What Arts Did Native Americans of the Great Plains Do
Fine art
The Swell Plains has presented artists with challenges unlike those of most other regions. Defective most of the visual elements that traditionally comprise landscape compositions, the terrain can seem utterly devoid of artistic subject area matter, empty and uninspiring to those who attempt to portray it. Over time, however, artists have adjusted to the Plains' unique qualities in a wide assortment of interesting ways that offer insights into both the development of the expanse and its peoples and the special graphic symbol of the place. And even though the region'due south sheer extent and altitude from major urban centers have tended to relegate it to the "margins" of the fine art world, artists in the Plains have established a stiff visual heritage through other subjects and activities in add-on to depictions of their region's landscape. The Great Plains is not frequently best-selling for its artful achievements, only information technology has a rich creative history that deserves to exist better known.
Cultural Contrasts
In visual art Native American and European American traditions differ to such a degree that their imagery is unremarkably considered separately; they are often studied as two distinct specialties inside the history of art. These cultures, with very unlike notions of vision, representation, and relationships to the land, accept responded to the world in accord with their own conceptions of infinite and humanity's place within it. As a outcome, each grouping's art remained distinctive until the mid. twentieth century, when cross-cultural influences began to have an impact. The differences between Native American and European American art, which range from the most basic qualities to the most profound aesthetic bug, compromise comparisons and even parallel discussions of the 2 to the indicate of diminishing the integrity of both. This is nowhere more apparent than in the art of the Great Plains, where contrasts of media, styles, subject thing, and perceptions of the country betwixt the two groups accept been every bit polarized every bit their unlike value systems and traditional means of life.
Native Plains art differs from European American imagery stylistically, functionally, and conceptually. Pictorially representing ideas and visual surround symbolically rather than literally or "naturalistically," Native Plains artists did not effort to direct transcribe the appearance of the natural globe co-ordinate to European techniques of perspective. Also, rather than being separated from everyday life inside a hierarchical value system that creates bogus divisions betwixt "high art" and lesser manifestations, fine art within Native traditions is an integral role of societal activities, both everyday and ceremonial.
Plains imagery that precedes European American contact is today extremely rare; it was ordinarily synthetic of organic materials that were not long lasting, and it was non considered "art" in the same sense that Europeans conceive the term. Until near this century it has not been considered unique or valuable apart from its ritualistic or functional purpose and was therefore non usually preserved and revered equally collectible. Some European and American visitors to the Plains region in the mid-nineteenth century did collect artifacts of various sorts from the Native peoples, and while those activities were not comprehensive and systematic and were often for anthropological or scientific purposes rather than aesthetic ones, their efforts, and those since, have preserved a variety of objects that requite a glimpse into traditional Native Plains imagery.
Prehistoric rock carvings and paintings (petroglyphs and pictographs) also survive at several sites throughout the Plains, although very trivial is known of their origins or intended meanings. Efforts to understand the significance of art in Native American life have been hampered by this scarcity of early on examples every bit well equally past the extreme differences betwixt European and Native American concepts of art.
Although the impulse behind creating imagery in Native cultures was undeniably inspired by aesthetic considerations equally well as by symbolic and ritualistic ones (all of which offering of import insights into their creative and cultural significance), the later exhibition of these objects equally museum collections of "fine art" tends to remove them from their original contexts and tin can misleadingly present them within a strange value system, 1 that considers fine art primarily something to exist looked at rather than integrated into the daily activities of its creators, as was originally intended. At the same time, however, the fine art establishment and its marketplace have provided Native American artists an important outlet for the expression and preservation of their traditions, a means by which their cultures can be understood and appreciated past a wider public. They have also provided some economic back up, which in turn encourages additional creative activities within tribal communities.
Native American and European American art forms do share at least ane important characteristic that is integral to understanding the significance of their creation in the Plains region. Both cultures created and used imagery, although non exclusively in either instance, to document life experiences. Considering the land was fundamental to these experiences in both cultures, this basic relationship can serve as a touchstone for discussions of their art.
Plains Indian Art
Plains Indians were, of form, not a single group merely rather many different peoples who inhabited an extremely big territory. While they shared certain aspects of lifestyle, their visual imagery, its specific symbolism, pregnant, and part, differed according to tribe and even co-ordinate to individual artists in the aforementioned tribe. Comprehensive accountings of their histories and the myriad of specific objects would require split up studies for each group, merely because they all had their origin in the same region some generalities tin be made.
