Baseline Shift: Her Greatest Work Lay in Decorative Design Angel De Cora PDF

“Her Greatest Work Lay in Decorative Design”: Angel De Cora, Ho-Chunk Artist, ca. 1869–1919 Copyright © 2021. Princeton Architectural Press. All rights reserved. Linda M. Waggoner “Angel DeCora, a Winnebago with noble French blood and descended from a line of famous chiefs,” wrote Elaine Goodale...

“Her Greatest Work Lay in Decorative Design”: Angel De Cora, Ho-Chunk Artist, ca. 1869–1919 Copyright © 2021. Princeton Architectural Press. All rights reserved. Linda M. Waggoner “Angel DeCora, a Winnebago with noble French blood and descended from a line of famous chiefs,” wrote Elaine Goodale Eastman in 1919, “was an idealist and an artist to her fingertips.”1 To characterize De Cora (Hinook Mahiwi Kilinaka) as a Native American artist today, however, involves a paradox. Like a shooting star, her trace remains visible, but we no longer perceive her contribution to Native American art. Post–World War II critics found her artwork to be overshadowed by her Western art training, but it is not only her oeuvre that poses a challenge. To contextualize her artwork today, we depend upon a rhetoric of authenticity she herself disseminated. Opening page of “Kwakiutl,” from The Indians’ Book, De Cora was a Ho-Chunk compiled by Natalie Curtis, 1907. The lettering, by (commonly Winnebago) Angel De Cora (Hinook Mahiwi Kilinaka), draws on woman who grew up on Kwakiutl design motifs: “the tail and fin of the whale, the Winnebago reservation the hawk, and the eye-joint,” as noted in the text. in northeastern Nebraska. The drawings, by Klalish (Charles James Nowell), a Born around 1869, she Kwakiutl Indian, reference the spiritual essence of a lived in early childhood grizzly bear and a killer whale. with her grandparents in 13 Baseline Shift : Untold Stories of Women in Graphic Design History, edited by Briar Levit, Princeton Architectural Press, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rit/detail.action?docID=6839923. Created from rit on 2023-04-14 18:13:09. Copyright © 2021. Princeton Architectural Press. All rights reserved. a traditional wigwam above the banks of the Missouri River. De Cora grew up observing her tribeswomen create beautiful silverwork, beadwork, and appliqué—at which Ho-Chunk women still excel. Julia De Cora early noticed her sister’s artistic bent. “There was the loveliest clay bank where we made all our own toys,” she recalled. “Whatever Angel made was done a bit better than we did.”2 However, De Cora was not honored as a significant Native artist in the National Museum of the American Indian’s commemorative book, Creation’s Journey: Native American Identity and Belief (1994). Her art is not represented, yet the book’s text is steeped in her influence, foregrounding concepts of abstraction, discussions of Indian trade economies and Native women, ideals about the American Indian’s connection to the land, and the education of Americans about the appropriate use and authentic representation of American Indian design elements and symbols.3 Although Smithsonian ethnographer John Ewers highlighted De Cora’s artistic career in his Images of a Vanished Life: Plains Indian Drawings from the Collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1956), he claimed, “There was little in Angel DeCora’s mature artistic style to suggest her Indian background.”4 He thought her work too “fine art” influenced to speak to the pictographs of the male Fort Marion Plains ledger book artists his book featured. In 1878 these men attended the first experimental class for Native Americans at Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, a freedman’s school established in Virginia in 1868. Notably, De Cora, having been abducted by a White recruiter, arrived to enroll in Hampton’s “Indian Department” in 1883, just a few years after subscribers to the school’s newsletter received free pictographs by the ledger book artists. Patricia Trenton’s Independent Spirits: Women Painters of the American West, 1890–1945 (1995) acknowledges De Cora as one of three Native American women “who distinguished themselves through their paintings and cultural activities.” De Cora’s White contemporaries distinguished her even more by declaring her “the first real Indian artist.”5 Yet she did not see herself as exceptional. She believed all Indigenous people were innately gifted artists, particularly in abstract design. Still, De Cora grew up at a time when Indians could inspire art but were themselves regarded merely as craft makers. De Cora’s formal art training began in 1892, when she was admitted to the art department of Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. She spent her first year studying anatomy, drawing from casts as well as practicing life drawing and still-life painting. 