintaining religious and social customs despite repression, and
performing individual acts of evasion and rebellion that included theft,

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166 · Geneva M. Gano

property destruction, and work slowdowns. As the controversy over

Indian dancing, in particular, and Native American sovereignty, more
broadly, heated up throughout North America, Native peoples in the
Santa Fe and Taos region employed all of these strategies on their own
behalf, as Wegner has shown. Following the lead of the Pueblo peoples,
and working closely with Tony Lujan, a Taos Pueblo Indian who married
modernist and socialite Mabel Dodge Sterne at the height of this crisis
in 1923, the sympathetic Anglo-American arts community utilized their
already-established modern communications networks that ran to New
York City, Washington, D.C., London, and beyond to launch a national
and international lobbying and publicity protest campaign ( Jantzer-
White). The arts colonists’ participation in this resistance indicated their
desire to be effective allies to the local Native American peoples, even as
their motivations clearly extended beyond the immediate, local struggle:
their political activities in support of Native American sovereignty were
part of a primitivist project common to cosmopolitan modernism across
the arts and across the world that aligned the appreciation and under-
standing of “primitive arts” with anti-nationalist critique, writ large (Bar-
kan and Bush; Carr; Rushing; Torgovnick).
Like so many of the modernists who found themselves in the Santa
Fe and Taos area, Lawrence was drawn to the region by the promise of
building a modern, utopian arts community that had Pueblo values—as
the colonists loosely interpreted and understood them—at their center.
From across the Atlantic, Lawrence had long been thinking and writing
about Native Americans, proposing in his 1920 essay, “America, Listen to
Your Own,” that Americans base their future endeavors—in art and be-
yond—in Native American rather than European traditions. Lawrence,
echoing and amplifying Hartley, argued against the dominant view that
American Indian cultures were dying out and needed to be preserved
for posterity as artifacts. Instead, he claimed, they were fertile, vibrant,
and dynamic living cultures that should be roundly recognized as the
“Godheads” of future American art and culture, across cultural and ra-
cial lines. The essay prompted an immediate response by New Yorker
Walter Lippmann, who found the idea preposterous and dismissed Law-
rence’s enthusiasm for Native American culture as a “dangerous misap-
prehension” (70). As an Englishman writing from Italy who had never
set foot on American soil, Lawrence was someone who couldn’t possibly

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 Pueblo Cosmopolitanism: Modernism and Tribal Ceremonial Dance · 167

understand what the nation’s arts and the age demanded: Lawrence’s
“futurist rage” for the “Noble Savage” was meaningless, Lippmann main-
tained, in the face of the anti-cosmopolitan, anti-arts, anti-intellectual
cultural crisis that faced modern Americans in the years following World
War I (70).
Within a fortnight of his arrival in the United States two years later,
Lawrence had made his way to New Mexico and attended his first Indian
dance at the Jicarilla Apache Reservation. Mabel Dodge Sterne, his host-
ess, was insistent that he attend as many dances as possible, as quickly as
possible, so that he would apprehend the beauty of Pueblo Indian cul-
ture and be compelled, quickly, to speak out to “save” it. Already inclined
to see the suppression of Native American culture as a cultural, if not po-
litical, mistake, Lawrence agreed to help her defeat the proposed Bursum
Bill, which was widely understood to be designed to divest the Pueblo
peoples of tribal landholdings and their sovereign rights to cultural and
spiritual self-determination. Within months, the New York Times pub-
lished Lawrence’s piece about these dances, which deplored the federal
government’s “great desire to turn [the Pueblo peoples] into white men”
(“Certain Americans”). This was the first of many essays Lawrence wrote
about Native American dance while he lived in the region.
Though this particular essay was directed most urgently at the legal
and political policies affecting Native Americans in the region, Lawrence
was also concerned about the deleterious effects of mass tourism in the
region on Indian life and culture. Along with other artists, archaeologists,
and anthropologists who were working out of the Museum of New Mex-
ico in Santa Fe, he believed that pernicious outside influences—namely
the invasive tourist market for “inauthentic” and cheaply made souvenirs
and trinkets—would ultimately and inevitably degrade the Native Amer-
icans’ unique aesthetic culture. As a signature component of the tour-
ism industry that grew up around Santa Fe, the dances attracted many
casual sightseers who were eager to see them on their “Indian Detours”
(Dilworth). While the modernists wanted to promote and facilitate the
appreciation of Indian dances as one way to end their suppression by the
state, they were conflicted about the potential success of their efforts: if
the dances became too popular, the arts colonists’ exclusive domains of
expertise and appreciation of the dances—constituting components of
belonging within the community—could be infiltrated or corrupted by

