Imaging (Native) America: Pedro deLemos and the Expansion of Art Education (1919-1950)

Abstract

For 30 years (1919-1950), The School Arts Magazine, American art education, and American school children were to be affected by the editorial work of Pedro deLemos. During his tenure, deLemos came to identify Native American art as a foundational source for America's restructuring of its unique aesthetic identity. This is significant because until the 1948 establishment of National Art Education Association (NASA), periodicals like School Arts functioned as a national platform for art educators. Prior to his editorship, School Arts made few gestures toward the inclusion of the values, customs, and forms produced by America's minorities. DeLemos's own identity, a working-class, second-generation, HispanicAmerican artist who obtained administrative positions both at School Arts as Editor and at Stanford University as Director of its Museum and Art Gallery, placed him on a border between under-represented people and mainstream institutions.1 These conditions urge a reading of the historical importance of del-emos's work as a transition period during which the presence and importance of minority contributions were identified and valued but not fully emancipated. In Indian Decorative Designs, deLemos's first portfolio of instructional materials to explicitly identify art as a form of cultural production, deLemos (1926a) articulates his views on the importance of Native American arts and crafts. American designers, for many years have studied design sources of the Old World for inspiration and guidance in producing designs for American industrial arts requirements. Egyptian, Grecian, and Renaissance sources were rigorously studied and rigidly copied. The result was that American homes became decorated with forms and motifs excellent in source and fitted to the land of their birth, but unrelated to a new period and in most instances inadaptable to a different background.... Where the early arts of the Old World had, through the years of refinement and elaboration, together with the ornate period of the Renaissance, become over-intricate, the arts of the early Americas come on the scene in contrast with a bold, almost crude, but refreshing simplicity.... It is hoped that with all the study of the world's rich gathering of design forms that the student will include those forms so excellently achieved by the early designers and craftsmen of the American continents and thereby more truly achieve an American expression in the design created for use in America today. DeLemos imagines a non-European American consciousness situated in the American home and delivered through American public schooling. Native American crafts, designed in an evolutionary relation to America's natural environment, presented a challenge to art education's use of Old World influences. For a nation that was largely a collection of Old World immigrants, the new American landscape, rather than race or culture, provided a shared foundation for understanding the aesthetic dimension an American identity. Native American crafts were granted a near-magical power that carried the authentic aesthetic of the land into American homes and schools. These issues illustrate the roles that Native American cultures were given within art education's development of its own identity. That process is set within the larger question What is it to be an American? that emerged as a function of America's evolving role as a world power in an industrial world. Participants in these discussions in the pages of School Arts included: deLemos; supervisors and teachers working for the Bureau of Indian Affairs both within Government Indian Schools and in Washington, DC; anthropologists, archeologists, and art historians associated with museums; Native American artists and educators; artists associated with the art colonies of Taos and Santa Fe; mainstream art educators; the New Mexico tourist industry; and businesses selling artist materials and supplies. Throughout the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, School Arts presented a version of Native American culture that contributed to art education's ideas about its own identity and about American life. …