Plains bison hunters moved often; therefore, other than the petroglyphs and pictographs inscribed on rocky outcroppings, their art was necessarily portable. Ranging from big painted tipis to small personal amulets, busy clothing, shields, and fifty-fifty horses and their own bodies, their media and the uses to which they were put were extremely varied, a diversity demonstrating the richness of the people'south creative responses to their environments and experiences.
A large per centum of Native Plains imagery was and continues to be symbolic of sacred events, rituals, and natural forces, which could include everything from celestial bodies and weather to the indigenous animals of the region. Often stylized into schematic diagrams, the representation of these objects on personal and communal property could, information technology was believed, transfer the power of these forces into forms that would protect the user from harm, bring wellness and prosperity, or appease the spirits and encourage them to provide for the people of the tribe. Some symbols and their subjects or referents were ubiquitous and relatively unchanging; others were highly specialized and designed for specific events or for item uses.
Common among Plains cultures are brute symbols and representations, especially those of the bison, which was a staple of their lives. Other animals were too revered for their special traits. Birds, for example, with their ability to wing, were considered especially powerful since they could transcend the earth, and amid these the eagle, with its majestic size and fierceness, was held in highest regard. These and other animals were not merely represented in Plains art in pictures and sculptured due east.gies; their hides and feathers were used as functional and ritual objects as well. In this manner the elements of the natural world were both depicted in and function of Native American fine art, a duality that was both symbolic and practical in the people's creative expression of life and their understanding of it.
Dissimilar the European tradition, in which the making of fine art is mainly reserved for a gifted few, virtually if not all members of Plains tribes incorporated fine art into their daily tasks and became artists in various ways. Women adorned vesture, baskets, and other personal and household objects with symbolic and decorative imagery fabricated from quills, beads, hides, and other elements that were often dyed with natural colors, and men were responsible for a broad multifariousness of artistic creations, from objects for ritualistic purposes and the painting of their own bodies for ceremonies, hunts, and battles to the inscription of tipis and hides with diagrams and narratives of important events in their lives and those of their tribes. Objects for particularly important purposes would be made by shamans, who were endowed with special gifts of wisdom or healing abilities, merely fifty-fifty children were sometimes invited to sculpt pocket-size dirt animal figures, which would exist used in ceremonials. All were taught to empathise the relationship between the natural world and the artistic interpretation of it.
Oscar Howe. Calling on Wakan Tanka, 1967. Casein on paper. 
Although nothing was ever entirely removed from its spiritual dimension in Native life, actual events were likewise recorded in pictorial imagery through a more than purely narrative format. Calendar hides painted by elders, for example, documented years of history, and although these were not designed according to a standardized hieroglyphic system, they could exist read almost as written chapters of tribal life over the course of time. Important ceremonies, battles, hunts, tragedies, storms, and other notable events were the main subjects of these paintings, which augmented the oral tradition of passing stories and communal history from 1 generation to the next. Individual warriors might also record especially notable encounters, gatherings, and conflicts in paintings, creating a visual document of personally significant occurrences that were used not simply equally memory "books" only for of import ceremonials.
When Native Americans were incarcerated toward the end of the nineteenth century, this tradition served as the basis for smaller ledger drawings that depicted battles betwixt various Plains tribes and the U.Due south. Army. Named for the newspaper upon which they were fatigued, which was taken from ledgers at the prisons or reservation schools, these drawings grade an important record of Native Americans' reactions to the violent disruption of their traditional means of life.
While the natural earth was always the most important discipline for Native American art, representations of landscape in the European sense did not exist until late in the nineteenth century and after prolonged contact between the two cultures. The Native concept of nature was not homo centered, and thus the tradition of portraying a landscape from a stock-still, individual point of view, looking across a scene toward the horizon, was foreign and inconceivable. In place of this "magisterial gaze," a socially constructed concept that has contributed much to the development of Europe and the United States and from which the creative technique of linear perspective evolved, Native Americans held the idea of the sacred wheel, a cosmic view in which all of nature is integrated and humans are merely one part of a living entity, no more powerful or significant than other things in the globe.
Considering of this philosophy, in traditional Native American representations of nature horizon lines are rarely if e'er found; more frequently, symbols and representations of humans and animals appear to float without a sense of specific location, equally if the entire universe is their home. Within the epic surface area of the Great Plains, where the horizon seems to merge with the sky in all directions, this conjoining of land with the cosmos must take seemed an particularly appropriate and truthful representation of the identify, even if it does not coincide with the more familiar mod formulation of the Plains as an expansive terrain represented by a line running horizontally across a motion-picture show.
