From the Editor

Abstract

F r o m t h e E d i t o r M e l o d y G r a u l i c h This special issue on women modernists and their use— or “appro­ priation”— of southwestern peoples, landscape, history, and art was not planned. No call for essays went out. No guest editor sought, culled, or organized the essays. Instead, these essays were separate submissions, all accepted by different readers through our conventional peer review process. The essays’ thematic unity and their authors’ divergent ap­ proaches to and judgments of their subject reflect a central nexus of debate in our field at the turn into the twenty-first century: how do we read the work of those who attempted to write about— sometimes to speak for— racial others? In this issue essayists explore from various per­ spectives authors who were, in their time, sharply critical of xenopho­ bia and racism but who, from our contemporary vantage point, often displayed those very qualities; who admired other cultures and peoples and were politically active in their behalf but condescended to and romanticized them; who sincerely studied those cultures, through aca­ demic research and through fieldwork, and sought to advance understand­ ing about them, but whose work sometimes seems filled with stereotypes and assumptions. These questions are also, of course, central to the study of the nu­ merous artists who moved to the Southwest during the same period and made American Indians one of their primary subjects. So many artists painted Indians that artists began to paint artists painting Indians, a trope we have emphasized in the artwork selected for this issue. Walter Ufer’s wonderful Artist and Model on our cover perfectly captures the complexities of interpretation foregrounded in this issue: does Ufer’s composition in this self-portrait present him and his Taos Indian sub­ ject in a position of equality or does it make the Indian recede behind him, position him as background to Ufer’s self-image? Is Ufer ironically suggesting an awareness that in his many paintings of Indians, he was also painting himself? Or, as in Fantasies, the lead image to Martha Viehmann’s essay, is he implying that his images of Indians originate in his inner gaze? The equally assertive eyes of the two men challenge us with these questions. Walter Ufer. FANTASIES. 1922. Oil on canvas. 42" x 38". Stark Museum of Art, Orange, Texas. ...