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OBOIS:ANA
Research of James Luna and Fritz Scholder and were crucial to the development of OBOIS:ANA. Fritz Scholder Fritz Scholder continuously confronts his identity and that of Native Americans in his expressionist paintings that span from the mid-twentieth to the early twenty-first century. Scholder is largely credited with demolishing the painting style promoted by Dorothy Dunn’s Studio at the Santa Fe Indian School through his Indian Series (Sims 30). In these numerous paintings, Scholder portrayed Native Americans in situations and environments unportrayed in art before. His subjects appear lost and fading away from the viewer. Referencing Indian with Beer Can (1969), Scholder admitted “No one had dared paint the massacres. No one had dared paint an Indian with a beer can. With all these artists running around and doing Indians, it had always been romantic views, which, of course, wasn’t Indian at all. They more like Italians dressed up in feathers” (qtd. in Sims 31). The artist also said, “I felt it to be a compliment when I was told that I had destroyed the traditional stye of Indian art, for I was doing what had to be done,” (qtd. in Sims 30). James Luna The “convoluted relationships between native and non-native Americans serves as the background against which James Luna’s artwork is presented” (Weintrab 98). Luna, a Lusieno/Diegueno tribal member, documents the “strange perversion of prejudice of admiration upon Native Americans” and “articulates the discrepancy between the Indians who occupy the white imagination and those who occupy the Federal reservations through his work (99). In Indian Tails (1993), Luna “simply speaks to an audience. Throughout the plaintive narration, his tone becomes progressively more anguished:” I don’t want to be an Indian anymore. Everybody wants to be an Indian .... I don’t want to be an Indian anymore, I don’t want to be an Indian anymore. I don’t want to be an Indian for historical reasons I don’t want to be an Indian for commercial reasons