Since their relegation to reservations, Plains Indians have had to adapt extraordinary disruptions of their way of life, assimilate vastly different worldviews and patterns of beliefs, and suffer the loss of both concrete and psychological links to the past. While this has altered their art greatly (including its increasing commercialization), Native American artists have continued to draw upon their traditional cultures for inspiration even every bit they have incorporated a new array of materials, subjects, and visual vocabularies into their piece of work. Start encouraged in mission schools to larn drawing and subsequently trained in art schools, they have go increasingly familiar with modern artistic concepts and methods. But they continue as well to utilize imagery that links them with their historic traditions and spiritual values. Their work today is a blending of cultures, both visual and social, just, no less than the art of their forebears, it is a unique expression of their identity every bit artists of the Great Plains.
European Encounters
Although Europeans encountered the Great Plains equally early as the 1540s, the outset non- Native artists (if early cartographers are not counted) did not arrive until the 1830s. Intent on documenting the appearance of the landscape and its inhabitants for distant audiences rather than incorporating it into an Ethnic club, they worked within a ready of values, aspirations, and media entirely different from that of their Native American contemporaries. Their reactions to the terrain were conditioned both past their previous experiences and by their artful preconceptions, and thus they were ill-prepared for the Great Plains landscape. Goose egg, except perchance the boundless ocean, to which the land was often likened, was familiar nigh the endless treeless vistas that stretched from horizon to horizon, and since their artistic training had taken place in regions that were more visually varied, many early artists in the Plains despaired at the grassland's lack of subject matter for pictures. The Great Plains, labeled the "Dandy American Desert" in 1820 by Stephen Long's government-sponsored trek, seemed to many an aesthetic desert that offered little to artists.
The standard reference for nineteenthcentury European American artists who traveled West was the European landscape tradition and its accompanying fine art theory. These theories and practices had been conceived, of course, for European terrain, which has zilch in common with the Great Plains. This pictorial tradition was premised on the notion of prospect, a concept with multiple meanings, both physical and philosophical. At its almost basic, referring to a point of view (ordinarily elevated) from which a mural is viewed, the term implies a human-centered universe, a fixed bespeak of reference that endows the private with essential power to envision, imagine, and even create the scene that lies ahead. Derived from this fundamental concept are additional connotations that include, amidst other things, the thought of futurity or potential too as specific artistic interpretations: "prospect pictures" standardized the representation of terrain into balanced compositions framed with trees and rocks and guided by meandering paths or streams, a gradual motion toward a horizon that was pleasantly glowing with the promise of opportunity. Equally "prospects," these views offered to audiences a advisedly conceived version of visual ownership, a psychological claiming of the state's futurity and their role within it.
All these issues and traditions directly affected the ability of artists to creatively respond to the Great Plains landscape. Simply stated, the grasslands of central Northward America seemed to have no prospects. They had no elevated vantage points from which to survey a scene, no variegated vistas that would charmingly straight the gaze through space, and, just as important, they seemed to have no obvious economic potential for a people more accepted to forestlands linked past navigable waterways. Artists were at a loss both because they had then little with which to fill up their canvases and considering they knew that viewers expected landscape paintings to imply the promise of the American continent. The Great Plains seemed empty and desolate, hardly the sort of mural that would fulfill the desires of an eager nation looking w for its future.
This perception of vacancy was, of course, misguided. A region of tremendous variety of many sorts–culturally in its human diversity, zoologically in its animal populations, climatologically with its extremes of conditions and dramatic storms, and botanically with its infinitude of grasses–the Plains offer both dandy expanse and extraordinary subtlety, a combination that is exceptionally difficult to appreciate without long and thoughtful exposure. And to artists intent on finding compositional subject matters that would intrigue their eastern audiences before they themselves returned dwelling house, the special aesthetics of the place by and large went undiscovered and undocumented. About none of the sizable number of paintings of the grasslands produced in the nineteenth century describe the expansive landscape without including something to break the monotony of the expanse.
Only in recent years, with the advent of modernist abstraction, which suits the terrain's minimal offerings, coupled with the increasing appreciation of the region's ecosystem and its relative solitude, take painters and viewers begun to appreciate the Cracking Plains for their ain special characteristics. Until and then near artists felt compelled to fill the region'due south emptiness or, alternately, transform information technology into an idealized vision of their own making.
