Water, Wind, Breath: Southwest Native Art in Community

I’m struggling to articulate why I felt so moved by the current exhibition Water, Wind, Breath: Southwest Native Art in the Barnes Foundation. If I had gone looking for a survey of the greatest works of Southwestern Native Art I would have been disappointed, even though it includes several beautiful and historically important objects, like the eighteenth century storage jar from the San Ildefonso Pueblo in the collection of the Barnes Foundation and the striking “Ya'ton Na'ne” (an embroidered wool dress made in the Zuni Pueblo around 1900), borrowed locally from the University of Pennsylvania Museum. The show also includes then-contemporary works that Dr. Barnes collected on his three trips to New Mexico in 1929, 1930, and 1931, like a water jar painted around 1920 by Catalina Zunie. We know her name because in the 1920s “native crafts” were being resuscitated for the tourist trade and individual artists began to be collectible. The Santa Fe Indian Market, as we call it today, began in 1922, though unbelievably, Native American artists weren’t permitted to sell their work in person there until 1931.

Lucy Fowler Williams, a curator from the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, has brought an historical overview to both the Water, Wind, Breath catalogue and to the exhibition itself, telling the history of the encounter between technologically advanced European cultures and Native Americans in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries.¹ The peaceful Pueblo cultures had lived in villages—each with their own cultural practices and even distinct languages despite their proximity to one another—for over 3,000 years, growing maize and hunting. Then roughly 800 years ago peoples from the plains migrated into the area, forming the modern Apache and Navajo Nations in Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona. The Navajo subsisted chiefly on sheep herding and hunting.

Beginning with the conquering armies of Cortés in 1540 (whom the Pueblo peoples sometimes called “the clanking metal people” for their armor), the Spanish imposed three centuries of brutal subjugation and forced Christianization.² The United States acquired these Native lands from Mexico in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the Mexican-American War, but under US government policies the appropriation of Native lands and the forced attempts at assimilation continued. Some 9,000 Navajo were driven off their lands to “reservations” in the Long Walk of the 1860s: US Army Colonel “Kit” Carson, for example, “burned and starved the Diné [the Native name of the Navajo] out of their ancestral homelands.”³ Although the US Government soon recognized the failure of their attempt to change the Navajo into farmers, the Navajo lived in these concentration camps for five years until the government let them return to their lands. Nevertheless, the US Department of Indian Affairs continued to take indigenous children away to be “civilized” in boarding schools into the mid-twentieth century. Having lost their sheep and much of their original homelands, the Diné had no viable livelihoods. Along with the Pueblo communities, whose hunting and agriculture had also been constricted, they grew destitute and dependent on government welfare.

By the 1890s, affluent easterners began establishing art colonies in Taos and Santa Fe, attracting such luminaries as Ansel Adams, Georgia O’Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, and the writer D. H. Lawrence. Some, like the wealthy Mabel Dodge Luhan and her Pueblo husband Tony Luhan became vocal advocates for the Native peoples and in 1928 the government commissioned the official “Meriam Report” that caused a national stir over the state of health, education, and poverty of Native American populations. A prohibition against further appropriation of Native lands became law and after centuries of trying to make our Native cultures “vanish”—the word with which Edward Curtis famously titled his romanticized signature photograph of 1904: The Vanishing Race—a movement began to encourage the revival of Native peoples’ crafts in the 1920s and 1930s, particularly traditional pottery, silversmithing, beadwork, and weaving. Curtis did some costuming for his photographs of that “Vanishing Race” in order to construct a picturesque attraction for J.P. Morgan’s new railroads; Morgan funded Curtis’s photographic project of The North American Indian. Beginning with the 1876 completion of the Atcheson, Topeka, and Santa Fe, the trains brought tourists and trading posts and the possibility of eking out a living from turquoise, coral, and silver jewelry, ceramics, beadwork, and weavings.