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168 · Geneva M. Gano

the uninitiated, gross bourgeoisie. It was important, then, for these self-
appointed authorities to distinguish themselves from the masses as supe-
rior, sensitive interpreters of Indian dance and culture.
Frequently, this took the form of satire. John Sloan, an extremely
well-established and respected New York artist who moved to Santa
Fe in 1919, was an ardent interpreter, defender, and promoter of Indian
dance and art; his 1927 etching, “Indian Detour,” ridicules the busloads
of smartly dressed tourists who irreligiously ignore the ceremonial corn
dance taking place in the middle of the plaza, and instead smoke ciga-
rettes, gossip, sleep, dance, and buy trinkets. The dance, supposedly the
reason for the tourists’ visit to the Pueblo, is easy to miss: the tourists
far outnumber the Native Americans depicted, and their tour buses
surround and dwarf the main event to the point of obscuring it. Sloan’s
cartoon visually expresses the disdain the modernists felt for those who
they believed misunderstood or simply did not properly appreciate In-
dian dance. Lawrence also lampooned tourists in his writing, aiming his
vicious wit at clueless girls with bobbed hair (the same tourists targeted
by Sloan) who clearly wanted “entertainment” rather than understand-
ing. At the same time, Lawrence was deeply suspicious of the arts colo-
nists, including Mabel Dodge Luhan, who imagined themselves to be
the sophisticated interpreters and righteous saviors of Native American
culture: these, too, felt the prick of his pen. As one of the most prolific
writers on Native American dance—he attended many and wrote about
them extensively while he lived in the Santa Fe and Taos area and his
essays were published in a variety of newspapers, magazines, and books
in the United States and abroad—Lawrence consistently argued that cul-
tural outsiders such as himself would never truly be able to understand
Indian dance, even though he left open the possibility that one could
respect and perhaps, partially and incompletely, appreciate them. Even
in his most serious, sustained essays such as “The Hopi Snake Dance,”
Lawrence’s attacks on the white audience frequently threatened to over-
whelm his fundamental goal of offering his readers genuine, though nec-
essarily limited, insight into the broader social, political, spiritual, and
aesthetic contexts for Native American dance.
As artists and culture workers, the arts colonists believed that they
had both a vested interest and an expertise in culture, which from their
perspective justified a variety of responses to “protect” tribal cultures

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 Pueblo Cosmopolitanism: Modernism and Tribal Ceremonial Dance · 169

Figure 8.1. John Sloan, “Indian Detour,” 1927. Courtesy of The Cleveland Museum of
Art, Gift of Mrs. Malcolm L. McBride 1951.50 © The Cleveland Museum of Art. ©
Delaware Art Museum/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

from tourists. This “protection” extended far beyond the ridicule offered
by Sloan and Lawrence. Some of the colonists conspired with Edgar Lee
Hewett, director of the Museum of New Mexico, to prevent the sale of
goods made for the tourist trade while financially rewarding those Na-
tive Americans who met the Anglo-Americans’ standards for what they
deemed to be “authentic,” “uncorrupted” art. They actively promoted
and championed these artists, bringing into their modernist networks
of exhibitions, sales, and patronage a select few individuals they identi-
fied as “masters” of the arts, particularly those who had excelled in the
Western art form of easel painting and whose subject matter focused on
ceremonial dance (Brody; Rushing).
The first generation of Native American easel painters who produced
these paintings very consciously plugged into this established modernist
network. Almost from the very moment of their initial production—ea-
sel painting was not a traditional art form in the Pueblos, but arrived in

