White Artist Research Articles

(M)Othering Like Us

Black artist-activist Parker Bright’s three-day protest of white artist Dana Schutz’s Open Casket (2016) at the 2017 Whitney Biennial ignited a debate concerning “historical witnessing” versus “cultural appropriation,” artistic freedom and freedom of speech, and institutional agency in affording socioeconomic value to white artists over artists of colour. While intended to evoke an empathetic response “across race,” Schutz’s painterly reproduction of the iconic photograph of 14-year-old murdered Black boy Emmett Till perpetuates and participates in white violence on Black life. Schutz’s own response—“I don’t know what it is like to be black in America but I do know what it is like to be a mother”—suggested an empathetic connection with Till’s mother, Mamie Till Mobley, whereby abstract notions of heteronormatively defined white motherhood transcend the reality of everyday Black and Brown life. Schutz’s claim resonates with a statement made by Robin Kahn, a white artist whose installation-performance Dining at Refugee Camps (2012) at dOCUMENTA13 relocated a community of Sahrawi women exiled to the Tindouf Refugee Camps in Algeria since 1975 to Kassel, Germany, as “a symbol of peaceful refuge.” Kahn identifies as a “mom of color” (her adoptive daughter is African American), suggesting a universal/izing point of reference to the refugees that elides the disparity in privilege and precarity. Schutz and Kahn deploy white feminist—in particular, white motherhood—tropes to deemphasize damage done to Black and Brown people that the artists’ work reproduces. This article is about the cultural collateral white motherhood assumes in its own gendered, racialized, and economic privilege (as well as the assumption thereof within the space of academic publishing and in the article itself). It is also about the broader response in the artistic community, primarily from artists of colour, who literally and figuratively stand between the viewer and artwork.

Art and Violence in Ayad Akhtar’s Disgraced: Reading Western Domination over Muslim Representation in Amir and Emily’s Relationship

Ayad Akhtar’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, <em>Disgraced</em>,<em> </em>grapples with Islamophobia, post-9/11 racialization of South Asians, and the possibilities of Muslim identity. The play recounts the tragic descent of Amir, a New York Lawyer and South Asian Muslim, from his precarious belonging in upper-class New York society to the devastating fulfillment of violent racial stereotypes about Muslim men. This paper considers Amir’s relationship with his wife Emily, a white artist, as a location of multifaceted and mutually inflicted violence that invites audiences to interrogate stereotypes about Muslim men and confront the harm of white domination over Muslim representation. Emily’s well-intentioned yet problematic control over her husband’s identity and appropriation of Islamic art traditions reflect Western domination over Muslim representation. By highlighting these tensions within Amir and Emily’s marriage, Akhtar deftly locates the impact of Islamophobia and post-9/11 racialization of South Asians in the realm of the personal, confronting audiences with their devastating consequences.

From Reverse Ethnography to Cultural Performance: Reenacting Colonial Shows in Contemporary France

Cuban-American performance artist Coco Fusco uses the phrase “reverse ethnography” in her essay “The Other History of Intercultural Performance” to describe what she did in 1993 when she exhibited herself and her co-performer Guillermo Gomez-Peña in the United States and in Europe as caged newly discovered Amerindians. Using the codes of colonial shows, she pretended to be the colonial exhibit, while the true exhibits were the viewers and their (post)colonial concerns. This intention seems to be central to South African Brett Bailey's Exhibit B: the museological exhibition of performers of African and Afro-Caribbean descent embodying the different stages of the (post)colonial enslavement of Africans by Europeans, from slavery to asylum seeking. Despite Bailey's best intentions, the show met with disapproval in London (where it was eventually cancelled) and encountered an even greater opposition in Paris in November 2014. Whereas the media tended to analyse the opposition in binary terms (Black protesters opposing a White artist for daring to show African suffering), a closer analysis of the petitions and interviews points to the problem of African and Afro-Caribbean invisibility in French culture and cultural institutions. Indeed, the recent fascination with “Afropeanism” fails to move from the narrow spheres of academia and small theatres to national stages. Once a performer in Bailey's installation (Exhibit B hires local performers from each city it visits), Guadeloupean choreographer Chantal Loïal offers an alternative to the South African's vision when she impersonates Sara (“Saartjie”) Baartman (also known as the Hottentot Venus) in her dance show On t’appelle Vénus. Loïal exposes and questions the spectators’ laughter while mixing in South African songs, Guadeloupean chants, and African dance moves. The famous colonial exhibit thus becomes a powerful illustration of African and Afro-Caribbean culture. Despite being recently awarded the prestigious Légion d’Honneur (one of the highest official distinctions in France), Loïal was not appointed head of the Centre Chorégraphique National de Nantes for which she was shortlisted: her failure seems to underline the above-mentioned lack of visibility she campaigns against. This essay shows how Bailey's installation and Loïal's danced performance expose, sometimes unintentionally, the possibilities and failures of the cultural representation of African and Afro-Caribbean history and culture in contemporary France.

