Reimaging History from an Indigenous Perspective: The Graphic Work of Floyd Solomon

By Joyce M. Szabo
University of New Mexico Press (2022)
120 pages

Review by Margaret MacKichan

This powerful little book hits us with a passionate punch. It opens a missing piece of Southwest history, and introduces the work of an important, yet relatively little-known Pueblo artist—Floyd Solomon.

Of Laguna and Zuni ancestry, Solomon grew up in Laguna Pueblo, living the traditions of his people. As a young man he left to go to war in Vietnam and returned to study accounting at the University of New Mexico. Along the way, however, he grew increasingly aware of the discrepancy in the oral traditions of his youth and those reports in common public record—written accounts of conquistadors, missionaries, and governmental officials. He found that no comprehensive report exists which gives a complete picture of the monumental clash of cultures that began with great brutality and continued for centuries, vestiges of which exist even today in insidious forms. Studying with an increasing need to tell the story, his eyes opened to the atrocities, both physical and psychological, which occurred from the Spanish arrival 500 years ago. Eradication was the order, even down to the U.S. policy of enforced changes of place and personal names. As no collective picture exists of this painful saga, Solomon was driven to bring it to light—first for the children to engage their sense of identity, but also for the world to uncover a truth hidden for centuries.

He strongly believed truth could be revealed through a visual language. Having been interested in art from a young age, he began to study the work of important artists on his own, teaching himself drawing in the process. Eventually, he attended the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Solomon’s art speaks authentically in his own voice. He had long felt that the Santa Fe Studio Style, so popular with tourists, had a crippling effect on artists, even going so far as to say the so-called “flat style” influenced the way Southwest artists perceived themselves. He equally rejected the romantic stereotypical pictures of Natives. He began to work from his inner vision to address these challenges.

Solomon’s work, primarily etchings, speaks to us in a dark, bold, and relentless rhythm. Not only are the brutal acts all but erased from history depicted, but the story is viscerally brought home through dark smudges, grainy shapes, crashing diagonals, and pinpoints of light in a black world. While the work is clearly Solomon’s own, he masterfully and effectively echoes the great artists he studied: Goya’s terrifying Disasters of War aquatints, Caravaggio and Rembrandt’s powerful use of light and shadow to create drama, even the jagged and broken forms from 20th-century ravages of war prints and paintings.

Floyd Solomon’s planned series, Crucifixion of a Culture, was to be 40 prints, but only 20 were completed when he died tragically. Joyce Szabo’s book helps to complete his goal. It celebrates the importance of Solomon’s work and gives the reader not only the facts of that long and harsh period of history but helps us see how and why Floyd Solomon devoted his life to bringing it to the world.

Margaret MacKichan served for over 30 years as the director of the Great Plains Art Institute at Sinte Gleska University.