User:Ashsnomac/Indian Space

Indian Space Painting (Indian Space Group) was a term coined to describe an informal art movement developed in the 1930's and into the 1940's. Connected to the Abstract Expressionist movement that developed in New York after World War II, Indian Space Painting was a term created by painter Howard Daum (1918-88) to describe the pictorial language and influences taken from Native American iconography more specifically from the Kwakiutl and Tlingit Indians of the Northwest Coast. The artists were drawn to the symbology being uniquely American as a way to separate from their European counterparts.

Development
All the artists involved in with Indian Space Painting were members of the Arts Students League (ASL) though they were seperated into two groups by age. The first group Steve Wheeler, Peter Busa, Robert Barrell, and Will Barnet formulated the ideas. Barnett who became a teacher at the ASL, influenced the second wave of the group Howard Daum, Gertrude Barrer, Ruth Lewin, and Oscar Collier. These artists exhibited at Gallery Neuf, a downtown art gallery, run by Kenneth Laurence Beaudoin. Beaudoin, a writer from New Orleans, went on to create Iconograph, the publication connected to the movement.

Iconograph consisted of Kevin Beaudoin as editor, Collier as associate editor, and Barrer as art editor. They published five issues and two supplements up to 1947. A subsequent issue was published by Collier alone.

The Indian Space artists differed from their abstract expressionist counterparts in that the work was more geometric and communicative. Instead of abstract shapes, the symbols and ideograms used in the paintings were meant to communicate meaning and function as a type of languageg and creating a unity in all things which Indian Space Artist Steve Wheeler said was to "Build a reality in harmony with external fact and internal desire... weaving painting and life into a close knit fabric that has no beginning or end."

"During the pivotal period when American art was finding its voice, the Indian Space Painters created a new iconography by transforming the familiar identity of things into a complex, multileveled vision—at once idiosyncratic and universal, of the moment and timeless." -Barbara Hollister

Exhibitions
The informal Indian Space Group which described themselves as “8 and a Totem Pole,” were only in one group show together in 1946. The group was comprised of Peter Busa (1914–85), Howard Daum, and Gertrude Barrer (1921–97). Will Barnet and Steve Wheeler (1912–92), who shared the group's aesthetic but did not participate in the 1946 show, are commonly included in considerations of Indian Space achievement, and others also experimented with Indian Space principles.

Controversy
The term Indian Space Painting had its distractors at the time who preferred to call the style Semeiol­ogy" (referring to its exploration of the language of symbols). Howard Daum had created the term but later believed that the Indian Space label failed to do justice to the broader aims of the approach.