Existing comment:
Ward Lockwood
Opening of the Southwest, 1937
Consolidation of the West, 1937
In the nineteenth century, the rugged land of the American West offered geological grandeur and agrarian opportunity, and represented to many the destiny of the American people.
Moving chronologically from left to right, Ward Lockwood's ambitious frescos provide a sweeping history of the settlement of the American West against the backdrop of advancements in postal communication. In Opening of the Southwest, a Hopi man performs the traditional Snake Dance, a Spanish Conquistador rides on horseback alongside a Franciscan priest, Plains Indians hunt buffalo in the distance, and pioneers advance across the land> The story continues in Consolidation of the West. Here, a stagecoach descends into a deep gorge, settlers build a permanent structure, and a train carries mail and other goods with unprecedented speed. In the final scene, on the far right, Lockwood depicts the 1877 close of the Black Hills War. Thus, this pair of murals begins and ends with problematic depictions of Native Americans: Lockwood's Hopi figure reduces the ritual significance of the traditional Snake Dance to t decontextualized emblem of the ancient American West, and his surrounding chiefs, while regal and appropriately dressed, display a false ease with their captors and enact an idealized, peaceful surrender. Meanwhile, the central mother-child pair in Consolidation of the West symbolizes the religious underpinnings of the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, used to justify brutality and Indian removal. These depictions do not represent malice on the part of the artist, but rather reflect the cultural assumptions that remained in circulation in the 1930s. |