In addition to collecting Southwest Native American art objects, Barnes also found inspiration in Pueblo dances. His 1931 trip centered on seeing the “Deer Dance” in the San Ildefonso Pueblo. The “Deer Dance” melded Catholic and Pueblo traditions in giving thanks to the deer, elk, and antelope for their life-sustaining gifts, while also venerating the Christ child. Po-wa-ha (water-wind-breath) refers to “the flow and energy that moves and animates life,” and is embodied in these traditional rituals.⁴ The Pueblo dances not only assimilated the Christian and Hispanic cultures that came to them, but in the same inclusive spirit they also embraced the entire community within the Pueblo, even the tourists, in the spiritual celebration of the dance. This assimilative openness seemed to Barnes an affirmation of the same continuum of art and life that he hoped to inspire through his foundation in the daily lives of his students, his visitors, and his factory workers in Philadelphia.

Barnes did not “explore the driving cultural meanings and forces behind the objects” he collected but, like his personal epiphany in experiencing the “Deer Dance,” he focused instead on what he felt in response to the forms.⁵ He found thought provoking and meaningful formal relationships, installing his collections as dialectical ensembles of objects. He hung a Navajo rug (probably from the 1890s) in an intimate balcony space, looking across at Henri Matisse’s 1932–33 Dance, which Barnes had commissioned for the arched lunettes of the two story main gallery. “The weaving’s networks of terraced diamonds contrast with the curved bodies … across from the balcony.”⁶ Next to the rug he placed French polychrome saints from the Renaissance, a Navajo “Slave” blanket from the late 1850s, modernist stone carvings by Jacques Lipchitz and Amadeo Modigliani, a wrought-iron filigreed cooking grate, an eighteenth century grandfather clock, Navajo concho belts, and upholstered chairs.⁷ He meant the forms to set one another off with contrasting rhythms (the animated geometry of the rug and the flowing curves of Matisse’s Dance) or to cause one to note visual similarities in entirely unlike objects (the contrapposto of both the Renaissance polychrome and the highly abstract Cubist figure by Lipchitz).

Barnes wanted to inspire the visitors to his collection to look at things and find harmonies and contrasts where they least expected them. This does lead viewers to look more closely. It was (is) a utopian aspiration to make everyone more open and less hierarchical in their thinking—first about these particular objects but then more broadly in their encounter with the world. “Imagination is the chief instrument of the good,” John Dewey writes in Art as Experience (his 1931 “William James Lectures” at Harvard). Indeed, “art is more moral than moralities” and conventional morals are “consecrations of the status quo.”⁸ Dedicated to Dr. Barnes, Dewey’s book theorizes the point of view of Barnes’s Foundation.⁹ Once one grasps the argument he makes, it’s hard not to see The Barnes and Dewey’s Art as Experience as inextricably intertwined. Barnes and Dewey were what the National Science Foundation today would call “co-investigators” on this magnificent experiment in thinking and education. What is so uplifting in this exhibition, Water, Wind, Breath: Southwest Native Art in the Barnes Foundation, is precisely what is so uplifting in the entire enterprise of the Barnes Foundation.

This exhibition and its catalogue have several purposes. First, they research, document, and make visible a rich vein in the permanent collection that is often overlooked: the holdings of Southwest Native art. They also illuminate a central tenet of the Foundation by finding in this particular genre a fundamental principle for why Barnes collected what he did. “Pueblo values of community,” Lucy Fowler Williams writes, “are centered in the maintenance of harmonious reciprocal relationships with the spirit world … Art springs from a place where everything is connected.”¹⁰ But Williams also points out

what Barnes did not see—namely, the meanings and enduring roles of the arts in sustaining the health and identities of Southwest Native peoples. By resituating his collections of Pueblo and Navajo objects within their respective cultural, historical, and sociopolitical contexts, the works are brought to life, reinscribed with Native American perspectives that remain vital today.¹¹

