The Issue of Cultural Misappopriation

A recent writer to one of the email lists I read and contribute to regularly mentioned the issue of cultural misappropriation, just one aspect of the huge overall copyright issue now facing artists working in all media. Her concern was that although not a Native American she had spent most of her childhood in the pueblo areas of northern New Mexico, surrounded by and familiar with the cultural imagery associated with different tribes in that region. She commented that in light of current societal attitudes and potential legal pitfalls, she now longer felt able to use any kind of symbol in her work lest she be accused of cultural misappropriation.

I think her concern was a bit over the top. She is as entitled to use the generic kinds of symbols found there and anywhere else in the world to represent man, the sun, mountains, rivers, lightning flashes, stars and so on. Put a crayon in any child’s hand and many of these figures or symbolic representations will appear – I regard these as primal to the human race, and therefore the property of all of us. Of course, I would not represent a bird in the thunderbird style associated with north America, but find a loose open-legged ‘M’ or a curvy ‘V’ quite OK representing a bird. In the same way I feel dots, circles, concentric circles and concentric basic geometric shapes are quite open to me to use – it’s more what you do with such patterns that may be “ evocative”, but which is not necessarily theft of image, however.

Take dots for example. They are extensively used in the paintings of Australian Aboriginals and were the stuff of the brief school of pointillists in the C19th. Most people are familiar with these intense areas of dots built into a composition on a plain ground. Fewer may be familiar with the common usage by certain Outback artists of an outline of dots around each important different part of a work. Certainly many of my quilts are in colours that evoke Outback Australia where I lived and worked for almost 20 years. With lots of browns, golds and creams, black and very little green – they’re earthy. About 15 years ago I found a fabric in the USA, designed by Jennifer Sampou fro P&B Fabrics, of irregular coin dots on a plain background colour. Several colourways included red on navy, cream on black, ochre on tan, and one that I bought a lot of, tan on black… it’s very earthy, evocative of many Outback places I had visited, camped or lived, and perfect for inclusion in my quilts. I have found that each time I use it in a quilt, when exhibited, people tend to say things like “Oh, so you do Aboriginal designs, too? “