Whose history is it anyway? The case of Exhibit B

In 2014, Brett Bailey’s Exhibit B site-specific installation created a media storm and protests throughout Europe. One such protest was in London, leading to the cancellation of his show at the Barbican. Consternation caused by art work is not a new phenomenon, and indeed one of the enduring purposes of art is to push the boundaries of acceptability and to show sights that are normally kept hidden from the public gaze. From some of the Impressionists’ exhibits to twentieth century art works such as Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ in 1987 and Chris Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary 1996, art has caused offence in a variety of ways. This article examines Exhibit B to identify the reasons for its reception. In broad outline, as a white artist his presentation of black oppression was regarded at best as naïve and at worse as culturally inappropriate.

Against his self, against his time: modernist aesthetic, post-war London, and the failure of imagination in J. M. Coetzee’s Youth

ABSTRACTJ. M. Coetzee’s Youth (2002), born in the heated times of the reconciliation of races in South Africa, has invited scholarship primarily on two areas: the problem of storytelling and the nature of place. Its predominant aspects, modernism, and post-war London have hardly been taken up for an analytical discussion on the issues of land, race, and storytelling. These aspects merit attention for three specific reasons: to understand the nature of exile for a white intellectual or artist from a peripheral colonial geography to a white metropolitan centre and the related notion of ‘real’ and ‘configured’ racial foreignness in post-war London; to comprehend the ‘evental’ in art and city-space as against the everyday and the contemporary influenced by 1920s European modernism; and to see the masculinist aspect in such project, especially in relation to the problem of love. The essay concludes with the argument that the author’s repeated focus on the aspect of John’s conscious dismissal of his essentially Romantic nature for this modernist quest is a suggestion that art, entirely dissevered from contemporary social and political reality, is bound to be futile and failed.

Whose interests and under whose control?: Interest convergence in science-focused school–community collaborations

In this dialogue with Monica Ridgeway and Randy Yerrick’s Whose banner are we waving?: exploring STEM partnerships for marginalized urban youth, I engage the critical race theory (CRT) tenet of interest convergence. I first expand Derrick Bell’s (1980) initial statement of interest convergence with subsequent scholarly work in this area. I then explore ways CRT in general and interest convergence specifically have been applied in the field of education. Using this framing, I examine how interest convergence may be shed new insights into Monica Ridgeway and Randy Yerrick’s study. For example, the tenet of interest convergence is used to frame why it was beneficial for the White artist, Jacob, and the Achievement Scholars to collaborate in the service-learning mural. Then the idea of interest divergence is brought into explore the ways in which Jacob benefitted from his participation in the service learning project while the Achievement Scholars were left with an unfinished project which they had to problem solve. To conclude, I provide future directions for the application of interest convergence and divergence to issues facing science education.

Историзм творчества художника И.И. Фризена

At the beginning of the 21st century dynamics of regional and local sociocult u ral processes amplified which is ref lected in works of artists, in museum exhibition projects, and also in publishing activities. Historical and cultural researches are developing simultaneously on the all-Russian and regional levels. The observation is made of the process of reorientation of researchers’ attention towards cultural and anthropological history. It corresponds to modern international practice of humanitarian research. The article is devoted to ethnocultural traditions in the works of the Altai painter and black and white artist, I.I. Frizen, who was the founder of the Russian Germans Miseum in the Grishkobka village of in the German national region of the Altai Krai, the author of the album of graphics illustrating the life of the Russian Germans “National Memory” (2015). The social history of art is designed to launch the mechanisms of broadcasting of images and values of the past to the present; the analysis is given to personalized (biographic) approach to study history as a science and to study art creativity. DOI 10.14258/izvasu(2016)4-23

Crying

Crying explores the tension between an 'authentic' and a 'performed' moment of vulnerability and the complex emotions associated with being both artist and new mother. The artist has approximately one hour to capture this work in her backyard, before her baby wakes and demands her full attention and care. The challenge she sets herself is to cry on camera. In dialogue with Bas Jan Ader's I'm too sad to tell you (1970), in which Ader sobs for an unknown reason (in the tradition of the "melancholy white male artist", as Jennifer Doyle writes in her book 'Hold it Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art'), Crying captures a performed and staged sadness, a feminist reworking of Ader's intimate yet self-indulgent action. Ader has become a mythical figure after he was lost at sea in 1975, three weeks after setting off alone in a small sailing boat, attempting to cross the Atlantic Ocean. In motherhood, Lim feels almost daily to be 'lost at sea', charged with the responsibility of a new life and love so strong as to be almost unbearable.

