Canonising ‘Cowboys and Indians’ at Booth Western Art Museum, Cartersville, GA
Robert Tannenbaum, 'Grey Wolf', 1984, casein on masonite, at Booth Western Art Museum, Cartersville, GA. Photo credit Kelise Franclemont. The card reads: Robert Tannenbaum was an award-winning illustrator before turning to easel painting. This Native American portrait shows a defiant Plains Indian with arms folding in front of an American flag, perhaps expressing the struggle for success many Indians face in the modern world.'
The Booth Western Art Museum in Cartersville, Georgia, USA houses thousands of Western-themed paintings and sculptures in their permanent and temporary galleries. Opened in 2003 with over 120,000 square feet of exhibition space, visitors can see contemporary and historic art from the Great American West, the Civil War, Western movie memorabilia, plus Presidential portraits and letters.
Glenna Goodacre, ‘He is, they are’, 1991, bronze, at Booth Western Art Museum, Cartersville, GA. Photo credit Kelise Franclemont. The card reads: ‘…a social commentary in which Goodacre expresses how “we banished the Native Americans from their lands and tied their hands at the same time.” The artist dreamt that she asked this figure what his name was and he replied, “He is, they are”.’
All about “Cowboys and Indians” – from the cowboy’s point of view
If you’re new to the Booth Western Art Museum, you’ll see buttes, cowboys, and boy-howdy, there are “Indians”* everywhere in the scores of paintings, bronzes, and artefacts in Booth’s permanent collections.
David Manuel, ‘Victory coup’, 1994, bronze and polychrome, at Booth Western Art Museum, Cartersville, GA. Photo credit Kelise Franclemont. The card reads: ‘David Manuel grew up in Walla Walla, Washington, but now resides in nearby Joseph, Oregon, where he operates a museum, art school, sculpture studio, and a bed and breakfast. Among the many awards and commissions Manuel has received was his recognition as the official sculptor for the 150th Anniversary Celebration of the Oregon Trail.’
Michael C Poulsen, ‘Chief Joe Medicine Crow’, 1998, oil on masonite, at Booth Western Art Museum, Cartersville, GA. Photo credit Kelise Franclemont. The card reads: ‘This portrait exhibits the influence of classic European art which Poulsen brought back from studies abroad…the sitter once auditioned for a role in a Western movie but was rejected because, “he didn’t look Indian enough”.’
Vic Payne, ‘Eagle Catcher’, 1996, bronze at Booth Western Art Museum, Cartersville, GA. Photo credit Kelise Franclemont. The card reads: ‘Legends tell of capturing the Golden Eagle by the Plains Indian, who believed their feathers were infused with wisdom. These coveted feathers, when displayed in a war bonnet, symbolised the capture of the essence of the Great Spirit. A brave obtained an eagle feather to represent each heroic strike he inflicted on an enemy combatant. Only after a warrior earned 29 or 30 feathers, did he earn the right to build a bonnet to display them all and become an ‘Eagle Catcher’.’
Nancy Glazier, ‘Audacious’, 2000, oil on canvas, at Booth Western Art Museum, Cartersville, GA. Photo credit Kelise Franclemont.
Krystin Melaine, ‘War and peace’, 2008, oil on canvas, at Booth Western Art Museum, Cartersville, GA. Photo credit Kelise Franclemont. The card reads: ‘A native of Australia, Melaine knew she wanted to be an artist. Her interest in Western American subjects emerged from her numerous trips to the United States. Although this Plains Indian subject wears the shirt of a warrior, he holds a peace pipe.’
*Booth’s words, not mine, as over 500 distinct tribes with unique culture are often boiled down and collectively referred to as “Indians” on the many placards throughout the exhibit.
