“They Sent Me Way Out in the Foreign Country and Told Me to Forget It”: Fred Kabotie, Dance Memories, and the 1932 U.S. Pavilion of the Venice Biennale

Chapter 3 demonstrates how the work of contemporary artists can prompt imaginative engagements with past materials that had equally complex lives abroad. Horton overturns a truism that Native American artists have never exhibited in the U.S. Pavilion of the Venice Biennale, revealing that the neoclassical pavilion held indigenous pottery, silverwork, textiles, and gouache paintings in 1932, just two years after its construction. When U.S. organizers determined that the display failed to communicate a nationalist agenda, it was excised from a dominant narrative of transatlantic modernism. Horton reclaims this covered ground by looking at the exhibited work of Hopi artist Fred Kabotie (c. 1900–1986). He painted ceremonial dances from memory at boarding school during the height of federal Indian assimilation policy and bans on Pueblo religious practice. His diagrammatic approach, inspired by indigenous ritual and exposure to Western musical notation, enabled the painting to withstand gaps in time and space.