The Journal of Surrealism and the Americas: Vol. 7 No. 1 (2013) - Table of Contents

“Introduction to the Issue and Special Section on Native American Surrealisms” by Claudia Mesch, p. i-iv. 

“George Morrison’s Surrealism” by W. Jackson Rushing III, p. 1-18. 

“César Moro’s Transnational Surrealism” by Michele Greet, p. 19-51. 

“A Modernist Moment: Native Art and Surrealism at the University of Oklahoma” by Mark A. White, p. 52-70.

“The Opposite of Snake: Surrealism and the Art of Jimmie Durham” by Mary Modeen, p. 71-95. 

“‘My World is Surreal,’ or ‘The Northwest Coast’ is Surreal” by Charlotte Townsend-Gault, p. 96-107. 

“Complexity and Contradiction in Native American Surrealism” by Robert Silberman, p. 108-130. 

“Review of ‘Double Solitaire: The Surreal Worlds of Kay Sage and Yves Tanguy’ & Kay Sage, ‘The Biographical Chronology and Four Surrealist One Act Plays’” by Larry List, p. 131-134.

“My world is surreal” says Yuxweluptun (b. 1957). The Coast Salish artist lives in Vancouver and therefore on un-ceded native land, where the ‘rights’ of Native people are, contradictorily, defined by the 1876 Indian Act. Yuxweluptun accounts for the surreal in his paintings as retaliation for a mode that drew on Indigenous sources to define itself. They are part of a capacious, populist discursive history that has long informed production and reception of Northwest Coast Native art. ‘The Colour of My Dreams: the Surrealist Revolution in Art’, at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2011) helped to establish its historical framework.

In the late 1940s, a handful of Native artists studying and working at the University of Oklahoma began to experiment with modernist styles such as Cubism, Expressionism, and most notably Surrealism. Chief Terry Saul, Richard “Dick” West, and Oscar Howe used their Master’s theses to depart from established, accepted styles of Native painting in order to explore the possibilities of Native expression. They were encouraged not only by their instructors, who dabbled with various Surrealist tendencies, but also by notable examples in the museum collection from William Baziotes, Byron Browne, Charles Howard, and Adolph Gottlieb. For the Native artists, Surrealism in its various forms provided a strategy for producing work identifiably Native yet visibly modernist by contemporary definitions. Surrealist fascination with myth and magic provided an accessible framework for them to explore the visionary and mythical within their respective tribal cultures while creating work marketable as both modern and Surrealist.