Deconstructing the racialised gaze: Subverting whiteness in the work of Minnette Vári

The institutional violence of apartheid legislature homogenised what was in fact a remarkably diverse population into fixed categories, and resulted in what Richards (1991) refers to as the ‘apartheid gaze’. This mythological quantification of race and culture is an heirloom of ideological whiteness. Given the complex dynamics of power and representation that haunt the socio-political climate of postapartheid South Africa, how might a white South African artist problematise whiteness in a way that allows for a cultural fluidity that runs counter to this gaze? This article identifies the strategies used by the white South African artist, Minnette Vári, to subvert her apparent whiteness and build a case for accessing a multiple identity that is African in its ability to be diverse. I argue that, rather than addressing established ideas of a sexual or maternal femininity, Vári's use of her own (usually naked) body attempts to expose her whiteness. In this way, she is less concerned with reclaiming the female body from the male gaze, than from the racialised gaze. I conclude that it is ultimately this use of her body that allows Vári to discuss issues of representation and belonging without falling into the ideological position of the coloniser.

Freedom Readers: The African American Reception of Dante Alighieri and the “Divine Comedy.”

Freedom Readers: The African American Reception of Dante Alighieri and the “Divine Comedy.”

Jessie Fauset's &lt;em&gt;Plum Bun&lt;/em&gt; and the City's Transformative Potential

We are mainly indebted to writers of fiction for our more intimate knowledge of contemporary life. (3) Robert E. Park, City, 1925 In a moment of accumulated outrage at humiliations of everyday racism, Angela Murray, protagonist of Jessie Redmon Fauset's 1928 novel Plum Bun, decides to leave what she considers her staid hometown of Philadelphia and launch herself a freer, fuller life that can be had only in a truly great like New York (8o). To avail herself of greatest possible freedom, she also chooses to cross color line and pass as white. This is a decisive--if expected--moment in text, and rest of narrative details various repercussions of Angela's daring decision to set off as an unfettered woman. Fauset's novel thus traces Angela's movement over time and space: from her early years in a respectable black neighborhood in Philadelphia, through her adventures as a young woman passing as a white artist in bohemian Greenwich Village, and eventually to reclaiming her racial identity and moving to Paris to pursue her art. At novel's conclusion, Angela is coming into her own as a portrait artist and has been reunited with love of her life, Anthony Cross. Set exdusively in various and increasingly cosmopolitan spaces--from Philadelphia to New York City to Paris--Fauset's novel participates, at least to some degree, in urban of Harlem Renaissance literature that Maria Balshaw details in Looking for Harlem. In her book Balshaw considers then-nascent discipline of sociology as practiced by thinkers such as Robert E. Park, whose words serve as epigraph to my essay, and Charles S. Johnson. She demonstrates that their progressive ideas about space formed an important background to optimism of Harlem Renaissance (23). (1) Yet Balshaw does not discuss Fauset's work at any length, despite fact that Plum Bun--like Nella Larsen's Quicksand and Passing--clearly takes part in ongoing debate about the embeddedness of African American in consumer culture and in city (97, emphasis added). Because Plum Bun engages in important ways with both aesthetics and concerns of sociology, I will demonstrate that novel can be read as raising crucial and timely questions about emancipatory potential of space for upwardly mobile black women. By emphasizing centrality of space in Plum Bun, I add a new dimension to literary criticism on Fauset while reinforcing Kathleen Pfeiffer's claim that novel's narrative is neither anachronistic nor marginal but rather modern, complex, and worthy of serious scholarly attention (80). (2) Susan Tomlinson has convincingly argued that Plum Bun explores intersections of race and gender constructions of black and white American women (90). Angela Murray, Tomlinson suggests, manages to emulate two norms of womanhood: that of New Negro Woman--characterized by racial pride and sexual respectability--and that of New Woman--characterized by sexual experimentation and pursuit of a public career. Yet, according to Tomlinson, not until novel's end--when Angela is in Paris, has disclosed her racial identity, and begins to devote herself to her artistic career-- do both gender and racial advancement coalesce in unified female (90). The impossibility of combining these norms in one female subject in turn reveals their contradictions and mutual exclusivity. Cherene Sherrard-Johnson makes a similar point, suggesting that passing character as artist is locus of Fauset's oscillation between advocating an avant-garde womanhood and endorsing a more conventional New Negro womanhood (Portraits 49). Pfeiffer, on other hand, examines narrative in light of its even larger cultural context, suggesting that Fauset uses passing as a way to reflect on the multivalent transformations in which white American culture at large was then participating (80). …