Curated into galleries with themes such as: “Cowboy” (driving cattle, looking into sunsets, bustin’ broncos);
William Penhallow Henderson, ‘Sky high, Powder river’, 1915, oil on canvas, at Booth Western Art Museum, Cartersville, GA. Photo credit Kelise Franclemont. The card reads: ‘…This colourful painting is influenced by the French art style known as Fauvism. WP Henderson is remembered as a highly-inventive New Mexico artist, teacher, children’s book illustrator, and architect.‘
…”American West” (“Indians” riding horses, playing pipes, wearing warbonnets, fighting cowboys/settlers/soldiers, and doing other “Indian” things like gambling for a dead man’s gun);
Alfredo Rodriguez, ‘Wind beneath their wings’, 2001, oil on canvas, at Booth Western Art Museum, Cartersville, GA. Photo credit Kelise Franclemont. The card reads: ‘…Rodriguez pays tribute to Native American women in this romanticised work. Such idealistic portrayals, however, are at odds with the hardship that often characterised the lives of the Plains Indians. Rodriguez, one of nine children, was born in Mexico near a Huichot Indian community.’
Kathryn Woodman Leighton, ‘The referee’, 1926, oil on canvas, at Booth Western Art Museum, Cartersville, GA. Photo credit Kelise Franclemont. The card reads: ‘Charles M Russell introduced Leighton to important Blackfeet Indian leaders in 1925, during her family’s vacation to Glacier National Park. She returned next summer to paint a series of their portraits. The Great Northern Railroad bought twenty of these and sent them on a cross-country tour. The sitter holds and eagle-tail fan, decorated with peacock feathers, showing how current fads sometimes modified traditional Indian apparel. Fashion-conscious Americans of the 1920s often used peacock feathers for decoration.’
Roy Andersen, ‘The Pindah War Cap’, 1999, oil on canvas, at Booth Western Art Museum, Cartersville, GA. Photo credit Kelise Franclemont. The card reads: ‘An Apache warrior carefully probes the kepi (forage cap) of a US Calvary trooper. He wonders if the cap of a Pindah (white man) may contain the same power that inhibits his own headgear. This painting is an excellent example of narrative realism, a realistic style of painting that tells a story.’
Warren E Rollins, ‘The Burden Bearers’, 1929, oil on canvas, at Booth Western Art Museum, Cartersville, GA. Photo credit Kelise Franclemont. The card reads: ‘Rollins gained recognition as an Indian painter in California, and is also known for helping to establish an art colony in Santa Fe in the early 1900s. This painting is very similar to a frequently copied photograph of the time, entitled, “Carrying water to Tewa”…’
John Ford Clymer, ‘Marie Dorion, Winter Refuge in 1814’, oil on canvas, at Booth Western Art Museum, Cartersville, GA. Photo credit Kelise Franclemont. The card reads: ‘…depicts the widowed Marie Dorion who fled into the mountains of the Oregon Territory after local Natives killed her husband… In order to endure the winter, she used fur skins and tree materials to build a wigwam, utilising the meat from horses she had captured for food.’
David Nordahl, ‘Winner takes all’, 1984, oil on canvas, at Booth Western Art Museum, Cartersville, GA. Photo credit Kelise Franclemont. The card reads: ‘The calm manner of these Apache Indians playing cards contrasts with the troubling vision in the mind of their prisoner whose fate is in doubt. His gear goes to the winner, but to the captive, worldly possessions are now insignificant. Nordahl has made it his life’s work to paint the everyday life and customs of the various Apache tribes.’
…and “War is Hell” gallery (mostly hero-worship of Confederate soldiers and generals because, Georgia).
Installation view, ‘War is Hell’ gallery at Booth Western Art Museum, Cartersville, GA. Photo credit Kelise Franclemont.
And in the category of neither Indian nor Cowboy, there’s also the mammoth group portrait of 18 American Presidents of the 20th Century.
Ross R Rossin, ‘A Meeting in Time’ (The American Presidents of the 20th Century), 2004, oil on canvas, at Booth Western Art Museum, Cartersville, GA. Photo credit Kelise Franclemont.
Throughout there are numerous tributes and portraits of pioneer settlers glorifying all that is Taming the Wild Frontier, along with the highly romanticised and nostalgic view of First Nations Peoples in North America, whom the Booth Museum persists in calling, “Indians” (no relation to people in the Southeast Asian country by the same name).
