A visible and significant program of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, the Indian Arts and Crafts Board, under the direction of General Manager Rene d’Harnoncourt and Commissioner John Collier, represented a well-intentioned initiative in economic and employment development whose true value and impact are only now, with the publication of A New Deal for Native Art, becoming fully understood. Author Jennifer McLerran’s book builds upon the considerable prior scholarship on New Deal arts programs known to folklorists and other scholars as Federal Project Number One (the Federal Writers’ Project, Federal Theater Project, Federal Art Project, Federal Music Project, and Historic Records Survey) and that of allied endeavors, including the Historic American Buildings Survey and the Indian Arts and Crafts Board—most particularly Robert Jay Schrader’s 1983 book, The Indian Arts and Crafts Board: An Aspect of New Deal Indian Policy. McLerran, however, undertakes wider coverage of American Indian art programs during the New Deal decade by including those of the Civilian Conservation Corps and the U.S. Treasury Department’s Section of Fine Arts.
An art historian’s perspective on the political and cultural climate of the decade that saw the greatest governmental activity in the arts—before or since—is a most welcome addition to the scholarship. McLerran brings contemporary thinking on commodification and colonialism to bear upon a time and place where these perspectives are appropriate and effective in identifying the consequences of branding art and the people who make it. Most important here is a fresh reading of two events that came to define the identity and efficacy of the Indian Arts and Crafts Board—the 1939-1940 Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco and the 1941 exhibition, “Indian Art of the United States,” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. These events provide a snapshot of American Indian art and how that cultural territory was populated for the general public and for connoisseurs of things Indian and/or artistic at a key moment in American social history. That moment is explored by McLerran in terms of the perception and manipulation of important distinctions between the pre-industrial and industrial: people, objects, attitudes, and cultural economies. McLerran disassembles the exposition and the exhibition with a surgeon’s delicacy, enabling readers to look inside the decision-making processes that led to the fabrication of the two events and the ways in which specific choices of participants, objects, and display methods contributed to their overall effect.
McLerran’s book applies a contemporary critical analysis of events seventy-five years ago, establishing clear distinctions between the interpretations of Indian artisanship held by American tastemakers and those of the well-intentioned—if perhaps naïve—cast of government employees charged with the promotion of Indian handicrafts. It is difficult at present to imagine an aesthetic contest between those espousing a return to pre-industrial ways of life and proponents of an industrially-informed lifestyle. In the 1930s, the casting of American Indian artists as spokesmodels for a land that time forgot was risky business. McLerran provides a wealth of examples that reveal how American Indian participants in government-sponsored programs foiled the best efforts of their handlers to portray them—and their art—in an ideologically consistent way.
McLerran’s book has much to recommend it, particularly as a contribution to the growing body of scholarship on the New Deal. It should be forgiven for failing to follow a few interests of folklorists, who may wonder how the metabolisms of the American Indian art and craft traditions profiled in the book were affected by the publicity and “exposure” garnered for them by public programs. The author’s attentiveness to art historical details, particularly in the analysis of mural projects, sets up a paradigm of multiple message-making and multiple interpretations, sometimes sharpened, sometimes muddied by public funding. This is the paradigm that is at the heart of public folklore; McLerran’s book should remind many in our profession that the 1930s were not such a faraway time, and that the world of Native Americana created by government officials is not such a faraway place.
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[Review length: 660 words • Review posted on December 8, 2010]