The forthcoming auction, Fine & Decorative Interiors including Jewellery, features a group of thirteen mixed media works by the Shoshone-Tataviam or Paiute artist Stan Natchez, (lots 1-13).
At the time of his exhibition, ‘Indian Without Reservation’, held at Birmingham Bloomfield Art Center, Michigan, in Spring 2023 Stan Natchez was quoted describing his approach and his art, ‘I feel fortunate for having been raised in the city because of the perspective it gave me on modern life. However, without an awareness of our traditional heritage, we as Native Americans have no identity. By taking the best of both worlds, the modern and the traditional, we are better able to find balance in our lives’.
Stan Natchez (b. 1954) grew up in Los Angeles, and was educated at the University of Colorado, where he studied Education and later at Arizona State University earning a Master of Fine Arts. He taught Humanities for ten years at a prep school and was also an Editor at Native Peoples Magazine. ‘In the white man’s world, if you want to get an education, you go to college’, he has explained, but, ‘In the Indian way, if you want to get knowledge, you go through ceremonies’. As a California-based Indian however, there were very few Tataviam rituals left for Natchez to experience but he travelled throughout the States and met people living in tribes who shared their ceremonies with him. Native American dances provided the route to his career in art – through the creation of dance regalia Natchez became absorbed in the colour and composition of beadwork. For many years he took part in the Sun Dance in South Dakota, the important, ancient ceremony associated with the Sioux and many Plains Indians which involves four days of dancing and fasting from sunrise to sunset. Prayers for life are offered to the Great Spirit, for the individual and for the life that surrounds him, and participants also submit part of their own skin, demonstrating the strength of their resolve which also acts as a form of payment to the Great Spirit for blessings.
Stan Natchez had his first exhibition in Santa Fe in the late 1980s, soon after he had completed his undergraduate and post graduate education. The show was held at the gallery of the renowned dealer and major player in contemporary art in the Southwest, Elaine Horwitch. Other exhibitors included Andy Warhol and Fritz Scholder, and on seeing the company he was keeping, Natchez was naturally apprehensive and began to question his ability to make a full time living from his art. However, by the end of the Private View his doubts would be allayed when all his works had sold.
Natchez’s works are eye catching and absorbing, and have been called Neo-Pop. He works with a rich colour palette, in gold, burnt orange, deep purple, lapis blue and scarlet, rather than bright colours for the sake of sensation suggested by the label. Natchez deploys a range of items, mostly highly recognisable and many conveying a sense of nostalgia – beadwork, bottle caps, pages from telephone directories, government bonds, print advertisements, postage stamps, the American flag and dollar bills, with fictional figures from Native Indian history and culture. However, he doesn’t always employ this combination – Navajo girl on gold is a striking head and shoulders portrait devoid of elements from everyday life. The confident use of colour feels contemporary but the pose is reminiscent of a vintage photograph where the sitter stars into the camera with a natural innocence and poise.
Natchez also calls on Native American ‘ledger art’ – the style widely seen from the 1860s until the 1920s featuring drawings and paintings on paper and cloth, and named after the accounting ledger books which provided a source of paper. Native Americans came to acquire ledger books, along with pencils, ink and watercolours, during incarceration by white captors and they drew what they could recall from memory, such battle scenes, hunting, courtship and religious practices. From the auction, An eighteen part collage of a figure on horseback, shows a lone Indian on horseback being shot at by numerous white soldiers. It is an alarming, striking image. The encroaching world of the white man and new technologies were also seen, typically steam trains and cameras, as well as encounters with European Americans and European soldiers. Navajo and train, also from the auction, a stylised image of a gleaming, shiny steam train, manufactured by Baldwin & Co. of Philadelphia, shares the canvas with an elegant Navajo – Natchez leaves it up to the viewer to consider how the two might be connected and how they relate to each other.
Natchez has explained specifically why he uses the dollar in his works, ‘I’m saying that the dollar bill is a symbol of the world we live in…In the 1700s and 1800s Indians painted on deerskin, buffalo or elk hides. And if you wanted something, hides were your money. So the modern-day hide is the dollar bill’. The dollar appears in several of Natchez’s works in our auction – in Horses and Navajos on a five dollar bill, the US is renamed the United Indian States and a Navajo Indian takes the place usually occupied by US Presidents on the bank note. The one dollar bill appears in uncut sheets, papering the background like wallpaper in Navajo with birds against one dollar bills, the Navajo could be carrying a pipe and Natchez has picked out the embroidered star on his cuff through the use of a deep orange thread. A small scale Navajo in a head dress is mounted on blue and black piebald horse which gallops at pace and almost leaves the work – perhaps he represents a memory? In Navajo in head dress against gold wearing a one dollar blanket it is possible that the dollar takes the place of what might have been a traditional animal hide worn as a protective garment.
Along with many of his peers, Natchez tackles the pain and tragedy of the European colonisation of North America, a sad and long history of countless battles for land dating from the 17th century through to the early 20th century. However, as a youngster he was taught that bitterness, hatred and anger can become ailments for the individual and with this outlook in mind Natchez produces works which are humorous, beautifully executed and with no detectable rage.
Peggy Lanning, the pioneering gallerist and specialist in the field, knows Stan Natchez well, and she has said of his art, ‘We see his true gift as being the manner in which he blends traditional American imagery with traditional imagery of Native Americana, he shows us, with no shadow of a doubt, that you cannot have one without the other’.
Fine & Decorative Interiors including Jewellery | The auction will close for bidding on Tuesday 24 September at 5pm
For all auction enquiries contact Sally Stratton MRICS and Guy Savill | +44 (0)207 281 2790 or info@thepedestal.com