A Landmark Survey of Native Graphic Arts Defies Expectations

Through next February, New York’s Poster House is home to “Designed to Be Red,” a milestone survey of Native graphic arts. By institutional convention, such a show would unfold chronologically; but as its curator, the Native designer Brian Johnson, notes, time is a snake swallowing its own tail.

The show spans two centuries and more than 60 tribes and nations, organized around five themes: Indigenous Joy, Creative Sovereignty, Protest, It’s Complicated, and Extractive Marketing. The sections wrap around a single gallery, allowing visitors to begin at either end. It’s best to start from Joy, according to Johnson, though even that section’s psychedelic centerpieces—the ‘60s youthquake swept Native land, spectacularly—suggest trouble.

“Protest is literally the backbone of the entire gallery,” said Johnson, who is a citizen of the Monacan Indian Nation. Johnson assembled this show in part to correct the graphics arts record, which has both marginalized Native practitioners in its annals and left a legacy wound in the popular imagination. Americans surely remember the advertisements and have seen the movies: the heartbroken ‘Chief’, provocative princess, and proud warrior, infantilized by pidgin and hollowed of individuality.

“The whole idea behind this is multiplicity,” Johnson, who goes by he/they pronouns, said. “Native Americans and Indigenous peoples are not a single blanket. We are allowed to talk about ourselves and have ourselves seen, not as have a myth pushed onto us or woven into the American fabric.”

Among the participating artists are Kent Monkman, Onaman Collective (represented in the original posters they created for Dakota Access Pipeline protests); Anna Tsouhlarakis, who featured in the latest Whitney Biennial, contributed a banner from her Native Guide Project, that reads with the authority of Helvetica Bold: I Really Like the Way You Respect Native American Rights. The show, however, expands the notion of graphic arts beyond the boundaries drawn even by its host, Poster House. Jeffrey Gibson, who also appears in a series of jubilant collaborations with artists including Luzene Hill,Eric-Paul Riege, and Dana Claxton, is represented by a miniature ziggurat titled Because Once You Enter My House, It Becomes Our House (2020), and modeled after architecture of Cahokia, an ancient Native metropolis near modern St. Louis.

Craft, visual art, design: Where does Tony Gonyea’s ceramic wampum belt, which draws on a Haudenosaunee tradition dating to the mid-16th century, fall? And what of Ella Myers’s shadow box, Navajo Dye Chart, which, as its name suggests, displays some 40 plants and the colors they produce on wool?

“There’s a wall that is assumed, or imposed, between these categories, but someone can be a basket weaver or a rug weaver and also be engaged in graphic design. Art and design meld into everything,” Johnson said.

Read on for a conversation between Johnson and ARTnews on the show’s beginning, end, and next destination.

So, the title.

I love that the title is a double entendre: “Red” and “read.” I’m taking a racial slur and putting it right in your face, but the work is also designed to be read, understood, processed and contemplated. It’s like the Red Power movement or the American Indian Movement—taking something back that was very sacred to us and opening the entire show by punching it out.

It’s unusual to see so many three-dimensional objects in a graphic design show. What’s the thinking here?

One of the questions running through the exhibition is what counts as a poster.

For me, a poster, in a Native context, is something that communicates a message through typography, visual language or vernacular language, and is intended to be publicly shown or expressed.

Navajo Dye Chart shows how plants can be used to make different colors. The artist made posters in the 1980s, but the printing was on acidic paper and the work deteriorated quickly. There are letters still around, but I wanted the original chart—the actual object that shows where to find a particular plant and how it can be used to make a color.

That’s sovereignty: saying ‘these are the things you should be talking about.’ We don’t teach this in design history classes.

What do you make of that gap in arts and design education?

In school, we’re told that the Germans did everything, that design began with the Bauhaus, that this is how it has to be: Swiss typography. After the Bauhaus, people came to Yale, taught at Black Mountain College, and then those ideas disseminated to Cranbrook, Otis, CalArts, and other schools. Art education is stuck in the deep shadow of the Bauhaus.

I run Polymode Studio. We’ve been designing books and museum show for 20 years. In 2020, we started a school BIPOC Design History. We look at people of color who have been deliberately erased and left out of the design canon. Our school offers classes about Black design in America, Diseño Gráfico, a SWANA course—we ask designers and researchers to show us what they think has been left out.

The section “Alcatraz and Protest” further complicates the distinctions between art, object, and design.

In 1969, Native Americans occupied Alcatraz Island, off San Francisco, and held it until 1971. They issued a declaration calling for the island’s return. The settlers who had occupied the island before them had left it in disrepair. Native people realized it was no longer being used and said, in effect, “We’re taking it back.” They wrote that proclamation on a piece of stretched buffalo hide.