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170 · Geneva M. Gano

the late teens with the artists—the paintings were produced at the urg-
ings of Anglo-American art enthusiasts and circulated for sale within the
international modern arts marketplace (Brody 64–65). The first exhibi-
tion of modern American Indian paintings, which was held at the Mu-
seum of New Mexico in 1919, established a small group of young Na-
tive Americans, including Velino Shije Herrera (Zia), Otis Polelonema
(Hopi), and Fred Kabotie (Hopi), as well as a few who quickly became
included in this group, such as Awa Tsireh (San Ildefonso) and Tonita
Peña (San Ildefonso), as the great artists of their generation. Mabel
Dodge Sterne, who had patronized an impressive roster of modern art-
ists in Europe and the United States, acquired the entire exhibition and
immediately sent it to New York to be included in the Society of Inde-
pendent Artists exhibition, where major newspapers and little magazines
alike called attention to the works. Even though the dances themselves
did not travel from New Mexico, paintings of Native American dance
ceremonies by these artists were exhibited in national and international
exhibits alongside those by celebrated Anglo-American cosmopolitan
modernists including Marsden Hartley, George Bellows, and Andrew
Dasburg. These Native American artists were also plugged into a sophis-
ticated patronage system alongside them, though the financial support
they received from collectors and patrons was not equitable (Brody;
Mullin). Their paintings of dance were discussed in major magazines and
newspapers by well-known art critics, including Walter Pach, and col-
lected by modern art enthusiasts around the world. This selected group
of artists attended parties and soirees in Manhattan; spoke and taught
regionally, nationally, and internationally as experts in their fields; and
achieved a level of celebrity that has continued to reverberate in muse-
ums, histories, and arts practices over the years: their subject matter and
stylistic innovations continue to be singled out for recognition.1 Though
these painters were thoroughly engaged with this network of cosmopoli-
tan modernism, they were not always recognized as full participants but
commonly performed dual roles as janitors or maids, entertainers, and
models and assistants to white artists.2
Properly appreciating and valuing Native American dance—and all
that it stood for—was frequently expressed by the modernist art commu-
nity through the appreciation and ownership of paintings about dance
by these Pueblo artists. Easel paintings, with their distinctive blend of

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 Pueblo Cosmopolitanism: Modernism and Tribal Ceremonial Dance · 171

Western tools (watercolors and paper) and non-Western subject matter

and distinctive style (it was proposed that the painters were translating
ancient paintings of dance ceremonies from Kiva walls to paper), were
aesthetically compelling as examples of primitivist art. As art historian
J. J. Brody proposes, for members of the Anglo-American modernist
community, the paintings functioned as “cognates of the spiritual, so-
cially vital, communal events”: that is, of the dances (93). In other words,
the paintings served as souvenirs: symbolic mementos that reminded
possessors of a felt and lived experience of dance that they had wit-
nessed. They believed that the paintings functioned this way for the Na-
tive American painters, too, often remarking that the “boys” hummed or
sang the corresponding ceremonial songs to themselves as they painted.
One of the well-recognized painters of this generation, Fred Kabotie,
emphasized the mnemonic aspect of his dance paintings in his autobiog-
raphy, explaining that “when you’re so remote from your own people you
get lonesome”; he began painting while in boarding school in Santa Fe in
order to “express something of [his] home” (Kabotie and Belknap 28).
The bulk of the paintings by Kabotie and the other early Pueblo wa-
tercolorists focus on ceremonial dances that thematized the subject of
the spiritual in art as well as the communal, collective process of cre-
ation: favorite subjects of little arts communities. Though the dancing
figures represented in these paintings were frequently described by later
critics as being static in nature, the arts colonists would have recognized
them as frieze-like: they would have perceived formal resonances with
Classical portrayals of significant ceremonial or social acts (Lears). The
rhythmic, formalized figures, attention to detail in the costuming, and
the blank backgrounds, all of which were commonly noted in writings
about the paintings, signaled a connection to the “high art” of the Greeks
that many of the modernists active in little arts communities believed
were important, ancient sources for new directions in modern art (Ca-
hill; Hough).
This shift of focus from the dance event to the representation of dance
was ironic, though most modernists did not seem to notice: if dance
was especially compelling to the moderns because it was a fundamen-
tally communal, spiritual endeavor that brought elements of all of the
arts together in space and time, the two-dimensional representation
of dance in a fundamentally Western art form—easel painting—that

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172 · Geneva M. Gano

Figure 8.2. Awa Tsireh, “Corn Dance,” ca. 1919. Photograph by Addison Doty. Courtesy
of the School for Advanced Research, cat. no. IAF.P11.