Expeditions and Excursions
The starting time European American artists to travel through the Great Plains did so in the company of expeditions, either government or private, and this trend continued until well after the Civil War. Federally sponsored artists were charged in their commission with portraying the scenery and its inhabitants for official reports to be used in policy decisions that would determine the future development of the region. Just artists who traveled privately did so for a number of purposes. Virtually famous of these, both for his expansive route and for his dedication to his subject field thing, was Pennsylvanian George Catlin (1796-1872), who journeyed throughout the Plains in 1832 and 1834 on a personal mission to visit and visually document as many of the Native American peoples every bit possible before, as he foresaw, their style of life was destroyed. To the due north, Paul Kane (1810-71) followed Catlin'southward case past creating an "Indian Gallery" of portraits and landscapes from the Prairie Provinces. In 1833-34 Karl Bodmer (1809-93), a Swiss creative person, made his but visit to America in the company of Prince Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied, an ethnographer studying Native cultures who needed paintings to illustrate the volume he would write upon his return. Bodmer's beautiful watercolors, mostly Indian portraits and river views, established a standard for all artists who would follow. In 1837 Alfred Jacob Miller (1810–74) accompanied Scottish nobleman Sir William Drummond Stewart beyond the Cardinal Plains to the Rocky Mountains. Stewart wanted souvenirs to decorate his castle back dwelling house, and Miller'due south work is correspondingly romantic, both stylistically and thematically.
Other than Catlin, who had relatively petty artistic preparation and was thus less hampered by aesthetic theory and precedents, none of these artists, even Bodmer and Miller, who produced a large number of evocative paintings of the region, portrayed the landscape in its pristine form without something in the composition to provide it with visual interest. This would be the norm for more than 100 years, as artists struggled to enliven their views and to endow the seemingly empty Plains with prospects, even if they were of the artists' own making.
Animals, Indians, and the travelers themselves formed important early on subjects. Bison were particularly exotic and appealing, and 1 of the nearly frequent subjects was the bison hunt, with Indian horsemen engaged in the chase. Prairie fires were another pop theme, oft filled with running animals chased by flames and smoke, an eerie and dramatic sight that never failed to evoke awe in those who witnessed those events. Increasingly, scenes of frontier life, usually highly contrived, dominated the images and appealed especially to eastern audiences, every bit the paintings were exhibited widely and reproduced in readily available publications and prints by lithographic firms such equally Currier and Ives. Guidebooks likewise became immensely pop, every bit much for their illustrations as for their text, and, especially after the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, these helped shape the expectations of thousands of immigrants who moved into the Plains after the Civil State of war. Artists often worked on committee for these publishers, and, in the days before copyright enforcement, their work was besides frequently shared among publishers or redrawn past other artists in a variety of formats for reprinting.
The Settlement Flow
A major change in the portrayal of the Slap-up Plains occurred with the arrival of the settlers, who dramatically altered the mural and its prospects. With the advent of overland routes such as the Oregon Trail in the 1840s and and then with railroads in the 1860s, coupled with the 1862 Homestead Act, which made landownership bachelor to a broad populace, the influx of Europeans and Americans into the region that had showtime been a trickle became a virtual flood. The prospects of the Groovy Plains began to improve, and their image evolved from the "Corking American Desert" into the "Breadbasket of America." For the Native peoples it was a harrowing menses of loss and despair every bit their homelands were fifty-fifty more conclusively encroached upon, their livelihoods destroyed, and their ways of life irrevocably altered.
For artists, withal, these events meant new subjects and new audiences. Photographers like Solomon Butcher (1856-1927) in Nebraska in the 1880s recognized an opportunity in the new settlers, and his work appealed to people's fascination with his stillnew medium that could in a matter of minutes capture both a likeness and their pride in domicile ownership. He and other entrepreneurs traveled throughout the Plains photographing the homesteaders and their farms. Occasionally, they established studios in the burgeoning towns in the region. Their work has become a valuable historical record of the early American settlement flow. In their photographs we run across the range of pioneer living conditions in the Plains, from the sod houses of the new arrivals to the frame dwellings of those more established. We also witness the diversity of the people, from newly freed slaves who claimed their ain state to European immigrants only recently off the gunkhole. Meanwhile, William Henry Jackson's (1843-1942) photographs of Plains Indians depict the twilight of a way of life that was beingness effaced. In all these views the sense of place is almost palpable, with the settlements perched tenuously on the expansive Plains, simply the insights into the individuals are as compelling, whether it is hope on the faces of the new landowners or despair on the faces of those dispossessed.