Photoluminescence Properties of Zinc Oxide in Paints: A Study of the Effect of Self-Absorption and Passivation

Zinc oxide has been widely used as a white artist pigment since the end of the eighteenth century. The luminescence properties of this compound have received great interest during the last decades for promising applications in different fields of material science, but their diagnostic implications in the cultural-heritage context have been poorly exploited. This paper is intended to provide a clear picture of the luminescence behavior of zinc white in oil paintings. With this aim, three white pigments and three highly pure (analytical grade) zinc oxides were studied as powder substrates and as painting models by ultraviolet-visible (UV-VIS) fluorescence and Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy. The quenching of the luminescence intensity of the UV excitonic emission due to self-absorption and multiple scattering phenomena has been investigated, pointing out the possible difficulty of detecting this signal with negative consequences in the diagnostics of works of art. By contrast, the UV emission is notably enhanced by interaction with the binder, whereas the visible emission decreases. This phenomenon is probably due to the formation of covalent bonds between zinc atoms and carboxylates from the lipidic medium that are chemisorbed on zinc oxide surfaces.

Anton Kannemeyer's Tactics of Translation as Critical Lens

Anton Kannemeyer (b.1967) is a white Afrikaner artist whose work engages with translation: subject matter culled from historical archives, comics, and the mass media is transposed into different languages, artistic mediums, and styles. Kannemeyer's artworks use translation as a means of returning to and interrogating traumatic, historical events. The beholder is prompted to (re)engage painful aspects of the past, approached from the critical distance allowed by the deferral implicit in translation. By re-encountering history in the gallery, the viewer must confront her memory and reconcile or interrogate disjunctions proposed in the space of Kannemeyer's work. Thus, with the re-imagining of events as translations in a new language, there is the possibility for a renewed investigation of received histories and a working over of traumas of the past.

Reading as Responsible Dialogue in Ana Castillo’s &lt;i&gt;The Mixquiahuala Letters&lt;/i&gt;

[O]ne voice is not enough, nor two, although is where dialogue begins. --Cherrie Moraga (58) In Letter Thirty-Two of Ana Castillo's epistolary novel, The Mixquiahuala Letters (1986), the Chicana poet protagonist, Teresa, recalls her return to writing after having been silenced by an emotionally abusive lover: Then one October night, she has finished a fifth of rum alone and dares to take out the poems she wrote in life, before him. The voice of a woman who rebelled ... calls to her with shouts. She begins the methodic process of gathering the pieces of that woman, like the pieces of a broken china vase, and glues them together, patiently, as neatly as she is able. (118) This letter--like all the letters that make up the book is directed to Alicia, a white artist, feminist, and Teresa's best friend. Teresa's letters to Alicia are lyrical and intimate, recounting their travels in Mexico and elsewhere and analyzing their relationships with each other, with men, and with America (in the broadest sense). None of the letters follows a standard form; they differ dramatically in style, tone, and content. Letter Thirty-Two is distinctive because it is one of only two in which Teresa writes of herself in the third person. The shift from first to third person reinforces the sensation of being shattered that Teresa recalls, a sensation figured in the jagged pieces of a broken china vase. Teresa is, however, not only shattered in passage; she is also multiple. There are at least three Teresas here: the self-possessed, feminist Teresa of another life who speaks with muffled shouts; the shattered Teresa, attempting to piece herself again; and the Teresa writing retrospectively about the act of recovery in which the second Teresa is engaged. Such multiplication makes it possible Teresa to figure as reader, writer, and textual subject. Teresa writes about reading her own poetry and recounts the self-referential reading experience as one in which she speaks to herself in a plural voice. Commenting on the intimacy among reading, writing, and identity-formation, passage figures the plural, active, and self-reflexive reading practice solicited by The Mixquiahuala Letters. Reading is presented as the creation of coherence out of fragments, and surely, is one way to describe the experience of reading Castillo's novel. In a note to the reader that precedes the letters, Castillo announces that this is not a book to be read in the usual sequence. She then invites readers to choose among three narrative paths--one for the conformist, one for the cynic, and one for the quixotic--or to read the letters individually. In note, Castillo recognizes her readership as multiple and engages readers as coauthors. She also acknowledges that, in the practice of piec[ing] together (n. pag.) a story, readers are also piecing themselves, as Teresa does in the scene described above. The narrative path they follow bestows upon them an identity. It is not rare readers to read a text out of order, skipping passages, re-reading others, or flipping to the last page first. (1) What is unusual is the invitation to read in these ways. (2) Non-chronological reading typically signals a reader's refusal to join the audience that seeks to interpret a text in keeping with authorial intention and historical context (Rabinowitz 20-42). In the case of The Mixquiahuala Letters', readers depart from narrative chronology under the direction of the author. The only unauthorized reading is one that moves through the letters chronologically. Even if readers choose to read in order, the undated, often impressionistic letters--indicative of the vagaries of memory--offer up narrative coherence unwillingly. The emphasis on readerly agency implicit in Letter Thirty-Two and in the structure of The Mixquiahuala Letters can be understood in part as a response to the postmodern death of the author (Barthes 142). …

