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

Abstract

116 reviews Elizabeth Sutton, Angel De Cora, Karen Thronson, and the Art of Place: How Two Midwestern Women Used Art to Negotiate Migration and Dispossession. Foreword by Linda M. Waggoner. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020. Pages xiii–­ xix + 168, 1 color map, 28 illustrations. Nancy Parezo A basic rhetorical strategy in Indigenous studies is to include the author in an analysis and demonstrate kinship to the people being studied. It is especially important for non-­ community scholars to establish they understand the importance of family in social relationships as well as the cultural basis for the continua­ tion of traditions and philosophies in the face of historical changes. Based on the contention that only ascribed individuals can truly understand a sovereign group’s relationships to their homelands and sacred places, genetic heritage is often an authoritative prerequisite to decolonized history. This position presents a problem for non-­ Native scholars who aim to understand aesthetics, especially for a scholar’s first attempt to present an authoritative voice. How can an author establish legitimacy to analyze the experiences of peoples from different cultures and how art has contributed to their identities? One way to tackle this dilemma is to study one’s own ancestors in a specific landscape or region and compare what emerges to that of a similar Indigenous individual or group. Elizabeth Sutton, an associate professor of art history specializing in early modern European and African art at the University of Northern Iowa, has chosen this strategy. To understand her own heritage, she chose to document her ancestor, Karen Thronson, a Norwegian settler housewife who created decorative arts in lace and straw as a way to survive what can only be seen as a difficult existence in strange lands. Sutton does this from a feminist perspective that starts from the marginalization and lack of agency of women in nineteenth-­century America. Sutton then compares Thronson to a well-­ known and highly respected professional Ho-­ Chunk (Winnebago) artist Angel De Cora, whose work Sutton greatly admires, as do all Native-­ American scholars. De Cora was also conscribed 117 reviews as a Native-­ American artist who occupied a limited position in a modernizing America. Sutton chose De Cora because Thronson settled on Ho-­ Chunk lands from which De Cora was forcibly removed to attend an Eastern boarding school, and a homeland to which she never returned permanently. Sutton contends that from this physical geographical basis the women shared an “art of place.” By “art of place” Sutton takes long-­ standing cultural geography and anthropology concepts about landscape and specific places and how people inscribe meaning to where they reside and the homelands from which they migrated. The landscape and place concepts are used extensively in Indigenous studies but Sutton broadens them to the point that place becomes primarily the context for all of life, including a wealth of variables like ethnicity and the lack of power all American women experienced in late nineteenth-­ century social structures and capitalistic economies in the Midwest and East Coast. From here Sutton looks for similarity rather than difference , especially in the production and use of aesthetically pleasing objects. The result is a difficult comparison which relies on claiming commensurable rather than concrete evidence. De Cora’s experiences as a domestic migrant more closely resemble European urban immigrants who became artisan professionals than Thronson’s agrarian-­ based life in small towns. The rural-­ to-­ rural or small town experience is closer in structure, class, and experience to the thousands of Native-­ American female artists like the weavers, potters, and tanners who produced art for consumption in their own communities as well as for external sale from the mid-­ 1880s through World War II. With this aside, Sutton has written good descriptions of the lives, situations , and experiences, as far as she can reconstruct them, and the art produced by two very interesting women whom she considers her biological and intellectual grandmothers. Sutton’s study is part of the University of Iowa Press’s Iowa and the Midwestern Experiences series. It is here that Sutton’s reconstruction of Thronson’s life is well situated and it is the chapters on her immigrant experiences and her search...