The great Africanist Robert Farris Thompson wrote of “the aliveness an image must embody to function as a work of art.”¹² This exhibition embeds the 239 objects collected by Barnes between 1929 and 1931 in the broader context of Native American history and art, while also placing that collection in a trajectory of ongoing creativity. Two native practitioners participated prominently in curating the show; Tony Chavarria wrote about “Renewing the World in the Pueblo Dance”¹³ and TahNibaa Naataanii provided an insider’s account of Navajo weaving, as well as giving us outstanding examples of her own artistic textiles.¹⁴ “I created the weaving Dancing Fire,” Naataanii tells us,

in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time, all around us was filled with panic—of life and death moments, of food and water shortages—as a mysterious monster was looming in our communities. This weaving’s beautiful disarray embodies both fear and the beauty that remains deep in our roots. Although many of us were scared, we found security in our prayers, cultural upbringings, song, and dances. Dancing Fire 2020 represents me and many of us in this way. My weaving helped me cope during this uncertain time.¹⁵

In this exhibition, TahNibaa Naataanii’s Dancing Fire represents a contemporary native artist connecting to the past and at the same time reaching for a contemporary language in which to define herself. The selection of other contemporary artists in the exhibition are likewise not an effort to survey the cutting edge of new art by Native artists, even if Naataanii and the clay sculpture by Roxanne Swentzell, or the ceramic tile by Jason Garcia may represent just that. Rather Swentzell—seeking an authentic, deeply sensitive and personal expressionism in her ceramic figure—and Garcia, in his graphic Tewa Tales of Suspense: Behold … Po'Pay retells this traditional story as if illustrated in an action comic. They both point to a living generation of new artists grounded in Native culture.

“The warp represents our life, and this is why we do not cut the thread’s ends,” Naataanii explains.¹⁶ That connection to tradition has a critical importance for her. She wove another work in the show, a woman’s shoulder blanket, at almost the same time as her very personal Dancing Fire, but in a highly traditional style. How can the two coexist? “The exact limits of the efficacy of any medium cannot be determined by any a priori rule,” Dewey wrote, “…every great initiator in art breaks down some barrier that had previously been supposed to be inherent.”¹⁷

In the same way, certain historical works in the show, like the painted water jar by Catalina Zunie, adapt traditional stories and visual prototypes into delightfully personal, unique styles at a high level of mastery. On this jar, the artist depicted a frog with dark outlines and a speckled stomach (more glyph than description), helplessly splayed across the belly of the pot. Split-wing birds and dragonflies accompany the frog on an animated field of tadpoles. The tadpoles and frogs often appear on Zuni water jars (ollas), symbolizing transformation (as from the tadpoles’ life in the water to frogs on land). Water plays an important role in Pueblo and Navajo myth as well as in the realities of daily life, and consequently, reference to it appears frequently in the art objects, stories, and dance, particularly in ceremonial vessels. The traditional dances are frequently prayers for rain. Yet whatever the conventions, Catalina Zunie also imbued this depiction with an imaginative and unique personality, including her signature invention of the split-wing birds.

Water, Wind, Breath: Southwest Native Art in the Barnes Foundation shows us a glimpse of the cosmic scheme of the Navajo and Pueblo worlds. The exhibition also provides examples of living artists finding ways to configure their own individuality within those still evolving cultures. This helps us understand something about ourselves and our own culture(s) too. Western art over the last fifty years has increasingly embraced more layers of arbitrarily overlapping thoughts, increasingly complicated and unresolvable. It is more about process, performance, political engagement—more open-ended, embracing instability in identity and meaning. The style of looking that permeates the Barnes collection, the deliberately perplexing discourses that Barnes set up in his “ensembles” of objects, pushes us to see his collections, like this exhibition, in a constant flux of fresh relationships between things. It aspires to promote a radical openness and prompts us to rethink how we see ourselves—our past and our present—and how we meet the world.

