Who Gets to Define Native American Art?

Oscar Howe was furious. Howe, a Native American artist, had submitted a painting to the 1958 Philbrook Indian Annual art competition and the jurors had turned it down. It wasn’t the rejection that offended him but the rationale. Howe had begun exploring abstraction in his work, and the painting with its bold planes of color and jagged abstract shapes defied the jurors’ expectations of what Native American art could look like. It was, they said, a “fine painting–but not Indian.”

By Susannah Gardiner