National Pleasures: The Fetishization of Blackness and Uruguayan Autobiographical Narratives

This article examines the autobiography of white Uruguayan artist Carlos Páez Vilaró, read contrapuntally with the autobiographical accounts of several Afro-Uruguayans contained in the book Historias de Exclusión: Afrodescendientes en el Uruguay, including that of late painter Ruben Galloza (1926–2002). I argue that the fetishization of the black figure–evident in Páez Vilaró, but speaking of and through a larger context–constitutes whiteness and circumscribes the experiences of those who embody blackness.

Judith Lütge Coullie and J. U. Jacobs, eds. a.k.a Breyten Breytenbach: Critical Approaches to His Writings and Paintings. (Cross/Cultures 75). Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2004. 337 pp. $94.00 Cloth. $36.00. Paper.

Judith Lutge Coullie and J. U. Jacobs, eds. a.k.a Breyten Breytenbach: Critical Approaches to His Writings and Paintings. (Cross/Cultures 75). Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2004. 337 pp. $94.00 Cloth. $36.00. Paper. The title of Coullie and Jacob's collection of essays on the contemporary South African poet, novelist, playwright, essayist, painter, and political activist Breyten makes primary reference to his self-constructed and self-deconstructing multiple narrative and authorial personae. As Lisbe Smuts observes, these personae-Galaska, Bengai Bird, and host of others-problematize a one-to-one relationship between the real person, Breytenbach, and the textual (57). But the essays also examine, on more implicit level, the always complex, often ambiguous, and multifaceted position of the reluctant colonizer and anti-apartheid Afrikaner who, according to Coullie, was born of the white (master) race... but as an albino with black heart (210). This sense of double-consciousness pervades the collection. On one hand, is depicted as kind of archetypal white artist in contemporary South Africa, an individual caught in the debate between the contention of authors like Andre Brink that art should be elevated above the political and the stance of writers like Nadine Gordimer, Steve Biko, and himself, whose first volume of poetry, Die ysterkoei moet sweet (The iron cow must sweat) (1964) took the position that artists ought to employ art in the fight for political freedom, human dignity and justice (xii). On the other hand, the critics whose essays make up this work seek to define what makes not only unique within this context, but also transcendent. In this quest, variety of themes and discourses emerge-multiplicity, mirroring, representation, African memory, metamorphosis, and regeneration, to name but few-and are threaded through chronological dialogue in which Breytenbach's critics speak with the artist (as in Marilet Sienaert's interview) and also with one another. On the matter of gender, Louise Viljoen examines Breytenbach's literal, literary, political, and poetic fathers in his early poetry; Judith Lutge Coullie questions the absence of the female subject in his critical writing; and Andries Visagie, in his examination of the masculine subject in Breytenbach's later works, seems to conclude that perhaps nothing definitive can be concluded: Breytenbach is likely to continue to revise his approach to masculinity, specifically in relation to women and sexuality (325). Many of the essays in this collection, in their attempts to distinguish from his fellow writers as postmodern, postcolonial, or South African, position him alternately within and outside of those aforementioned paradigms. …

