The Delaware Art Museum’s newly opened special exhibit “Citizen Artist” is an embarrassment of aesthetic riches buried in a meaningful history of our nation and our nation’s artistic traditions. Among the many works, some very striking works are three posters for the Golden Gate International Exposition’s “Indian Court,” which opened in 1939. The three posters on display Apache Devil Dancer from an Indian Painting, Arizona; From an Indian Painting on Elkskin, Great Plains; and Pomo Indian Basket, California by Louis Siegriest were meant to entice visitors to explore “an exhibit of historical and contemporary Indigenous design” according to the label. Siegriest’s designs, derived from actual works by Indigenous artists, continued a reappraisal of Indigenous Arts begun earlier in the decade by artist John Sloan, much of whose work is at the Delaware Art Museum courtesy of his widow Helen Farr Sloan.
The three posters represent a simplified version of traditional indigenous forms to facilitate easier screen printing, but those solid blocks of colors and simplified forms represent contemporaneous movements in painting that eventually led to several modernist movements. These forms represent a traditional Apache dancer, a Buffalo Hunt (likely Lakota), and an intricate woven basket of the Pomo people of Northern California. These types of Indigenous works were meant to further showcase Indigenous arts on their own terms, rather than on an anthropological, almost extinctionist basis, as had traditionally been done before John Sloan’s pioneering 1931 exhibit.
Currently on display in Gallery 7 is a collection of work by John Sloan engaging with traditional Indigenous art, as well materials related to “Indian Tourism” of the early 20th Century. Sloan, the famous Ashcan School artist, spent a great deal of time in New Mexico, and was disturbed by the voyeuristic nature of the tourism industry around the Pueblos. He was determined to mount an exhibition that would center Indigenous American artists as artists, and their work as worthy of intrinsic aesthetic value, not a morbid curiosity. In support of his 1931 “Exposition of Indian Tribal Arts,” Sloan co-wrote a catalog with Oliver LaFarge entitled Introduction to American Indian Art, which featured the same sort of stylized adaption of true Indigenous Art that Siegriest’s posters did, and for a similar purpose- centering Indigenous artists as artists in their own right.
Come and see Citizen Artist, running through July 19, 2026 in Gallery 10, and then visit our John Sloan collection to see the work of the man who helped make the Golden Gate International Exposition’s “Indian Court” of art and design possible (Now on view in Gallery 7).
Written by Joe Soler, PhD, Gallery Learning Assistant
Left to right: Indian Court Federal Building Golden Gate International Exposition San Francisco, 1939. Louis B. Siegriest (1899–1989). Screen print, composition: 32 1/16 × 21 1/4 inches, sheet: 35 11/16 × 24 7/8 inches, support: 39 3/16 × 28 7/16 inches. Delaware Art Museum, On loan from David Pollack Vintage Posters. Knees and Aborigines, 1927. John Sloan (1871–1951). Etching, plate: 6 13/16 × 5 7/8 inches, sheet: 12 3/8 × 9 9/16 inches. Delaware Art Museum, Gift of Helen Farr Sloan, 1963. © Delaware Art Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.