Miracle Generation: How Earl Biss Helped Shift Native Art from Folk to Fine
There are moments in history when the world tilts—when artists collide with forces larger than themselves, and something irreversible happens. In the art world, those moments include Goya and Turner breaking beyond romantic realism. Monet and Pissarro, discovering Turner and Constable, igniting Impressionism. Picasso and Braque imagining Cubism. Pollock, Rothko, and the Irascibles launching Abstract Expressionism.
Earl Biss was a catalyst for one of those rare moments.
His work helped spark the Contemporary Southwest Art Movement—when, for the first time, art by Native American creators moved from ethnographic corners to the white walls of major museums and elite collections. It was a shift not just in style, but in the recognition of voice, agency, and vision.
And it began with a generation of artists who emerged from silence.
“It’s difficult today to imagine the world from which Earl and his fellow Native American artists emerged,” writes John Goekler in Moving Paint: The Life and Art of Earl Biss. “When they were growing up, official U.S. policy was to eliminate Native reservations and cultures through relocation and assimilation.”
The Bureau of Indian Affairs banned Native language, dress, and ceremony in schools. “No Dogs or Indians” signs still hung in towns across the West. Meanwhile, white artists like Edward Curtis and George Catlin filled museum halls with romanticized portrayals of Native life, while actual Native artists were excluded—if not altogether invisible.
Even when “Indian Art” was exhibited, it was classified as artifact, not art. And authenticity was legislated—not by tribal communities, but by white institutions and traders shaping a marketable image for Eastern tourists.
“The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad made their money moving tourists to Acoma and Zuni,” said Ryan Flahive, archivist at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA). “So it created this romanticized image of what Indian art was supposed to be.”
That manufactured image extended into private collections. There was even a collecting blueprint known as “The Indian Corner.”
“You were supposed to own so many baskets, with some from California and some from New Mexico and Arizona, and so many drums,” said Dr. Kristine Ronan. “And it was recommended to have some instruments and a generic photograph.”
When the market ran out of artifacts, white dealers encouraged Native artists to replicate them—mass-producing a static idea of the past.
Meanwhile, at the Santa Fe Indian School, the art curriculum had stagnated under Geronima Montoya, a student of Dorothy Dunn, with little room for experimentation or evolution. From 1937 to 1961, there was “no real expansion of form,” said Flahive. “They were becoming a place more for troubled kids than it was for anything else.”
Then came IAIA. And then came Earl Biss.
A product of the newly formed Institute of American Indian Arts, Biss was part of what Goekler and others call the “Miracle Generation”—a group of young Native artists who didn’t ask for permission to paint the future. They created it.
And when Earl Biss picked up a brush, he didn’t just depict Native life—he exploded it open. His work was spiritual, abstract, rebellious, mythic. It lived not in museums of the past but in the full velocity of the now.
He painted with both hands. He painted for days. He painted with cardboard and Q-tips and barefoot. “They were already there,” he said of his paintings. “I just let them out.”
In doing so, he opened the door for Indigenous artists across continents—Asia, Africa, Latin America, Oceania—to move out from under the title of “craft” or “folk” and into the global fine art conversation.
What Earl Biss began at IAIA is still reverberating today.
