Native American traditions inform work held at the Autry
The Autry Museum has just added another facet to its mission of penetrating exhibitions that challenge shibboleths about the American West. The museum has been a consistent showplace for work that both confirms and expands upon the many concepts of Western art. The estate of artist Henry Fonseca has given a huge portion of the artist’s work to the Autry.
At more than 900 pieces (including 500 original pieces, 19 large-format murals, 69 sketchbooks, and a number of posters, prints, collages and multiples), the Autry is now the largest repository of Fonseca’s work.
From the late 1960s to the ‘80s, artists and intellectuals examined ideas around national identity. A few Native American artists grappled with modernism and traditions: Luiseño painter Fritz Scholder (1937-2005), Winu/Nomtipom painter Frank La Pena (born 1937), Apache sculptor and painter Allan Houser (1914-1994), and Sacramento-born Henry Fonseca (1946-2006).
Fonseca had a complex ethnic identity: descended from the Nisenen Maidu tribe, he also claimed Hawaiian and Portuguese ancestry. Though he studied with La Pena, renowned teacher and Native American art scholar, at U.C. Sacramento, Fonseca dropped out and went his own way.
Fonseca often worked in mixed media — painting, collage and print. One of his strongest motifs was the recurring depiction of the coyote in many different guises. Among the postures that Fonseca gave his coyotes were as Uncle Sam on a vaudeville stage, a juvenile delinquent, a powwow dancer, a Wild West Show performer, a floozy, the principals in Verdi’s “Carmen,” a street pimp, a ballet dancer and a cigar store Indian chief.
“It was a perfect metaphorical image for Fonseca,” claims Autry Chief Curator Amy Scott. “I think he used Coyote to explore his own identity. Coyote slides from one identity to the next, from one setting to another. He’s a trickster, a transformer and a shape-shifter — effortlessly crossing cultural lines. He’s a performer and Fonseca loved performance. He loved opera and ballet and one of the Coyotes stands in front of a brick wall. Well, that’s in the San Francisco Mission District, where Fonseca lived in the ‘70s. That area was important to him as he came to terms with being a gay man.”
Fonseca’s Stone Poems use prehistoric petroglyph imagery and basket design motifs combined with modernist fillips to explore Maidu creation myths handed down from his uncle. “I think the Stone Poems are both some of the most ancient and at the same time some of the most contemporary aspects of Fonseca work,” Scott says. “They’re somewhat ambiguous, as the petroglyphs are; not even the Native Americans understand everything about them. And while mystery is an element in Fonseca, I’m cautious about using that word because so often it’s been used to brand something as primitive. And although he may use traditional elements, Fonseca’s work is incredibly sophisticated.”
How does Scott see Fonseca in the art constellation? “His work straddles the universal and the personal,” she states. “He combines elements that are quite internal to Native Americans but he combines them with global visual languages and abstractions, like Pollock drips. Fonseca delights in ambiguity.”
“Fonseca draws on so many Native American traditions,” Scott points out. “There is a tremendous potential for exhibition subjects: the California missions, the Gold Rush, the mystical coyote, pop culture, the transformative effect of Catholicism on Native Americans, and modernism.”
For now, plans are underway for a small showing in one of the Autry galleries in October. Scott also sees a Fonseca show that she describes as “major” sometime in the future, but she can’t say how it will play out at the moment.
Beyond the curatorial potential, Scott sees an expanded possibility for the Autry with the acquisition. “I hope this makes us a more visible repository for Native American art,” she says. “Fonseca’s regard for tradition relates directly to much of the Native American art that we have in the Autry Collection. I think it can be a wonderful conduit for other items.”
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KIRK SILSBEE writes about jazz and culture for Marquee.