I’d started wondering if any of the artwork is authored by Native American artists, and found this one by a fellow of “Comanche heritage”…
Bob Moline, ‘The Altar’, 1974, oil on masonite, at Booth Western Art Museum, Cartersville, GA. Photo credit Kelise Franclemont. The card reads: ‘Texan Bob Moline gave up his full-time job as a saddle-maker in 1973 for a full-time career in art. In this painting, he draws on his Comanche heritage, portraying a Plains Indian medicine man praying with a sacred pipe. He has laid out a buffalo skull and offerings of tobacco to the four directions.’
And another Native made this piece, commissioned by a British Canadian couple to fashion a totem pole to tell the story of how they were adopted into a Native Nisga’a tribe:
Eli Gosnell, George Gosnell, Joe Gosnell, and Sam McMillan, ‘Nisga’a Totem pole’, 1977, red cedar and paint, at Booth Western Art Museum, Cartersville, GA. Photo credit Kelise Franclemont.
The placard which accompanies ‘Nisga’a Totem pole’, 1977, red cedar and paint, at Booth Western Art Museum, Cartersville, GA.
And then there are these images, in which white folks toss accuracy to the wayside in favour of unbridled artistic licence:
James Bama, ‘Indian rodeo performer’, 1988, oil on board, at Booth Western Art Museum, Cartersville, GA. Photo credit Kelise Franclemont. The card reads: ‘James Bama was a famed illustrator in New York City before moving to Cody, Wyoming in the 70s to paint full-time. This portrait is an excellent example of the photo-realist style, incorporating a lot of detail in his depiction of a young woman rodeo performer.’
Carl Oscar Borg, ‘Into the great silence’, 1922, oil on board, at Booth Western Art Museum, Cartersville, GA. Photo credit Kelise Franclemont. The card reads: ‘Soon after Borg emigrated from to the US from his native Sweden, he worked as a scene painter for silent movies in Hollywood. His dream to paint the Native American West was made possible by the support of three influential Californians…Borg traveled to the Western outback with artist Edward Borein in hopes of capturing subject matter from a civilisation he believed to be on the edge of extinction. He so loved the Grand Canyon as an uncorrupted relic from antiquity, that he willed his ashes would be scattered into its “great silence”.’
E. Irving Crouse, ‘Incantation (making medicine)’, 1918, oil on canvas, at Booth Western Art Museum, Cartersville, GA. Photo credit Kelise Franclemont. The card reads: ‘A native of Michigan, EI Crouse was one of the most prominent founders of the Taos Society of Artists. Crouse is best known for his romanticised depictions of the Indians of Taos, New Mexico. In this mythical painting, he conveys the close connection between their spirituality and the natural world. However, the details of the ceremony, figures and background are an amalgamation of motifs, many of which come from other regions and cultures.’
John Moyers, ‘The suitor’s song’, not dated, oil on canvas, at Booth Western Art Museum, Cartersville, GA. Photo credit Kelise Franclemont.
Ernest E Varner, ‘A noble past’, 2002, oil on canvas, at Booth Western Art Museum, Cartersville, GA. Photo credit Kelise Franclemont. The card reads: ‘This painting was inspired by a Zulu warrior performance the artist observed in South Africa with a re-enactment unit of Buffalo Soldiers from Atlanta. It focuses on the proud heritage African-American soldiers inherited from skilled tribesman throughout Africa.’
…plus this probably unintended irony of a proud “defiant Plains Indian”…. in front of the banner of the much younger nation that replaced his own.
Robert Tannenbaum, ‘Grey Wolf’, 1984, casein on masonite, at Booth Western Art Museum, Cartersville, GA. Photo credit Kelise Franclemont. The card reads: Robert Tannenbaum was an award-winning illustrator before turning to easel painting. This Native American portrait shows a defiant Plains Indian with arms folding in front of an American flag, perhaps expressing the struggle for success many Indians face in the modern world.’
Each and every representation of an “Indian” that I saw in Booth Museum gave me the impression of some glorious past: the proud brave on a mustang, the stoic warrior, the coy desert princess in beaded buckskin… And quite a few of these paintings are dated within the most recent couple of decades, implying a certain now-ness as if the situation in “Indian Country” today is the same as it was 150 years ago, handsome bare-chested men with strong cheekbones, feathers in their long and flowing hair, chasing down buffalo/enemies on the back of a spirited pinto pony.
