Squaw Dance 1929

Stephen Mopope created 'Squaw Dance,' and it’s just wonderful how he coaxes the colors out. It’s interesting how flat the picture plane is, a kind of frieze of figures. Look at the central figure, the woman in the blue dress. See how the artist has carefully marked out the details of the dress in a geometric pattern, almost like a blueprint. How would you create a sense of depth with such a system of notation? Mopope was one of the Kiowa Five, a group of artists whose work gained recognition in the early 20th century. Like his peers, his work celebrates the ritual and ceremony of Kiowa life, continuing a practice of representation now freed from the constraints of a colonialist gaze. Think of Marsden Hartley, whose later work shares the sense of a flattened pictorial space and the simplification of form to make an image. What do you think?