Bad Rap for Rap: Bias in Reactions to Music Lyrics1

This research examines the recent public outcry against violent rap songs such as Ice T's “Cop Killer.” It was hypothesized that rap lyrics receive more negative criticism than other types of lyrics, perhaps because of their association with Black culture. Two experiments were conducted to examine the effect of musical genre and race of singer on reactions to violent song lyrics. The results support the hypothesis. When a violent lyrical passage is represented as a rap song, or associated with a Black singer, subjects find the lyrics objectionable, worry about the consequences of such lyrics, and support some form of government regulation. If the same lyrical passage is presented as country or folk music, or is associated with a White artist, reactions to the lyrics are significantly less critical on all dimensions. The findings are briefly discussed in terms of various models of racism and stereotyping.

Nadine Gordimer: The White Artist as A Sport of Nature

This article applies principles of new historicism to show that A Sport of Nature can be read as Gordimer's attempt to persuade South African artists to reject mere protest art and to shift art beyond the trap of oppositional forces in South Africa's history today. The text calls instead—via fiction and the imagination—for a new post-apartheid art that will generate creative possibilities for a future South Africa. Gordimer's protagonist, Hillela Capran, is read as a metaphor for the white South African artist who, like Hillela, struggles for an authentic identity and meaningful role in the evolving history of South Africa. This paper asserts that A Sport of Nature boldly proposes the mutation necessary for the South African artist and people to resolve the political, personal, or artistic fragmentation, beckoning other artists along the path. Hope of its assured success, however, remains as elusive and unpredictable as any "sport of nature" must be.

Faulkner's Pantaloon: The Negro Anomaly at the Heart of Go Down, Moses

THE SENSE OF HOW NEGROES and how they have so long endured, wrote James Baldwin in i95i, was hidden from white Americans. barriers, he felt, were formidable; foremost was nature of the [white] American psychology. For whites to accept the qualities of Negro life, that psychology must undergo metamorphosis so profound as to be literally unthinkable.' statement summed up years of Negro frustration at the fumbling efforts of white writers to portray Negro character. It remains significant expression of widely shared attitude; and yet, obviously, some sense of how Negroes live indispensable for the white artist. For if the Negro not, as Richard Wright has asserted, America's metaphor,2 he obviously one very important metaphor; and our classic writers have generally acknowledged this by attacking the issue. No white writer of stature has committed himself to this problem more strongly than Faulkner; The Negro, Robert Penn Warren concludes, is the central figure in Faulkner's work. Warren, like other Southerners of moderate and liberal persuasion, 'has found much to satisfy him in Faulkner's efforts. Because of his open-eyed rendering of Negroes, Warren contends, Faulkner was able to accomplish a more difficult thing than Joyce's Dedalus: To forge the conscience of his [white Southern] race, he stayed in his native spot and, in his soul, in images of vice and of virtue, reenacted the history of that race.' Few writers receive such praise. But Faulkner's formidable efforts have left Negroes far from satisfied. Precisely because he greatest artist the South has produced,

A Unique Pictorial Interpretation of Blackfoot Indian Religion in 1846-1847

Sometime in 1846 or 1847 a Blackfoot Indian artist painted for Father Nicolas Point, S.J., an unsigned watercolor depicting various aspects of Blackfoot Indian religious beliefs. The details of this painting are interpreted here for the first time. In 1846-1847 Father Nicolas Point, S.J., was the first Christian missionary to spend a winter among the warlike Blackfoot Indians on the plains of present-day Montana. Making his headquarters at the American Fur Company's trading post of Fort Lewis, on the Missouri River near the mouth of the Marias, he extended his labors to the hunting camps of the Indians. Point's own account of his experiences among the Blackfoot was published one hundred and twenty years later under the title, Wilderness Kingdom, The Journals & Paintings of Father Nicolas Point, edited by another member of the Jesuit order, Father Joseph P. Donnelly. The text is handsomely illustrated in full color with reproductions of numerous small portraits of Indians and scenes in Indian life executed by Father Point himself, in addition to a few paintings made for him by Indians. The latter are of particular interest because they are the earliest known examples of Blackfoot Indian painting in the white man's medium of watercolor on paper. Despite the fact that Point was preceded among the Blackfoot by two more talented artists, George Catlin (in 1832), and Karl Bodmer (in 1833), he was the first white artist to portray a number of significant aspects of traditional