Painters were also inspired past the settlers and gratified by their ability to transform the terrain into scenes not unlike those of more than traditional mural fine art; at last the creative prospects of the country and its economic potential were improving. Scenes of verdant fields, locomotives, and farmers at work helped convey these developments to eastern audiences and satisfied the local inhabitants that their efforts were indeed contributing to the progress of the country. The land was taking shape–literally–as what had previously been seamless prairie was conformed to section lines and plowed fields, creating the first blocks of what at present appears from the sky to be an earthly quilt.
Although plough-of-the-century viewers did non take the do good of airplanes, of course, aerial portraits of the landscape were available to Plains audiences through artistic renderings. Throughout the settlement period bird's-eye town views drawn from maps, with careful perspective manipulations to raise the appearance of each building, were extremely popular and were used equally promotional objects by ambitious city planners, borough organizations, and entrepreneurs. A clever adaptation of the eighteenth-century English language prospect pictures, which were essentially estate portraits for wealthy landowners, these boondocks views, with their clear delineations of streets, homes, businesses, and surrounding territory, offered a unique sense of buying to the inhabitants, a feeling of civic pride every bit they witnessed the expanse of their towns. The surrounding land beyond the last homes not only suggested the local terrain but also implied a pale in the future potential of the customs'south growth. This innovative grade of depicting the Plains persists to this day in an updated version; gimmicky farms are routinely photographed from the air, and landowners regard the framed prints every bit prized possessions.
Cowboy Art and the Great Plains
Charles M. Russell. Smoking Upwardly, 1904. Statuary. 
Fifty-fifty more than than the landscape and its tillage, the most enduring visual image of the Swell Plains remains the western ideal of cowboys, Indians, and cavalry. Although precedents had been established for these themes in the 1840s and 1850s, by and large by eastern artists, the "golden age" of western art that codification these indelible symbols really occurred during a relatively brief period, from the late 1880s through the plow of the century, after the Plains had been essentially fenced and domesticated and its Indigenous populations reduced and relegated to ever-shrinking reservations. Inspired past the speedily disappearing ways of life, as the cattle drives were replaced past railroad aircraft, the cavalry campaigns disappeared, and the tribes were subdued, artists such every bit Frederic Remington (1861–1909) and Charles Grand. Russell (1864–1926), among others, dedicated their art to heroic masculine action in the Plains, struggles between humans and animals, and the conflict of cultures.
The compelling power of this subject matter, enhanced by their dramatic representations of information technology, established a standard to which all subsequent art of the region would exist compared. Russell had been a working cowboy and lived in Montana, merely Remington and many of his colleagues such equally Charles Schreyvogel (1861–1912) were easterners, and their work, produced in New Bailiwick of jersey and New York studios, ignored the rapid industrialization that much of the terrain they were portraying was actually experiencing. While they were careful to be accurate with details such as clothing and movement, the histrionic compositions of these artists were largely invented and thus portrayed a mythic region that relied equally much on romance and nostalgia for its appeal as on fact. Their legacy, notwithstanding, has been so profound that most Western movies have ascribed to their model, sometimes quite directly, and these representations take determined the identity of the W and the Great Plains for a large viewing audience. Today their emulators are numerous, near notably in the system known as the Cowboy Artists of America, whose members continue to propagate the ideal of the cowboy and the heroic battles of the Plains tribes through representational imagery.
By the terminate of the nineteenth century, artists in the Great Plains knew that a new era was upon them. As the focus of the region inverse from establishing communities to sustaining them, it became articulate that the region would once once more exist redefined in a new, more modernistic image. The emphasis, by necessity, would have to exist on connections with the nation and the globe equally a whole—for trade, for culture, and for identity itself. While this promised to bring fifty-fifty greater bounty to the region as it positioned itself as the state'south agricultural heartland, the transition likewise posed risks, as dependence upon distant regions became ever more important. This was no less true for artists in the Great Plains as they worked to strengthen their own connections with the larger art world and position their work within it.
Art Civilization in the Great Plains
As 1 of the last major areas of the Us to be settled, the Cracking Plains was correspondingly deadening in developing the trappings of cultivated lodge, including artistic organizations such every bit museums, galleries, and societies to support and encourage the evolution of artists and their piece of work. As before long every bit statehood was granted, however, which occurred at different times in different parts of the Great Plains, efforts were initiated to institute institutions that would substantially contribute to the region's cultural future. Art museums took time, but private collections were assembled in some places such every bit Omaha and Winnipeg relatively early, and these also as public collections supported past civic groups and wealthy philanthropists evolved into today'southward museums.
Colleges and universities, many of which were founded through federal land grants at the time of statehood, however, offered art departments very early on and were an important catalyst for the product of paintings and sculptures as well as for the training of local artists. Their dominance as centers of fine art activities in the Plains has remained, fifty-fifty as museums, galleries, and specialized art schools have get more mutual throughout the region.
