U.S. Department of the Interior Museum
Erika Doss discusses the complexities surrounding government-funded art projects during the 1930s and how American Artist Maynard Dixon negotiated with New Deal tastemakers in his depiction of modern American Indians and the American West. In 1937, the Treasury Department’s Section of Painting and Sculpture, a New Deal arts program, commissioned a two-panel mural for the Bureau of Indian Affairs offices in the Main Interior Building. Dixon was asked to depict ‘themes taken from the activities’ of the BIA. Following the lecture, visitors are invited to view Dixon’s Indian and Soldier and Indian and Teacher murals in the Main Interior Building.
Erika Doss, Chair and Professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame, has authored publications including; Benton, Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism: From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism (1991), Spirit Poles and Flying Pigs: Public Art and Cultural Democracy in American Communities (1995). Her latest work, Memorial Mania: Self, Nation, and the Culture of Commemoration in Contemporary America will be published by the University of Chicago Press in 2010.
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Three sisters gardening.