Angel De Cora, Karen Thronson, and the Art of Place: How Two Midwestern Women Used Art to Negotiate Migration and Dispossession by Elizabeth Sutton

Abstract

Reviewed by: Angel De Cora, Karen Thronson, and the Art of Place: How Two Midwestern Women Used Art to Negotiate Migration and Dispossession by Elizabeth Sutton Emily C. Burns Elizabeth Sutton, Angel De Cora, Karen Thronson, and the Art of Place: How Two Midwestern Women Used Art to Negotiate Migration and Dispossession. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020. xix, 168 pp. $49.95 (paper). Histories built on comparative case studies often lead to new discoveries by focusing on examples that are both parallel and divergent. This is the model undergirding art historian Elizabeth Sutton's comparative study of Ho-Chunk artist Angel De Cora and the author's great-grandmother Karen Thronson, a Norwegian immigrant to the Midwest. Pairing these two figures' stories and the spaces of subjugation and assimilation that operated for both Native nations and Scandinavian immigrant communities in the [End Page 197] Midwest allows readers to consider the power of objects to engage with place, identity, culture, gender, and memory. Sutton argues that these artists, contemporaries who never met, both engaged in community-building through art production to, in Sutton's words, "connect with place and validate self and group identity" (1). The act of creating in a variety of media—and in particular engaging with long-standing practices in their respective communities—helped these individuals to navigate their identities in the context of expected assimilation. There is much to recommend in this discussion, that centers on female makers and challenges art history's traditional hierarchies that tend to devalue craft. Sutton's focus on minoritized experience recasts ongoing narratives of settler colonialism and cultural subjugation. The text also takes seriously the possibilities of "visual coding" (24, 56) as a strategy that Thronson and De Cora employed to speak to U.S. and non-U.S. audiences simultaneously. This question—what modes of cultural expression could be non-threatening to dominant culture—offers the book's key investigation of artistic agency and messaging. The text also highlights the role of organizations and publication outlets for communicating ideas of identity. The study, however, leaves some important questions tantalizingly unanswered. There is a promising synergy between the presentation of handicraft from Scandinavia and Native American design in ladies' magazine cultures (83), but this is not probed further. The crucial scholarship by art historian Elizabeth Hutchinson on De Cora's navigations of modern and Native identities is listed in the bibliography but is not cited or directly engaged in the content of the book, although the author does come to similar conclusions about how De Cora strategically sought to build a compatibly Native American and modern artistic practice. A dialogue with Hutchinson's conclusions on this topic would have also enabled greater clarity of Sutton's contributions, especially in her original research of design projects by De Cora's female students at Carlisle Indian Industrial School and the ways that De Cora encouraged her students to develop individual expression via a larger understanding of Native American art practices in the early twentieth century (108–116). I also would have appreciated a citation for her use of Lakota interpretations of color in the Carlisle student work (112) as well as some discussion of De Cora's painting in the Native American boarding school exhibition at the Universal Paris Exposition of 1900 when her participation in several other World's Fair displays is noted (57). Tonalism as an aesthetic practice, which De Cora employed, is never really defined or productively [End Page 198] engaged as an aesthetic (48, 65), which makes it difficult to trace the artists' adaptation of it. The project might have benefited from further integration of the main figures. Each chapter oscillates between the two subjects, and the brief conclusion does not fully show how they are complements or foils for each other. Do we really see either figure more clearly in this comparison? An extended article focusing on key similarities, such as immigration and dispossession, might have been more effective as a comparative study. Indeed, while the artists share a gender identity and the use of art to connect with their respective communities, certainly the experiences of Norwegian immigrant women and Native American women significantly diverge in...