Studio style
Description
Santa Fe Indian School (SFIS) is a tribal boarding secondary school in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It is affiliated with the Bureau of Indian Education (BIE). Read more ↗
Key Artists
Dorothy Dunn
Founder and director of The Studio at the Santa Fe Indian School in 1932 who codified the flat, two-dimensional narrative style inspired by traditional hide painting and Pueblo pottery.
Pablita Velarde
Santa Clara Pueblo master trained at The Studio who ground her own natural mineral earth pigments to create detailed, ethnographic visual records of Pueblo daily life and ceremonies.
Harrison Begay
Renowned Navajo painter trained under Dunn whose serene, delicate compositions of weavers, horsemen, and desert wildlife became worldwide exemplars of the flat Studio style.
Allan Houser
Chiricahua Apache painter and sculptor who studied at The Studio in 1934, producing dynamic flat-style mural commissions before becoming one of America's most celebrated Native sculptors.
Oscar Howe
Yanktonai Sioux artist who mastered the flat Studio style under Dunn before famously breaking its rigid stylistic rules in the 1950s to introduce vibrant modernist abstraction to Native art.
Gerónima Cruz Montoya
San Juan Pueblo painter and educator who succeeded Dunn as director of The Studio in 1937, leading the program for twenty-five years and mentoring generations of Native artists.
Famous Artworks
Fun Facts
Dorothy Dunn founded The Studio at the Santa Fe Indian School in 1932 on a budget of just one hundred dollars, instructing her Native students to strictly avoid Western perspective and shading in order to create a modern Indian style based on traditional hide and rock art.
↗ Source: en.wikipedia.org
While the flat Studio style dominated Native American art for decades, it eventually sparked intense rebellion; when Oscar Howe's painting was rejected from the 1958 Philbrook Indian Annual for not looking 'traditional', Howe penned a historic open letter defending Native artists' right to modern abstraction without being dictated to by white institutions.
↗ Source: en.wikipedia.org