Interactions, Interconnections, and Impressions: Indigenous American Modernisms and Intergenerational Printmaking

This project is a research and advocacy paper submitted in partial fulfillment of an upper-level art history seminar, Indigenous America, taught by Professor Andrea Gallelli Huezo. This paper examines the creative practices and personal lives of Woodrow Wilson Crumbo (1912-1989) and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (1940-2025), and explores the ways in which both artists operated within and beyond the aesthetic and discursive confines of modernism. The paper employs a comparative lens in analyzing animal symbolism, landscape, and composition in prints made by Crumbo and Quick-to-See Smith and held within the Georgetown University Art Collection. The author intends to contribute to underexplored scholarship which frames Crumbo and Smith in conversation with one another as two pioneering Indigenous artists and printmakers. Thus, this paper strives to chart parallel histories—the intergenerational interactions and interconnections of Indigenous artists, the formation of the Western art historical canon, and the development of the university art collection as an institutional archive.