Dorothy (Kramer) Dunn – Artist Bio

in Artist, Dunn, Dorothy

(1903-1991)

New Mexico/California, Native American Motif Painting, Teaching

In 1928, Dorothy Dunn traveled to New Mexico for the first time, where she taught second grade at the Santo Domingo Pueblo Day School, located south of Santa Fe. In 1930, she moved to Shiprock, New Mexico to teach at the San Juan Boarding School at the Northern Navajo Agency.  In 1931, she returned to Chicago to complete her degree at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Dunn established The Studio for art instruction at the Santa Fe Indian School in September 1932. She helped to bring together national and local movements that would improve Indian education, develop a new Indian painting genre, and foster a market for Indian painting. Dunn’s five years at the Santa Fe Indian School transformed the Indian education curricula to value and promote traditional heritage. 

Dunn insisted that her students use Native American subjects and a flat-art style, which to her yielded authentic representations of Indian culture, free of foreign influences that may have been introduced by traders or by outside training in art. The young teacher found support for her belief in this authentic style in the wall paintings and rock art that had been created for millennia and were visible everywhere in the Southwest.

This narrative style occurred elsewhere in indigenous American Indian art – on buffalo robes and tipis of Plains Indians and on bark containers, shell ornaments, and hide paintings found throughout North America. Though the paintings lack perspective and shading, they depict great emotive movement and rely on an accurate rendition of subject matter to communicate. This is what Dunn termed a naturalistic style and, as far as she was concerned, the only authentic one. She felt the naturalistic style did not derive from tricks of naturalism, such as light and shade or perspective; instead, she believed that Indian art could be deceptively simple, creating illusions of depth, light, and mood through color and composition.

From The Studio came an extraordinary group of artists who went on to successful art careers. Among them were Allan Houser, Ben Quintana, Harrison Begay, Joe H. Herrara, Quincy Tahoma, Andy Tsihnajinnie, Pablita Velarde, Eva Mirabel, Tonita Lujan, Pop-Chalee, Oscar Howe, and Geronima Cruz Montoya.

In 1968, she published the book, American Indian Painting of the Southwest and Plains Areas. Her collection of paintings was donated to the Museum of New Mexico in the 1970s. In 1992, Dunn’s daughter, Ethel Kramer, donated her papers, scholarly and personal, to that museum.