Taylor Rose Payer

“Crafting Kinship” traces the persistence of abstraction in the work of Native American women artists throughout the twentieth century. Within the context of major federal policy, this project considers four graphic artists— Angel DeCora, Mary Sully, Jessie Oonark, and Kay WalkingStick—who have consciously engaged with their experiences of modernity as Indigenous women by drawing on the textiles of their artistic foremothers to assert presence and visualize futurity. “Crafting Kinship” threads specific tribal epistemologies throughout, while examining the use of pan-Indigenous aesthetics in modern art and undermining settler modes of visual interpretation. This dissertation argues these artists are early examples of those who use strategic abstraction to articulate Native identity and resurgent practices in the United States and Canada.