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RADIO TALK by Olive Rush

(on Alfred Morang's art program - KTRC Santa Fe, April 4, 1957, 3:15 p.m.)

Note:  This talk in in answer to an article by David Gebhard, Director of the Roswell, (N.M.) Museum, in the Museum Bulletin (Winter 1956-57) concerning contemporary painting of Indians of the Southwest. 


"Mr. Gebhard says, 'There is a myth to be destroyed, that contemporary Southwest Indian art is a direct and logical outgrowth of its own pre-historic past.' This is no myth of be destroyed. For Art is a fluid thing, and alive, and subject to change. As Andre Malraux says, 'Every great art unearths or rediscovers its perfection, just as it discovers its ancestors; but this is always a perfection of its own, and varies from on period to another'
Our interest is in art as Art, and in the artist as an artist, whether Indian, European, Oriental, African, and it is with the working artist that we have to deal. Pigeon-holing him is not beneficial to any artist. 
 We who have known Indian Art for several decades are not worried about names for its various forms. We are troubled - offended might be the word - over the present commercial trend. Commercial bothers invade all art movements, but this one was no outgrowth of the work done at the Santa Fe Indian School. I was there at the very beginning and know the devotion of Dorothy Dunn to the sacred principle of encouraging pupils to follow their own bent, their own intuitive wisdom, and to follow true to the Indian Culture. They were given no mid-West instruction. When Mr. Faris and I had gathered together the artists to paint the murals in the dining room at Santa Fe Indian School it was only necessary to prepare the walls for them and to choose the beautiful water colors they had made at home. No instruction was necessary, except the art of composing for a wall, and the use of proper paints for it. Julian Martinez had painted all of Maris's pots, Oqui Pi had been doing enchanting water colors. They an others made the walls glow. The pupils of the school were delighted and through their eagerness to carry on with water colors,