14 Angel De Cora, Ho-Chunk Artist Baseline Shift : Untold Stories of Women in Graphic Design History, edited by Briar Levit, Princeton Architectural Press, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rit/detail.action?docID=6839923. Created from rit on 2023-04-14 18:13:09. Copyright © 2021. Princeton Architectural Press. All rights reserved. At the end of her second year, a reporter from the Boston Journal sang the praises of “the young lady of Indian parentage” who “won the undergraduate prize simply from excellence in cast drawing in charcoal.” This was “a distinct departure from the custom observed at the college,” noted the reporter, “and, in consequence, Miss DeCora is receiving many encomiums for her marked ability.”6 De Cora’s most influential Smith teacher, Dwight Tryon, emphasized “good draftsmanship” and “clearness and beauty of line,” but he also influenced her to paint in his own misty, tonalist style. In 1894, De Cora took courses in composition, landscape sketching, and modeling in clay. When she completed her coursework in June 1896, she received recognition as “one of the most proficient in clay modeling,” the skill she’d honed on the banks of the Missouri River. The art department also presented her with “special mention” in color studies, “specially meritorious work” for cast drawing, and honorable mention for a “nocturne sketch” that the judges pronounced “a beautiful thing.”7 Upon graduation, De Cora submitted her portfolio to Philadelphia’s Drexel Institute of Art, Science and Industry. She hoped to study illustration. According to a Hampton teacher, when “the question of ‘art for art’s sake’ or ‘art for money’s sake’” came up, De Cora’s “desire to be independent as soon as possible decided her in favor of taking up illustration as a means to this end.”8 Despite intense competition, Drexel admitted her in September 1896. She took courses from the dynamic Yankee illustrator Howard Pyle, known today as the “father of American illustration” and the mentor of the Brandywine School of artists. Recognizing De Cora’s talent, Pyle envisioned a promising career for her in the special niche of Indian illustration and so urged her to sketch and paint her own people. In June 1897, De Cora journeyed with a Hampton chaperone to the Fort Berthold reservation in North Dakota, home of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara. “The Indians watched her skill with interest and pride, and became so fond of her and her bright, witty sayings, that she had no trouble in getting any number of people to pose for her,” relayed her chaperone. “Some of the portraits she made there of the old chiefs are of great value as well as beauty.”9 A local newspaper further touted, “The wild Indians have always had an aptitude for hieroglyphic or primitive drawing, comparatively few of the educated ones have excelled in the fine arts. Miss DeCora is one of these exceptions and to day stands at the head of her race as a portrait painter.”10 Linda M. Waggoner Baseline Shift : Untold Stories of Women in Graphic Design History, edited by Briar Levit, Princeton Architectural Press, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rit/detail.action?docID=6839923. Created from rit on 2023-04-14 18:13:09. 15 Copyright © 2021. Princeton Architectural Press. All rights reserved. When De Cora returned to Philadelphia, Pyle encouraged her to write and to illustrate her own stories and introduced her to the publishers of Harper’s Monthly Magazine. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that De Cora took “Mr. Pyle’s costume and illustration classes,” where “she progressed very rapidly, making drawings and compositions of a peculiar strength and directness....She is at present at work upon some illustrations for a story of her own shortly to be published in one of the leading American periodicals.”11 In February and November 1899, Harper’s published “The Sick Child” and “Gray Wolf’s Daughter” by “Henook-makhewe-kelenaka (Angel de Cora).” Critics adored her Thunderbird Clan name as well as her poignant and beautifully illustrated semiautobiographical stories. In 1898, Pyle opened a summer school for his more gifted students along the Brandywine River in Pennsylvania. De Cora won a coveted scholarship. “Look on this, study it, absorb it,” Pyle instructed. “Never again will it be the same. If you see it tomorrow, the light will be different and you will be different.” As Tryon had urged De Cora to sound the depths of her experience to develop her own style, Pyle espoused a theory of “mental projection,” urging students to “paint as you felt,” “throw yourself into the picture,” and forego “ideas of technique, classical rendition or art school technique.”12 De Cora left little record of that summer, but she left an impression. One student recalled that she “was a genial young woman, ambitious to succeed, but seemingly unable to get away from her native Reservation western life.” She observed that when Pyle instructed students to paint “springtime in the country,” the “Indian girl’s composition would show a hillside cottage embowered in roses and vines; but far in the distance would always be the wide spaces and open prairies of her native haunts.”13 So much for one’s own “mental projections.” According to another source, Pyle believed not only that De Cora’s gender was a disability, but also, “more unfortunately,” that her being “an American Indian” was a handicap. “She was so retiring that she always kept in the background of my classes,” he complained. “When I tried to rouse her ambition by telling her how famous she might become, she answered, ‘We Indian women are taught that modesty is a woman’s chief virtue.’”14 De Cora’s response to his goading reflects the deep cultural chasm between the two, but Pyle was nevertheless bowled over by her talent: “Out of a thousand pupils ten have genius, she’s one of the ten,” he revealed in a letter. “Of the six compositions she has sent in, every one, if properly painted” and “sent to Paris she would at once become notable.”15 16 Angel De Cora, Ho-Chunk Artist Baseline Shift : Untold Stories of Women in Graphic Design History, edited by Briar Levit, Princeton Architectural Press, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rit/detail.action?docID=6839923. Created from rit on 2023-04-14 18:13:09. Copyright © 2021. Princeton