Martin Grelle, ‘Running with the elk dogs’, 2007, oil on canvas, at Booth Western Art Museum, Cartersville, GA. Photo credit Kelise Franclemont.
Today, however, the reality on Native reservations looks more like this:
One might argue that the contemporary artists in Booth’s galleries are enlarging on work of artists like George Caitlinwhose paintings of Native Americans in the 1800s which are, of course, included in the collection; and it is through such imagery, both imagined and observed, that the author attempts to preserve something of the culture of the First Nations People, nigh extinct, decimated in front of frontier settlement, railroads, and over-hunting of primary food sources, such as the native bison.
George Caitlin, ‘Smoking the shield’, 1837-9, oil on canvas, at Booth Western Art Museum, Cartersville, GA. Photo credit Kelise Franclemont.
So yes, the Booth Western Art “Museum” is housed in splendid architecture and its collection of top-quality artwork is exhibited in a facility under as high standards as, say, National Gallery or either of the Tates in London/UK. Of course, it occurs to me that, just like any museum/gallery in the world, the whole objective of the curators is to present their own interpretation of the Western narrative, which at Booth Museum, the story seems to be one of keen nostalgia and a longing for a legendary past.
Installation view at Booth Western Art Museum, Cartersville, GA. Photo credit Kelise Franclemont.
So let me back up the truck a bit; in the Booth Museum one can appreciate excellently-wrought paintings and bronzes, and it is a chance to revel in someone’s singular vision of the glory days of the Great Frontier, home on the range, and the Proud Nations of the American Indian. A sort of colonial-days Disneyland, of which the mascot is a bald eagle not a mouse, in a made-up place where the deer and the antelope roam, in that liminal space between the Rockies and the Appalachians.
Howard Terpning, ‘Trail along the backbone’, 2001, oil on canvas at Booth Western Art Museum, Cartersville, GA. Photo credit Kelise Franclemont. The card reads: ‘Plains Indians often brought along extra horses when raiding enemies or hunting buffalo, saving their best ponies for the action. Terpning served in the Marines in WWII, later touring Vietnam as a civilian combat artist. He says this experience shaped his thoughts on native peoples.’
If you happen by the Northwest corner of the State of Georgia, and feel like basking in the fantasy of the Wild Wild West, then Booth Western Art Museum is the very thing, and if nothing else, it’s a top-notch display of bygone Americana.
Jim Vogel, ‘Dorothea Lange’, 2011, oil on canvas on board, painted wood, at Booth Western Art Museum, Cartersville, GA. Photo credit Kelise Franclemont.
Jim Vogel, ‘Maynard Dixon’, 2011, oil on canvas on board, painted wood, at Booth Western Art Museum, Cartersville, GA. Photo credit Kelise Franclemont.
(foreground) Truman Bolinger, ‘Rendezvous, Rendezvous’, 1973, bronze, and (background) L. Maynard Dixon, ‘Red Butte with Mountain Men’, 1935, oil on canvas, at Booth Western Art Museum, Cartersville, GA. Photo credit Kelise Franclemont. The card reads: ‘In this mural Dixon’s simplified shapes, strong desert colors, and vast landscape forms make Kit Carson and his band of frontiersman appear insignificant… this is one of a pair of murals with a similar theme installed behind one of the two cocktail bars in the Kit Carson Steak Restaurant in San Francisco (now demolished).’
P.s., my mom says “Booth is better than the Western Art Museum in Cody, Wyoming, which was mostly guns and I can see my own guns at home.” I haven’t visited there myself so am unable to offer comment…
P.s.s., Speaking of guns, don’t come packin’ because the Western Art Museum is (thankfully) a weapons-free facility.
“But why can’t I wear a hipster headdress?” by Adrienne K for NativeAppropriations.com – 27 April 2010 – Adrienne K, a Native woman herself, more succinctly than I could, sums up the real problem with pictures of “Indians”: “…when the only images of Natives that Americans see are incorrect, and place Natives in the historic past, it erases our current presence, and makes it impossible for the current issues to exist in the collective American consciousness.”
kelise soixante-douze 