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American Indian Art: Teaching and Learning

American Indian art history is recognized today as a field of study, but very few colleges or universities currently offer courses in American Indian— or Native American— art.1 This essay will consider several approaches to teaching American Indian art, such as American Indian art survey courses (and Native artists’ engagement with modernism as vital to these surveys); “world art” courses that focus on indigenous arts; and courses that position American Indian art, including contemporary Native art, as integral to the history of art in North America. The emphases of these courses will vary, but any of these approaches to Native American art history necessitates a reconceptualization of art history’s discursive frameworks, canonical narratives, and assumptions about art, artists, and representation. Critical engagement with indigenous methods and knowledge is crucial to this reframing, and must be foregrounded as key course content. While contemporary Native American art and art history tend to operate in what W. Jackson Rushing has termed “the fertile interstitial zone that critical theory and cultural studies have created between art history and anthropology,” the production, reception, and study of Native art has historically been laden with deeply problematic assumptions about art, artists, and indigenous cultures.2 The discourse of american Indian art teaching and Learning