Women were particularly prominent in these developments and, surprisingly perchance, formed the bulk of the art faculties of state universities in the Plains in the early years. The University of Nebraska, for instance, had a strong fine art program equally early every bit the 1880s, and it was dominated by women, both in the professoriat and the student ranks. This was truthful as well throughout the Plains, although as the schools developed and grew, men would increasingly take the women's places on the faculty past the 1920s. Far from beingness amateurs, many of the early female artists in the Plains came from or went on to study at prestigious schools such every bit the Chicago Art Found, the New York Fine art Students League, and in Paris, especially at the Académie Julian, which admitted women get-go in the 1860s. Their high level of expertise established a strong foundation for the growth of fine art within their home region. Characteristically, the careers of these women have been overshadowed by those of their male colleagues, but recent studies have begun to recognize their achievements and abilities.
Women contributed to the growth of art in the Plains in other means too. They organized art societies, art clubs, and exhibitions of art from national collections every bit well as from local artists and frequently were the guiding forces behind the establishment of the region's major museums. For example, a well-known painter in Oklahoma, Nan Jane Sheets (1889– 1976), served as cosupervisor and and so supervisor of Oklahoma's Works Progress Administration (WPA) fine art program during the Great Depression. She also established an art gallery in Oklahoma Urban center with federal funding in 1935. Even afterwards losing funding with the termination of the programme in 1942, she managed to go along it open as the Oklahoma City Fine art Center, the forerunner of the Oklahoma City Fine art Museum.
While women worked in like capacities nationwide, their prominence in the Plains states seems to accept been particularly significant. They may have had a longer and consequently greater impact in the Great Plains because the cultural institutions there were slower to mature than on the coasts, providing the women with more than fourth dimension before men recognized the importance of their activities and moved into positions of authority, but much research remains to determine this. Lack of male competition may accept also been a factor in women's abilities to become cultural entrepreneurs and successful artists, perhaps because of a gender bias against artistic civilization in these frontier states that would have relegated information technology primarily to the women's sphere. Withal, the status of fine art within the Smashing Plains today–its prominent art academies and university programs and museums that rank amid the country'due south finest–is certainly due to a large degree to the farsighted early women artists and philanthropists who made the region their home.
Canadian Art of the Plains
Canadian art of the Plains has a history similar to its counterpart in the United Sates, albeit, of course, with its ain unique circumstances and character. Commencement portrayed relatively sporadically by a few intrepid individuals such equally Peter Rindisbacher (1806-34), who settled briefly near the Cherry-red River in Manitoba, or artists who accompanied exploring expeditions such as West. Chiliad. R. Hind (1833-89), the landscape became a major component of a few artists' work such as that of Paul Kane, who, after meeting George Catlin in London in 1843, followed the elder artist's example and fabricated extensive travels through the Canadian Prairies, creating both a visual and a written record. Despite these efforts, however, the northern grasslands did not receive significant attention until the Canadian Pacific Railway began providing a ways of piece of cake access to the Plains in the 1870s and 1880s. To promote the line the visitor provided artists with costless passes to travel its route, and this do good, coupled with the patronage of a burgeoning popular press, a authorities eager to promote settlement in the western provinces, and a growing nationalism in the wake of the 1867 confederation that declared Canada a unified democracy of the United Kingdom, encouraged Canadian artists to await to their own landscape for pictorial inspiration. A number of them, including Sydney P. Hall (1842-1922), Frederick Verner (1836-1928), Edward Roper (1857-91), and Augustus Kenderdine (1870- 1947), are known for their portrayals of northern grasslands. A particular standout is Toronto artist Charles West. Jefferys (1869-1951), who not only devoted a number of his of import canvases to the Plains in the 1910s but too wrote compellingly of the terrain's innate challenges and its significance to a national art, inspiring many younger artists to explore the region'south visual potential.
Past the early on office of the twentieth century, especially through the work of the Group of Seven, members of which beginning exhibited together in 1920, Canadian painting became noted for its landscape imagery. With a few exceptions, such equally some of the canvases of A. Y. Jackson (1882–1976), these artists focused their work on the rocky, northern Canadian Shield region rather than on the Plains. However, other painters increasingly realized the visual power of the Prairie Provinces; an increasing number of artists embraced modernism'south minimalist aesthetic and followed the lead of Robert Hurley (1894– 1980), who devoted thousands of images to the apartment land of Saskatchewan subsequently the 1930s.
