Personal Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Unknown Artists: Lakota
19th-century
Chamberlain, SD: Akta Lakota Museum and Cultural Center
75%
Yellow Robe River Count. Pencil on muslin. c1880
Seldom have I felt as unequipped with the tools for dealing with an artwork as I did when I ran into this “winter count” in southeast South Dakota. Winter counts were spiraling pictorial calendars used by Plains tribes to record historical events; this one covers most of the 19th century. Part of the difficulty for me was the apparently total ambivalence which the figures had for their ground, as well as the spiral narrative form, the (I assume) conventional symbolism, and the deceptive simplicity of the figuration. For someone like me who’s been fatted on “naive” and outsider art, it begs to be read like a Bill Traylor, and by those terms its subdued coloration and uncannily coherent arrangement make it nearly a masterwork. But the obvious narrative complexity and rootedness in an elaborated tradition — however transformed by contact and tribulation — force me to admit that accounting for it exclusively in that way would be formalistic. (2024)