Shifting Grounds: Landscape in Contemporary Native American Art

Shifting Grounds: Landscape in Contemporary Native American Art

by Kate Morris
Shifting Grounds: Landscape in Contemporary Native American Art

Shifting Grounds: Landscape in Contemporary Native American Art

by Kate Morris

Hardcover

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Overview

A distinctly Indigenous form of landscape representation is emerging among contemporary Indigenous artists from North America. For centuries, landscape painting in European art typically used representational strategies such as single-point perspective to lure viewers—and settlers—into the territories of the old and new worlds. In the twentieth century, abstract expressionism transformed painting to encompass something beyond the visual world, and, later, minimalism and the Land Art movement broadened the genre of landscape art to include sculptural forms and site-specific installations.

In Shifting Grounds, art historian Kate Morris argues that Indigenous artists are expanding and reconceptualizing the forms of the genre, expressing Indigenous attitudes toward land and belonging even as they draw upon mainstream art practices. The resulting works evoke all five senses: from the overt sensuality of Kay WalkingStick’s tactile paintings to the eerie soundscapes of Alan Michelson’s videos to the immersive environments of Kent Monkman’s dioramas, this art resonates with a fully embodied and embedded subjectivity. Shifting Grounds explores themes of presence and absence, survival and vulnerability, memory and commemoration, and power and resistance, illuminating the artists’ engagement not only with land and landscape but also with the history of representation itself.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780295745367
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Publication date: 03/22/2019
Pages: 208
Product dimensions: 7.40(w) x 10.30(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

Kate Morris is professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Santa Clara University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments xvii

Introduction 1

1 The Lay of the Land 9

2 The Emergent Tradition of Native American Landscape Painting 27

3 Beyond the Horizon: Postmodern Perspectives on the Native Landscape 57

4 Centering: Site-Specific and Land-Based Art Practices 81

5 The Embodied Landscape 115

Notes 149

Bibliography 171

Index 181

What People are Saying About This

Janet Catherine Berlo

"This book offers a great deal to experts on contemporary Native art, as well as to scholars of global modern and contemporary arts who seek to learn more about this vibrant subdiscipline. With language that is both eloquent and accessible, Shifting Grounds is a significant contribution to art history in general, and Native American contemporary art criticism in particular."

Kathleen Ash-Milby (Diné)

"Landscape in the work of Native artists is sophisticated, conceptually complex yet visually compelling and at times even seductive. Morris illuminates the many layers of meaning in their work through this insightful and intriguing exploration."

Kathleen Ash-Milby

Landscape in the work of Native artists is sophisticated, conceptually complex yet visually compelling and at times even seductive. Morris illuminates the many layers of meaning in their work through this insightful and intriguing exploration.

Kathleen Ash-Milby (Diné)

Landscape in the work of Native artists is sophisticated, conceptually complex yet visually compelling and at times even seductive. Morris illuminates the many layers of meaning in their work through this insightful and intriguing exploration.

From the Publisher

"This book offers a great deal to experts on contemporary Native art, as well as to scholars of global modern and contemporary arts who seek to learn more about this vibrant subdiscipline. With language that is both eloquent and accessible, Shifting Grounds is a significant contribution to art history in general, and Native American contemporary art criticism in particular."—Janet Catherine Berlo, professor of visual and cultural studies, University of Rochester

"Landscape in the work of Native artists is sophisticated, conceptually complex yet visually compelling and at times even seductive. Morris illuminates the many layers of meaning in their work through this insightful and intriguing exploration."—Kathleen Ash-Milby, National Museum of the American Indian

Jolene Rickard

"Shifting Grounds releases the colonial capture of Indigenous land in the Americas from a central ideological tenet in the field of art history, the genre of landscape art. Launching from ground zero canonical works by W. J. T. Mitchell and Rosalind Krauss, Kate Morris remaps land in the Americas from an Indigenous visual, epistemological, and political perspective."

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