The Dust Basin
John Steuart Curry. Bound Shower; Western Kansas Landscape, 1931. Oil on canvas. 
Autonomously from the nineteenth century and its dramatic scenes of cowboys, Indians, and bison, no other catamenia has left as enduring a characterization of the Great Plains every bit the Great Depression, when years of drought and poor land management turned the western grasslands into the Grit Bowl. Farmers throughout the Plains were forced off their land by the thousands, and workers of all sorts faced unemployment. Forth with this widespread suffering, however, art actually flourished, drawing new attention to the central states and developing cultural institutions within them. Regional subjects were accorded new appreciation: gripping depictions of the difficult conditions throughout the Middle W and South in paintings and photographs absorbed American audiences, and federal relief programs brought new attention to the region's communities through special programs and investments that, among other things, fostered the production of art and encouraged related activities. Just as important, many of the works produced in the Great Plains or past artists from the surface area during this period have become the archetypal images of the period and a testament to the region'southward indelible significance to the nation.
The artistic way known as regionalism was not express to the central states, and indeed it had urban and littoral practitioners who portrayed their own locales, just much attending in both the art community and the country as a whole became focused on the Midwest and the Plains through the art of Kansan John Steuart Curry (1897-1946), Missourian Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975), and Iowan Grant Woods (1882-1942). Their work, which usually depicted downward-home themes and idealized landscapes in an accessible, representational fashion, seemed wholly American in style and sentiment and indicative of the core of national life, even if it did non ordinarily portray the difficulties of the time.
Although only a few artists held the spotlight, regionalism was widespread, and many artists throughout thePlains states adopted it during the 1930s and 1940s. It suited the temper of the fourth dimension well with its dedication to local subjects and its ability to simultaneously meld the ideal and the existent in ways that seemed to many to be more relevant than modernist abstraction. While the emphases of artists varied, from idyllic, pastoral scenes of bounty to harsher realities, some of the most effective works concerned the furnishings of the Dust Bowl. As much as any other subject area since the days of the bison, the widespread destruction peculiar to the Great Plains ordered artists in the region a new subject matter that could define their sense of place and convey to others the power of the mural inside which they lived.
Many of these images were produced independently, without federal assistance, just the wpa began an aggressive campaign in 1933 for reemployment and revitalization throughout the Usa. Programs for artists were included among these efforts. About famous was the Treasury Department's mural projection, which decorated post offices and other official buildings throughout the state, merely other opportunities were equally exciting, offering painters, sculptors, photographers, graphic designers, and other artists the means for income and the hope of commissions they would never have received otherwise. The programs too brought an unprecedented viability to regional fine art, including that of the Plains. Federal funding, for example, sponsored traveling exhibitions and established galleries where none had previously existed, introducing original art to a wide spectrum of the populace. Art didactics programs offered jobs for artists and encouraged artistic activities amidst many, both children and adults, who had never attempted them before. Some of these programs, such every bit the Oklahoma Metropolis Art Center (now the Oklahoma City Art Museum), were maintained afterwards the federal subsidies were discontinued and have become the principal fine art institutions in their communities.
In what became one of the most familiar programs of the New Deal art initiatives, the Farm Security Assistants (FSA) enlisted corps of photographers to travel throughout the hardest striking agricultural areas to document local weather condition. From their work emerged some of the most memorable images of the Plains. Dorothea Lange's (1895–1965) Tractored Out (1938) and Arthur Rothstein's (1915– 1985) gripping image of a farmer and his son running to their business firm, half buried beneath a ocean of dust (1936), for example, are but two of the most famous of the thousands of images produced by this program. These evocative depictions of the Great Plains are today still widely recognized and non only stand up as testimony to the most desolate catamenia in the region's history but also adjure to the enduring power of the fine art of the region to symbolize the state of the country.
Gimmicky Art in the Great Plains
Although diversity of artistic subject field thing has existed since artists began living in the Great Plains, as life there has go more than cosmopolitan, art there has correspondingly grown and developed. With increased ease of travel, the publication of first-class art books and catalogs, the prevalence of television and increasingly the Internet, the growth of art schools and university programs, and the development of active museums, artists and the public today accept easy access to art of other regions and countries, and the Great Plains has become no less central to the development of visual civilization in the United States and Canada than any other area.
