The Saint Louis Art Museum will unveil a new ticketed exhibition, Action/Abstraction Redefined: Modern Native Art, 1940s-1970s, beginning on June 24. On view until September 3, the exhibition includes roughly 90 works by about 40 different artists and is the museum’s first to center around Native American artists of the 20th century.
“Contemporary Native American art is getting a lot of attention across the country, and there is a broader story to how we arrived at this moment,” says Alexander Brier Marr, the associate curator of Native American art at the museum. “It reshapes our narratives of post-war painting in the United States, and it also helps us to see historic collections of Native American art differently as source material for contemporary Native American artists.”
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The exhibit is presented by Santa Fe’s Museum of Contemporary Native Arts at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA). Many of the artists who have work featured in the galleries formerly experimented with their artistic approaches at the IAIA, giving way to the introduction of new contemporary art forms. The pieces that appear in the exhibit take inspiration from both traditional art techniques and more modern influences.
Planning for the new exhibit began during the COVID-19 pandemic, about three years ago, according to Marr. The museum worked closely with its key collaborators, the Museum of Modern Contemporary Native Arts and half a dozen additional lenders, to bring together pieces from such sources as the Horseman Foundation in St. Louis, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and Arizona State Museum in Tucson.
The exhibition title references a previous exhibit from 2008, Action/Abstraction, which explored the concept of American Abstract Expressionism through the work of modern artists such as Jackson Pollock. The new exhibit builds upon the previous iteration by turning its lens toward Native American culture in a post-war world. The use of the word “redefined” in the title is meant to evoke the expansion of the art form and acknowledgement of Native American contributions to the movement.
“The modern art movement, in general, is indebted to indigenous art from around the world,” says Marr.
Throughout the exhibit, visitors will have the opportunity to take a walk through Native American culture as interpreted by Native artists such as Lloyd Kiva New, George Morrison, Fritz Scholder, Neil Parsons, Anita Fields, John Hoover, T. C. Cannon, Kay WalkingStick, and more. Their work showcases the development of personal styles and techniques across an array of indigenous tribes, including Cherokee, Chippewa, Cheyenne, Pawnee, Osage, and Navajo, among others.
Galleries are organized chronologically by decade to allow for visitors to smoothly transition through time from each section of work to the next. When visitors leave the exhibit, they are met with the contemporary art galleries, where the influence of the featured artists in Action/Abstraction Redefined can still be felt today.
The public can attend a free preview of the exhibition on June 23 from 4-8 p.m., which will include cocktails and entertainment in Sculpture Hall in addition to free entry into the exhibition.
For more information and additional event dates, visit slam.org.