emphasized the technical virtuosity of the individual artist and could

be experienced in isolation on gallery walls ultimately suggested some-
thing very different. As painters, individual artists—most prominently
those who had cultivated connections to the Anglo-American modern
art networks—were celebrated and masterworks identified; in Pueblo
dance, however, the group’s cohesion and collective work and the con-
tinuity between dances is emphasized.3 The modernist arts community
tended to gloss over this discrepancy, perhaps because the paintings (un-
like the dances themselves) were assimilable to a modernist praxis that
Janet Lyon has described as involving both the circulation of art objects
and modernist actors (as art collectors, enthusiasts and patrons, or art-
ists) (“Sociability”). While the dances were untranslatable performative
experiences that were difficult to quantify in dollars and cents—and that
were as accessible to the coarse tourist as to the modern artist—consum-
ers of Pueblo watercolors depicting dance could purchase (and resell)
an object that was detached from its communal production and spiri-
tual meaning. Indeed, many paintings representing Pueblo dance found
purchasers thousands of miles away, in New York City and beyond. For
instance, at Ishauu, a Madison Avenue gallery opened in 1923 by Santa

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 Pueblo Cosmopolitanism: Modernism and Tribal Ceremonial Dance · 173

Fe colonist and arts patron Amelia Elizabeth White, modern art enthu-
siasts could purchase works on paper by celebrated Pueblo artists of the
highest quality, appealing to a certain class of people: not what White re-
ferred to as the “the trashy stuff that is sold as ‘Indian Art’ along the Santa
Fe road” (White to Mabel Dodge Luhan, 1922; quoted in Mullin 174).
Such comments point to the fact that the Anglo arts colonists had a
strong hand in determining what and who to bring into their modern-
ist networks and communities. Almost all of the Native American art-
ists whose works were included in the 1919 exhibition had attended the
Santa Fe Indian School as part of the assimilation policies that required
Native Americans to send their children to boarding schools; they were
all identified by Anglo arts enthusiasts as “talented” and then given time,
materials, and studio space to develop their art under their patrons’ care-
ful guidance. The “guidance” that they offered usually meant shielding
the “boys” (as they were collectively referred to for years after they had
left school to work and paint) from outside influences in the effort to
preserve what the patrons believed was their native, uncultivated genius.
Paintings that seemed to be authentic expressions of culture—defined
by the Anglo patrons as formally distinctive and ideally detailing a spiri-
tual dance ceremony—were purchased and praised, and those paintings
that seemed derivative or somehow corrupted by Anglo or European tra-
ditions were shunned. Native American painters who worked with and
within the little arts colony at Santa Fe had unique opportunities to par-
ticipate in the transnational modernist movement, but the terms upon
which their participation was established and encouraged were circum-
scribed ones.
Considering the importance of Native American ceremonial dance
within the modernist imagination, both at Santa Fe and beyond, requires
that we revise our understanding of who and what constituted the ex-
pression of modernism in the early twentieth century. Once seen almost
exclusively as passive objects of the primitivist imaginary, Native Ameri-
can artists and dancers may be resituated as active and engaged par-
ticipants within an actually existing cosmopolitan modernist network.
We can also see that attending to localized articulations of modernism,
such as those centered at Santa Fe and Taos, substantially shifts our un-
derstanding of aesthetic, social, and political impulses that undergird

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174 · Geneva M. Gano

modernist activity more broadly. Such close studies help us to reimag-

ine modernism as a diverse set of place-based practices rather than an
unwieldy phenomenon that increasingly seems too big to identify in a
meaningful way.

Notes
1. This particular group of Native American artists has been discussed widely,
but basic biographical information about their lives is difficult to come by. My work
has been informed by Brody, Kabotie and Belknap, Scott, and Sloan and La Farge.
2. Hewett employed young Native American “boys” as day laborers when exca-
vating archaeological sites and as janitors at the Museum of New Mexico even as
he encouraged them to draw and paint with a portion of their paid time, which was
paid hourly (Hewett kept the paintings). This was common elsewhere, as Kabo-
tie recalls, where the Native American painters were employed primarily in menial
work but also asked to produce paintings for a primarily white tourist audience.
3. See Sweet and Rushing; see also Seymour for a discussion on how dance is
understood within a traditional Pueblo worldview.

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