Architectural Press. All rights reserved. Nevertheless, De Cora became aware of “certain deficiencies” in her art training and decided to go to Boston. “I had heard of Joseph DeCamp as a great teacher,” she wrote, “so I entered the Cowles Art School, where he was the instructor in life drawing.”16 DeCamp was one of the “Ten American Painters,” a group whose common bond was aestheticism executed in a modified style of European impressionism. DeCamp gave up teaching soon after De Cora’s arrival, so De Cora enrolled in Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts to study with Frank Benson, also one of the “Ten,” and Edmund C. Tarbell, leader of the Boston School. She also took at least one decoration course, where she made greeting cards with Angel De Cora, cover of The Middle Five, Francis art nouveau lettering. La Flesche, 1900. During this period she contributed a painting for the frontispiece of Francis La Flesche’s The Middle Five: Indian Boys at School (1900), about his boyhood at an Omaha boarding school. Following this she created several illustrations for Old Indian Legends (1901) by Gertrude Bonnin (aka Zitkála-Šá), as well as illustrations of several dozen headpieces and decorative chapter initials for Mary Catherine Judd’s Wigwam Stories (1901). De Cora designed the covers for all three books in an arts and crafts style using abstract Indian motifs— bows and arrows, teepees, animal horns, and a thunderbird—with complementary lettering. As she told La Flesche, she was not as happy with her illustration work as she was with his book cover. Linda M. Waggoner Baseline Shift : Untold Stories of Women in Graphic Design History, edited by Briar Levit, Princeton Architectural Press, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rit/detail.action?docID=6839923. Created from rit on 2023-04-14 18:13:09. 17 Copyright © 2021. Princeton Architectural Press. All rights reserved. In 1902, De Cora moved to New York City, where the art scene was less provincial. By the spring of 1905, she was busy with the American ethnomusicologist Natalie Curtis’s The Indians’ Book (1907), a compilation of art, songs, and stories from eighteen tribal nations. Initially, De Cora was hired to create a Ho-Chunk artwork for the Winnebago chapter, but she ended up rendering original lettering to complement art made by specific tribal artists for each of the book’s eighteen chapter heads. Curtis’s recollections reveal De Cora’s early role introducing and popularizing Native design: “I asked Angel De Cora to make a design for the title-page of her own tribe, the Winnebago people. When she brought me the finished page, it bore, in addition to the design, the legend, ‘Lake Indians—Winnebago,’ in letters so beautiful and of such startling originality that my publishers declared: ‘We can’t have one page looking like this and the others labeled with prosaic printing! We must have this sort of lettering all through the book.’”17 The publisher’s designer further exclaimed that De Cora’s “structural ideas for decorative forms,” were “unlike anything that’s ever been done with the alphabet before.” She “invented a different kind of lettering for every Indian picture, and the forms of the letters were composed of motifs from the drawings which they accompanied.”18 For example, one chapter’s lettering cleverly reflects the pictograph of a Plains ledger artist.19 De Cora’s work for The Indians’ Book shows her early role in introducing and popularizing Native design, refuting John Ewers’s dismissal of her Indianness. Curtis claimed that although De Cora “started her career by illustrating books of Indian tales,” she “later looked down upon these early efforts, for her greatest work lay in decorative design.”20 De Cora was educated when reformers promoted either the complete assimilation of Native children or returned them as cultural missionaries to their reservations. Yet she helped in some measure to transform this White supremacist attitude for the next generation after the Commissioner of Indian Affairs appointed her in 1906 to establish the innovative “Native Indian Art” Department at Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. She instructed students in the design of book covers, lettering, and head- and tailpieces, but her curriculum mostly emphasized the design of more salable items: “We can perpetuate the use of Indian designs by applying them on modern articles of use and ornament that the Indian is taught to make,” she said. “I ask my pupils to make a design for a frieze for wall decoration, also borders for printing, designs for embroidery of all kinds, for wood-carving and pyrography, and designs for rugs.”21 18 Angel De Cora, Ho-Chunk Artist Baseline Shift : Untold Stories of Women in Graphic Design History, edited by Briar Levit, Princeton Architectural Press, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rit/detail.action?docID=6839923. Created from rit on 2023-04-14 18:13:09. Copyright © 2021. Princeton Architectural Press. All rights reserved. In the fall of 1907, De Cora presented a paper at the National Educational Association Conference to inform fellow educators about her first year of teaching. Her presentation challenged their primitivist perception of what counted as art and, more importantly, who counted as an artist: In exhibitions of Indian school work, generally, the only traces of Indian one sees are some of the signatures denoting clannish names. In looking over my pupil’s native design work, I cannot help calling to mind the Indian woman, untaught and unhampered by the white man’s ideas of