User:Uyvsdi/Flatstyle art

Flatstyle art is a Native American painting style popular in the 20th century. Several regional variations of Flatstyle painting developed, particularly in Oklahoma and New Mexico.

Each variation of Flatstyle painting had indigenous roots; however, the artists employed Western media and supports, typically inexpensive water-based paints, such as tempera, casein, or gouache on paper or matboard.

"Bambi Art" is the derogatory term for Flatstyle Native American painting popular in the 20th century. In the Southwest, it was influenced by Pueblo mural and pottery painting and developed at the San Ildefonso style of the 1910s and 1920s, followed by the Studio style of the 1930s and onward taught at the Santa Fe Indian School. Pop Chalee (Taos Pueblo) sold several paintings of stylized blue deer to Walt Disney prior to his release of the animated movie, Bambi.

In Oklahoma, Flatstyle was popularized by the Kiowa Six, six Kiowa artists from Anadarko who studied at the University of Oklahoma. Called Kiowa, Southern Plains, or Oklahoma style, this branch of flat painting was directly influenced by Plains hide painting, ledger art, and early easel artists such as Silver Horn (Kiowa). Southern Plains style places the most emphasis on motion of any Flatstyle Painting.

In the northeastern part of the state, Bacone College promoted the Bacone School of painting, promoted by Native art instructors Acee Blue Eagle (Muscogee Creek-Pawnee-Wichita), Woody Crumbo (Muscogee Creek-Potawatomi), Dick West (Southern Cheyenne), and Ruthe Blalock Jones (Shawnee-Peoria-Delaware). Bacone School art was a medley of Southeastern Woodland, Prairie, and Plains influences.

Mid-20th century non-Native "Indian art experts" reified Flatsyle painting as the only authentic form of Native American painting and rejected more experimental Native art from shows. The work gets more derivative and purely decorative as the century progresses. The 1962 founding of IAIA heralded an end to the constraints of "Bambi Art."

Dismissed in the later 20th century as purely decorative and often considered a European-American imposition upon Native art, Flatstyle art has deep Native roots. The Kiowa Six were taught by Swedish-American professor Oscar Jacobson, but their first formal art training was by Choctaw nun Sister Mary Olivia Taylor and many of their relatives were accomplished ledger artists.

The Bambi in Bambi art is the blue deer. In Huichol cosmology the blue deer, named Tamatsi Maxayuawi, is the elder brother of humans. He is blue because he's a spirit deer and he emerges from the ocean. Huichol religion influenced that of northern tribes through peyote religion and the Native American Church, to which many of these Flatstyle artists belonged. The blue deer is a common motif in Huichol beadwork and yarn paintings today.