1. Lucy Fowler Williams, "In the Shadows of Paradise: Albert C. Barnes and the Spirit of Santa Fe," in Lucy Fowler Williams, ed., Water, Wind, Breath: Southwest Native Art in the Barnes Foundation (Philadelphia: The Barnes Foundation and New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2022), 1-37.
2. Mateo Romero, “Moonlight Woman’s Daughter,” in Native American Voices on Identity, Art, and Culture: Objects of Everlasting Esteem, Lucy Fowler Williams, William S. Wierzbowski, and Robert W. Preucel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2005), 91; in Lucy Fowler Williams, ed., "In the Shadows of Paradise: Albert C. Barnes and the Spirit of Santa Fe," in Lucy Fowler Williams, ed., Water, Wind, Breath: Southwest Native Art in the Barnes Foundation (Philadelphia: The Barnes Foundation and New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2022), 30.
3. Lucy Fowler Williams, "In the Shadows of Paradise: Albert C. Barnes and the Spirit of Santa Fe," in Lucy Fowler Williams, ed., Water, Wind, Breath: Southwest Native Art in the Barnes Foundation (Philadelphia: The Barnes Foundation and New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2022), 25.
4. Lucy Fowler Williams, "In the Shadows of Paradise: Albert C. Barnes and the Spirit of Santa Fe," in Lucy Fowler Williams, ed., Water, Wind, Breath: Southwest Native Art in the Barnes Foundation (Philadelphia: The Barnes Foundation and New Have and London: Yale University Press, 2022), 10. See also Rina Swentzell, “An Understated Sacredness,” in Baker H. Morrow and V. B. Price, eds., Anasazi Architecture and American Design (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997), 186-9.
5. Lucy Fowler Williams, "In the Shadows of Paradise: Albert C. Barnes and the Spirit of Santa Fe," in Lucy Fowler Williams, ed., Water, Wind, Breath: Southwest Native Art in the Barnes Foundation (Philadelphia: The Barnes Foundation and New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2022), 17.
6. Lucy Fowler Williams, "In the Shadows of Paradise: Albert C. Barnes and the Spirit of Santa Fe," in Lucy Fowler Williams, ed., Water, Wind, Breath: Southwest Native Art in the Barnes Foundation (Philadelphia: The Barnes Foundation and New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2022), 15.
7. This “slave” was a ten to fifteen-year-old child, kidnapped into a wealthy Hispanic family in Colorado, having already learned to weave.
8. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigee Books, 1980), 348.
9. “My greatest indebtedness is to Dr. A. C. Barnes. The chapters have been gone over one by one with him...Whatever is sound in this volume is due more than I can say to the great educational work carried on in the Barnes Foundation.” John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigee Books, 1980), Preface, VIII.
10. Lucy Fowler Williams, "In the Shadows of Paradise: Albert C. Barnes and the Spirit of Santa Fe," in Lucy Fowler Williams,ed., Water, Wind, Breath: Southwest Native Art in the Barnes Foundation (Philadelphia: The Barnes Foundation and New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2022), 17. See also Bruce Hucko, Where There Is No Name For Art: The Art of Tewa Pueblo Children (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1996), 4; and Rina Swentzell, “An Understated Sacredness,” in Baker H. Morrow and V. B. Price, eds., Anasazi Architecture and American Design (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997), 188.
11. Lucy Fowler Williams, "In the Shadows of Paradise: Albert C. Barnes and the Spirit of Santa Fe," in Lucy Fowler Williams,ed., Water, Wind, Breath: Southwest Native Art in the Barnes Foundation (Philadelphia: The Barnes Foundation and New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2022) 2.
12. Robert Farris Thompson, “Preface,” African Art in Motion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), XII.
13. Tony R. Chavarria, “Chasing the Dawn; Renewing the World in the Pueblo Dance,” in Lucy Fowler Williams, ed., Water, Wind, Breath: Southwest Native Art in the Barnes Foundation (Philadelphia: The Barnes Foundation and New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2022).
14. TahNibaa Naataanii, “Navajo Textiles: Weaving a Space of Great Peace,” in Lucy Fowler Williams, ed., Water, Wind, Breath: Southwest Native Art in the Barnes Foundation (Philadelphia: The Barnes Foundation and New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2022).
15. TahNibaa Naataanii, “Navajo Textiles: Weaving a Space of Great Peace,” in Lucy Fowler Williams, ed., Water, Wind, Breath: Southwest Native Art in the Barnes Foundation (Philadelphia: The Barnes Foundation and New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2022), 101.
16. TahNibaa Naataanii, “Navajo Textiles: Weaving a Space of Great Peace,” in Lucy Fowler Williams, ed., Water, Wind, Breath: Southwest Native Art in the Barnes Foundation (Philadelphia: The Barnes Foundation and New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2022), 102.
17. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigee Books, 1980), 226.