Where the Animals Live: Navajo Paintings Notecard Folio

The Studio of the Santa Fe Indian School, directed by the noted educator, curator, and author Dorothy Dunn beginning in 1932, was a major force in bringing American Indian painting to national and worldwide attention. Dunn’s educational approach encouraged “traditional modernism” as a synthesis of ancient and contemporary forms.

Indian painters were the first modernists, creating graceful, elegant, abstractly emblematic works that came to be associated with the century’s avant-garde. In a period when forces were coalescing in Indian arts and a national movement was afoot to create world attention for Native American art and cultural preservation, Dunn’s transformational philosophy of teaching, which abandoned European models and emphasized indigenous traditions, brought Indian art and artists to deserved distinction.

A number of young people who studied with Dunn became famous artists who worked under her stylistic influence all their lives, refining and individualizing it as their mastery grew. Harrison Begay, Pablita Velarde, and Geronimo Cruz Montoya were among those who found fame beyond their own region—as were the Navajo painters Quincy Tahoma and Stanley Mitchell whose lovely, artfully simple work is reproduced on the cards in this folio.