Where did you find it?

Emma Waggoner, a graphic designer who is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, found it. The hide was—and remains—in the collection of the U.S. Marshals Museum in Arkansas. Waggoner and her wife drove there to scout it out. They contacted the museum, though its staff was initially unsure whether they wanted to lend it to us.

I was in Santa Fe working with an archive when the archivist said, “Hang on, I know them,” and picked up the phone. He called the museum and said, “Hey, do you have this hide thing in your collection? Yeah, there’s this Native Brian Johnson who wants to get it from us.” Again, humanity is made possible by people knowing each other.

This is a key piece because it asks why Native Americans should be held to the convention of putting [design] on paper. Why would we need a huge printing press attached to the back of a horse, moving across the plains while we’re following buffalo? We can put a message on hide and put it up. And look: there’s typography and a public message, which is why this is such an important moment in the exhibition. It’s sarcastic and truthful at exactly the same time.

From the U.S. Marshals Museum—which I just learned existed—to Manhattan. How did changing the space it’s exhibited in change the object?

Here, it’s allowed to express itself, to be present and to scream. It’s not sequestered or called a prisoner; here, it has context. Is it a sacred object? No. Is it still talking to us? Yes. It’s a protest object that helped Native people gain the rights we have today.

I appreciate that Poster House cared enough to turn off the fire alarms once the show was fully installed, allowing me to sit in the institutional space. I thanked every object, especially this one, over and over. I really lived in the preparation of the room and said, “Thank you so much for being here.”

Like many pieces here, it’s attributed to ‘Designer Once Known’. In a museum, it’s more common to see on a wall text ‘Unknown artist’. What’s the nuance?

“Designer Once Known” is what we put on the label where a museum would put “Unknown.” It’s not the same thing. “Unknown” is a shrug. It’s anthropological. No way of proving it. No way of knowing. But that’s trash. The people who made that object or that work were known. They were loved. The name didn’t fall off the object. It just wasn’t valued.

“Once Known” says somebody was real, it gives them humanity again. Somebody knew whose hands cut that block, pulled that print, beaded that pennant—their name, their Nation, who taught them, their lineage, who they made it for—all the things. So when I put “Designer Once Known” on a wall, I’m not giving up on the name. I’m filing a space with dignity and the hopes of eventually one day being able to fill that in.

‘It’s Complicated’ and ‘Extractive Marketing’ are tucked in the back, a bit out of sight. What sort of work will visitors find there?

A key piece in this section was already in Poster House’s collection: a work by Winold Reiss. A German immigrant who came to the United States in the late 1880s, Reiss became an important painter during the Harlem Renaissance. He taught Aaron Douglas painting, and his portraits of Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston appeared in the Met’s Harlem Renaissance exhibition.

He was also obsessed with “cowboy and Indian” stories. Went out to the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana. Got really well known there; they loved this random German guy. He paid them to sit for him, paid for a translator, painted them exactly the way they should be painted—the opposite of Edward Curtis. Painted 280 portraits. He got to know their stories and when he died, they spread his ashes on the reservation. He also sold all those paintings to the Great Northern Railroad.

And the Great Northern Railroad—ding, ding, ding—turned those portraits into marketing tools to promote its route. The company reproduced them on playing cards, business cards. None of the money went back to the reservation. Their names were not used. They were not asked for permission.

But at the same time, the typography is amazing. That’s the contradiction. The poster is beautifully made, yet it participates in a system that extracted Native people, land, and imagery for commercial gain.

It’s complicated.

It’s complicated.

Reiss ran a workshop on the reservation?

People on vacation would come to Montana and paint Native people. They were paid, but they were also treated as a bit of a sideshow, folded into the myth of the “vanishing race.” There’s something sticky about it. Why not work with them directly, or have them teach you beadwork, something from our own traditions? No, instead, it was this Michelangelo-style, grand studio. Again, the Western idea of art education.

What’s next for the show?

This is not a comprehensive show. There’s no way we could represent all 574 [federally recognized] tribes. What about the unrecognized tribes? What about the tribes that were fully erased? Which is why I’m not the only person that can speak and do this. The show needs to go somewhere like Pine Ridge, or Oklahoma City. Wherever it goes, I’d love to dig into local archives, expanding the show to fit each space. There’s a lot of Lenape material, you know, because we’re on their land. I want the people who see it to be its anchor, so it has meaning for them.

Design is fraught in many directions, as we well know, and this show has never been done before. We have to take it to underserved areas. I need Native teenagers to see that they can make these things, that they deserve to be in this space.