The Clouds Are Moving 

Logan Maxwell Hagege painted "The Clouds Are Moving," sometime after his birth in 1980. Hagege works within the well-worn genre of art of the American West, where artists often represent Indigenous people in romanticized ways. However, Hagege here complicates this familiar image. On one hand, he repeats visual tropes, such as the stoic Indigenous man, here in profile, and the horse, standing in a classic pose. Yet Hagege subtly destabilizes these tropes by picturing the saddle with an American flag. What are we to make of this image of a Native man and an American flag saddle? Is Hagege pointing to assimilation, conquest, or perhaps resistance? As historians, we must look to the social and cultural context of the American West to analyze how images, like this painting, have operated within institutions of art and power. The project of art history, therefore, is to ask how art objects participate in the social structures of their time.