art, making beautiful and intricate designs on her pottery, baskets and beaded articles, which show the inborn Opening page of “Dakota” from The Indians’ talent. She sits in the open, drawBook, compiled by Natalie Curtis, 1907. ing her inspiration from the broad The lettering is by Angel De Cora (Hinook aspects of Nature. Her zigzag line Mahiwi Kilinaka). The image of a Dakota indicates the line of the hills in the brave and medicine man is by Tatankadistance, and the blue and white Ptecila (Short Bull), a Dakota Indian. The background so usual in the Indian warrior’s horned headdress represents color scheme denotes the sky. Her “divine power, the insignia of the Holy Man bold touches of green, red and yelor Man of Medicine,” as noted in the text. low she has learned from Nature’s own use of those colors in the green grass and flowers, and the soft tones that were the general tone of the ground color in the days of skin garments, are to her as the parched grass and the desert. She makes her strong color contrasts under the glare of the sun, whose brilliancy makes even her bright tones seem softened into tints. This scheme of color has been called barbaric and crude, but then one must remember that in the days when the Indian woman made all her own color, mostly of vegetable dyes, she couldn’t produce any of the strong, glaring colors they now get in aniline dyes.22 Linda M. Waggoner Baseline Shift : Untold Stories of Women in Graphic Design History, edited by Briar Levit, Princeton Architectural Press, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rit/detail.action?docID=6839923. Created from rit on 2023-04-14 18:13:09. 19 Copyright © 2021. Princeton Architectural Press. All rights reserved. De Cora’s essential observations “Away with Your White Man’s Art!” Detroit Free Press, July 28, 1907. The headline are still taught today in Native art classes, but without attribution to her. misidentifies Angel De Cora as “Sioux.” Yet she was a key figure in America’s arts and crafts movement, as one of the few to infuse it with insider knowledge about the esoteric elements of Native design. As a female in a male-dominated culture of professionalism, she popularized knowledge about Native art and design, hoping that the dissemination of authenticity would revive the pride and economic viability of 20 Angel De Cora, Ho-Chunk Artist Baseline Shift : Untold Stories of Women in Graphic Design History, edited by Briar Levit, Princeton Architectural Press, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rit/detail.action?docID=6839923. Created from rit on 2023-04-14 18:13:09. Copyright © 2021. Princeton Architectural Press. All rights reserved. Native Americans who were (and still are) historically traumatized by Indian removals, assimilation policies, and cultural genocide. In 1911, De Cora helped found the Society of American Indians, a pan-Indian progressive group dedicated to uplifting Native peoples. During the SAI’s first conference, she gave a presentation, stating, “Manufacturers are now employing Indian designs in deteriorated forms. If this system of decoration was better understood by the designers how much more popular their products would be in the general market.”23 She believed her Carlisle students were primed for this role, but she also stressed that Native women could obtain more financial independence for their families by applying their tribal designs to popular items. Eventually, De Cora hoped to quit the bureaucratic Indian Service that administered Carlisle and other Indian schools to collaborate with her husband, William “Lone Star” Dietz, a Carlisle football player who assisted her in the Carlisle art department.24 They worked together on Carlisle’s innovative monthly arts and crafts style magazine, which became a model for those of all Indian schools. They also co-illustrated Elaine Goodale Eastman’s Yellow Star: A Story of East and West (1911) and Ruth Everett Beck’s The Little Buffalo Robe (1914), but De Cora did most of the work and her dream of collaborating meaningfully with Dietz was unfulfilled. Dietz left Carlisle to coach college football in 1915, and the couple divorced in November 1918.25 De Cora died three months later on February 19, 1919, a victim of the flu pandemic. “Angel always insisted that she had no more talent than any other Indian woman, because they had been natural crafts people and artists from prehistoric times,” wrote Natalie Curtis. “‘The only difference between me and the women on the reservations,’” De Cora had told her, “‘is that I have chosen to apply my native Indian gift in the white man’s world.’” Unfortunately, as Curtis rued after her death, “there is little tangible evidence that now can be shown of what Angel wrought, and above all, of what she dreamed.”26 But what De Cora became inspired a generation of Native people to remember their history, honor their culture, and continue designing and creating beautiful art pieces that both reflect—and challenge— the notion of authenticity. Linda M. Waggoner Baseline Shift : Untold Stories of Women in Graphic Design History, edited by Briar Levit, Princeton Architectural Press, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rit/detail.action?docID=6839923. Created from rit on 2023-04-14 18:13:09. 21 Copyright © 2021. Princeton Architectural Press. All rights reserved. Baseline Shift : Untold Stories of Women in Graphic Design History, edited by Briar Levit, Princeton Architectural Press, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rit/detail.action?docID=6839923. Created from rit on 2023-04-14 18:13:09.