Andy Warhol: Cowboys and Indians
March 14-June 11, 2000
Andy Warhol, America's foremost Pop artist, became famous in the 1960s for borrowing images from the mass media—from Campbell soup can labels to movie idols—and refashioning them into monumental paintings and silkscreen prints. During the 1970s and 1980s, Warhol explored more complex subjects and created groups of prints such as Endangered Speciesand Ten Jews of the Twentieth Century. In 1986, he turned to the troubled history of Native Americans in the portfolio Cowboys and Indians.
Some of the images in the portfolio—John Wayne and Teddy Roosevelt—will be familiar. These are not so much "cowboys" as American heroes and symbols of authority and power. Warhol counters these with less familiar images of Native Americans. His Geronimofaces the viewer with a mixture of rage, strength, and fear, while the anonymous Mother and Childrepresents the multitudes of Native Americans who were annihilated by the encroaching white civilization. Warhol's Native Americans and their artifacts are shown as fragile and in danger of being forgotten or, as in the case of Indian Head Nickel, perpetually stereotyped. Cowboys and Indians forces us to question our notion of the "hero" and "heroine" of the American West and to ponder their relationship to the voiceless heroes of our Native American past.
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