Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant and the Origins of the Indian Arts Fund in Santa Fe in the 1920s

Abstract

This project studies the journalist Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant and her role in the founding of the Indian Arts Fund in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in the early 1920s. Sergeant was one of the founding members in 1922 of the Pueblo Pottery Fund, the precursor to the Indian Arts Fund, with the goals of collecting, preserving and promoting Pueblo pottery. In 1925, the members changed the name to the Indian Arts Fund and broadened the collection to include baskets, textiles and jewelry. The larger project traces Sergeant’s political activism in her work with John Collier and others as part of a community of writers, artists, and anthropologists in the American Southwest during the 1920s and 1930s. The project advances the scholarship in a number of fields, including western women’s history, feminist anthropology and Native studies. Scholars Margaret E. Jacobs, Flannery Burke, and Molly H. Mullin examine women’s reform networks in the Southwest and their larger national projects of preserving Native arts in the United States. We find that Sergeant and other Fund founders were motivated to revive and preserve Pueblo pottery as art rather than ethnographic object for future generations of artists and art patrons. Funding for this project was provided through grants from UCO’s Office of Research & Sponsored Programs and the John Topham and Susan Redd Butler Off-Campus Faculty Research Award, Charles Redd Center for Western Studies, Brigham Young University.