Native American Dance Analysis

Scholars have identified the works of several artists who showed a blend of both the Native American culture and that of Euro-American cultures in their paintings and drawings. For example, in the Shawnee War Dance by Ernest Spybuck 1833-1949, Spybuck shows the dance being performed for an Indian and a non-Indian audience. Spybuck has also embraced a Euro-American style of painting (Judith, 2008). The defined figures and flattened pictorial spaces of the earlier ledger drawings are no longer used as are swapped by sculptural figures and an illusionistic rendering of space similar to the work of 19th century artists such as George Catlin who frequently painted Native Americans. For Native Americans, narrative genre paintings were insignificant way of self-definition. Narrative painting permitted Native Americans to represent the realism of their lives to themselves, to each other and to the non-Native world (Judith, 2008).
The interaction of the two cultures has contributed to new styles of painting. For example, Painters of the Five Civilized Tribes established a distinctive style which combines features of Traditional Indian Painting, with ceremonial themes and genre scenes. However, …show more content…
Some continue to work within established traditions in Native American art while others try to adopt and come up with new styles of painting and drawing using both the Native American culture and European culture. Artists in such varied regions of the United States as Northern California, Upper New York State, and Alaska have adopted the European-influenced style of Early Narrative Genre painting. Their art is more closely connected to Native American traditions of storytelling than it is to the art of Southwest or Oklahoma artists who were encouraged by Euro-American patrons to make paintings rich in ethnographic detail as well as artistically pleasing (Judith,