The Origins of Modern and Contemporary Native American Art

Whenever I’m asked, “what’s your favorite kind of art,” I always respond, “contemporary Native American art.” Primarily painting.

It has been since I picked up an interest in art literally out of nowhere shortly after turning 40. Call it a professional mid-life crisis. I had a 20-year career in the sports media, focused on college football, and completely lost interest in it. Sports was my passion and profession since high school; now, I don’t even follow the scores. I haven’t watched a game in years. Any kind of game.

How art came to fill this void is an unlikely story.

I never took an art history or appreciation class in college. I don’t make art – couldn’t draw a circle on a dare. I didn’t have art in my house growing up or as an adult (now I do). I rarely went to art museums.

Some kind of spark was ignited on a visit to Madrid, Spain and its spectacular Prado museum in my early 30s, but that spark wasn’t fanned into a flame until I started visiting Breckenridge, Colorado with my wife a decade later. There was a gallery there, sadly out of business now, with extraordinary, museum-quality art, Russian Impressionism – long story for another day. The gallery, Breckenridge Fine Art, also had an extraordinary gallerist, Gretchen Greene. As the old saying goes, “when the student is ready, the master will appear.”

Greene introduced me to the joys of art – how to look, the artists, their stories. I’d spend hours in the gallery on ski trips to Breck, going through paintings in the storage racks like books on a bookshelf. I was searching for something to fill the hole in my life left by my abandonment of sports. I found it in art.

From the outset, contemporary Native American painting was my favorite. The vibrant colors. The wisdom. The stories. Trickster coyotes and Koshare. Raven. Skywoman. Native artists’ perspectives on America and contemporary life I hadn’t been exposed to or considered.

Indigenous cultures and societies intrigued me since childhood. I was attracted to life ways built around honoring and coexisting with nature, communal prosperity, a rejection of materialism and dogmatic, evangelical religion. Before I was a teen, I saw it as better way to live than the consumer Christianity, “greed is good,” “dog eat dog,” patriarchal, extraction society I was surrounded by. In contemporary Native American art, I found my values magnificently represented, spoken in the universal language of pictures.

My passion for contemporary Native American painting began with Tony Abeyta’s spectacular New Mexico landscapes. Then I found Earl Biss (1947-1998) and his paintings of Apsáalooke life past, present, and future. He changed my life. I had never been so affected.

I was turned on to T.C. Cannon (Kiowa/Caddo; 1946-1978) and Shonto Begay. I met John Potter. And Starr Hardridge. I was hooked.

I am also interested in history. Yes, world history and American history, but the history of everything I’m in to. The history of sports as a kid. The history of art when I got into it. The history of contemporary Native American painting.

The History of Contemporary Native American Painting

I have been writing professionally about art since 2018. I’ve written hundreds of stories, dozens of them about Native American art. I’ve interviewed the most prominent figures in contemporary Native American art – Abeyta, Begay, Jeffrey Gibson, Cara Romero, Rose B. Simpson, Virgil Ortiz, Dyani White Hawk, Kay WalkingStick among them – and learned a great deal from them about art and life. I’ve visited countless museums and spent hundreds of hours looking at contemporary Native American art.

Where did all of this come from?

What is the origin story of contemporary Native American painting?

An article I wrote in December of 2025 about Truman Lowe (Hoocąk [Ho-Chunk], 1944–2019) confirmed what my years of writing and looking and asking had suspected. In addition to being an artist and professor, Lowe served as the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.’s founding curator of contemporary art.

He built NMAI’s collection and organized several influential exhibitions after the museum opened in 2004. The first of those was “Native Modernism: The Art of George Morrison and Allan Houser.”

Rebecca Head Trautmann, now assistant curator of contemporary art at NMAI, worked with Lowe on the “Native Modernism” show.

“He saw those two artists as being the founders of this modernist approach to art among Native artists,” she said.

Trautmann curated Lowe’s first retrospective on view now at NMAI.

George Morrison, 'Summer Spectrum II,' 1958. Courtesy of Phillips.

Morrison (Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa; 1919–2000) has a solo exhibition of paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through May 31, 2026. Houser (Chiricahua Apache; 1914-1994) remains the most prominent Native American sculptor to this day.

If the founding curator of the nation’s national museum of the American Indian believed Morrison and Houser were the wellspring from which modern Native American art and the contemporary art which follows it flows, who am I to disagree?

A couple disclaimers.

For starters, plenty of Native artists, especially potters and weavers and basketmakers, continue working in a traditional, or customary, non-modernist approach. Nothing wrong with that. The artwork they make is contemporary, all work in its time, even cave paintings, is contemporary when its created, but these artists are not concerned with Modern art trends.

What is meant by “modernist” is artwork influenced by and created to be in conversation and lineage with global Modern art movements. Modern art with a capital “M,” designating it as belonging to a particular style and tradition, not merely a time frame. Modern art from the perspective of Western Civilization broadly runs from French Impressionism to Pop Art. The 1860s to the 1960s. Monet to Warhol.

That is the artwork, and Native artwork, I’m most interested in, as well as what followed it: Contemporary art. Contemporary with a capital “C,” designating it as influenced, in conversation with, and coming out of the traditions of global Modern art.

I also want to make clear I’m focusing on painting. Maria Martinez to pottery and Charles Loloma to jewelry and others in other mediums are the originators of modernism in their genre. I’m not suggesting the origins of modernism in Native pottery lie with George Morrison.

Despite his being most well known as a sculptor, I do think, along with Morrison, the origins of Modern Native painting trace back to Houser.

Allan Houser, 'Buffalo Hunt, (1960), from the collection of the Booth Western Art Museum. Photo by Chadd Scott.

Houser’s career began as a student with Dorothy Dunn at the famed Santa Fe Indian School where he was taught the iconic, flat, Santa Fe “studio” style he would rebel against. As he transitioned from two-dimensional to three-dimensional art, his sculptures took on modernist elements like flowing lines and negative space. He was influenced by Henry Moore (British; 1898-1986).

Houser’s prominent rejection of what white teachers and curators and collectors considered “traditional/acceptable” in Native art was picked up by countless painters. And I would argue potters and jewelers and all Native artists looking to break from the “traditional” box they’d been relegated to by the mainstream art world.

In addition to Houser and Morrison, I would humbly include Oscar Howe (Yanktonai Dakota; 1915-1983) and Lloyd Kiva New (Cherokee; 1916-2002) as originators of what has become Contemporary Native American art.

Oscar Howe, 'War Dancer,' 1959. Courtesy University of South Dakota.

Howe was every bit as radical as Houser in his work and vocal rejection of any constraints placed on Native artists. New was the driving force behind establishing the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, an institution more responsible for the nurturing, instruction, and promotion of Contemporary Native art and artists than any other. Contemporary Native painting in no way develops the way it has without IAIA and credit for that goes – not exclusively – to New.

Discussing the origins of modernism in Native painting and the contemporary art it birthed is also incomplete without a mention of Fritz Scholder (La Jolla Band of Luiseño Indians; 1937-2005). Scholder was trained and engaged with Modern art – the influence of Francis Bacon (British; 1909-1992) is unmissable – passed on what he knew to his students at IAIA as one of the school’s first instructors, and set the most prominent example for how a Native American painting in a modernist, ultra-contemporary style, could be commercially successful.

My favorite type of art is contemporary Native American painting. Its origins are found in George Morrison, Allan Houser, Oscar Howe, Lloyd Kiva New, and Fritz Schoulder.