The notion of regionalism in art, which was never an insular concept, is more than ever a affair of option. As the world becomes more than culturally connected and increasingly homogenized, notwithstanding, the entreatment of local identity, artistic and otherwise, becomes more powerful. Increasingly, a number of artists, museums, and galleries in the Swell Plains are recognizing this potential and focusing their attending on art of their ain region. Institutions such every bit the Museum of Nebraska Art in Kearney, the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City, the Center for Groovy Plains Studies at the Academy of Nebraska, and others are demonstrating the vitality and richness of the local mural and its inhabitants and history through art and scholarship.
Artists too, now freed from the constrictions of European theory and the prejudices it carried against planar terrain, are recognizing the visual ability of the Keen Plains in new ways. With the advent of minimalist abstraction and the more recent return to figurative representation, the fine art world can finally take the openness of the landscape and recognize the sublimity it has always offered.
In the final decades of the twentieth century a host of artists, working in a range of media from traditional painting and photography to installations, rediscovered the region and provided new insights into its visual, ecology, and cultural complexity. Their work sometimes celebrates its visual latitude in spectacular dimensions and panoramic telescopic, as in the work of Nebraska painter Keith Jacobshagen (b. 1941) and the 360-degree photographs of Gus Foster (b. 1940), in which the epic sweep of the horizon and the dominance of the sky overwhelm homo calibration. In other instances the land's ecological richness is the subject, as artists such as Terry Evans (b. 1944) explore the delicate relationship of the densely integrated foliage and its substructure to the health of the land and its inhabitants.
There is also a new appreciation of the epic poetry of burn every bit it rages through the grasses or the peacefulness of unlike times of day, merely only as significant in contemporary Plains art is the human presence, which increasingly dominates the landscape in so many ways. Photographers Robert Adams (b. 1937) and Frank Gohlke (b. 1942) and painter Harold Gregor (b. 1929), for example, draw our attending to the often unsettling human relationship between people and nature in the Plains through images of suburban sprawl, abandoned towns, and endless views of pristine farm fields where prairie grasses once grew. In their work, as in near recent art of the region, the real and the ideal, the Plains and the spectacular, are conjoined in ways that are often unsettling, provoking a reconsideration of the land and its vulnerability and our power to inhabit it in sustainable ways.
Finally, environmental fine art is also emerging as a new art class in the Plains, which now, as every air traveler recognizes, appears equally a giant patchwork quilt. Some farmers, ranchers, and "globe artists" such as Stan Herd (b. 1950) are emulating this result in giant multiacre portraits and plowed pictures. The pictorial prospects of the region have multiplied beyond anything early artists could accept imagined. As those who live in the Great Plains have always known, the region of waving grasses and countless horizons is hardly a vacant plain. Information technology is a vibrant place of many visions.
See alsoEDUCATION: Museums National Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage Center / IMAGES AND ICONS: Emptiness; Flatness; Remington, Frederic / NATIVE AMERICANS: Astronomy / PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT: Dust Basin / POLITICS AND Regime: New Deal.
Joni Fifty. Kinsey
University of Iowa
Kinsey, Joni L. "Cultivating the Grasslands: Women Painters in the Great Plains." In Contained Spirits: Women Painters of the American West, 1890–1945, edited by Patricia Trenton. Berkeley: University of California Press and the Autry Museum of Western Heritage, 1995: 242–73, 289–92.
Kinsey, Joni Fifty. "Not And so Patently: Art of the American Prairies." Bang-up Plains Quarterly 15 (1995): 185– 200.
Kinsey, Joni L. Plains Pictures: Images of the American Prairie. Washington DC: Smithsonian Establishment Press, 1996.
Kinsey, Joni Fifty., Rebecca Roberts, and Robert Sayre. "Prairie Prospects: The Aesthetics of Plainness." Prospects: An Almanac of American Studies 21 (1996): 261–97.
Lamar, Howard. "Seeing More Earth and Sky: The Rising of a Cracking Plains Artful." Groovy Plains Quarterly 9 (1989): 69–77.
Maurer, Evan One thousand., ed. Visions of the People: A Pictorial History of Plains Indian Life. Minneapolis: Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1993.
Nottage, James. Prairie Visions: Fine art of the American West. Topeka: Kansas State Historical Lodge, 1984.
Rees, Ronald. Land of Globe and Heaven: Landscape Painting of Western Canada. Saskatoon, Saskatchewan: Western Producer Prairie Books, 1984.
Stein, Roger. "Packaging the Great Plains: The Function of the Visual Arts." Great Plains Quarterly 5 (1985): 5–23.
Thacker, Robert. The Great Prairie Fact and Literary Imagination. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Printing, 1986.
Source: http://plainshumanities.unl.edu/encyclopedia/doc/egp.art.001