The West as Corporate Image: Winold Reiss and the Blackfeet

After immigrating to the United States from Germany in 1914, Winold Reiss applied his background in fine art and commercial art to visualizing a multiethnic America, including hundreds of portraits of Blackfeet Indians in Montana. This talk will focus on the intersection of art, ethnic identity, and corporate advertising by examining Reiss’ dual role as ethnographic observer of Blackfeet models and as corporate artist for the Great Northern Railroad, his chief patron. While scholars have examined the process of artistic colonization of the West, I hope to present a specific case study that complicates the relationship between artist, patron, and the incorporated Native American. The hundreds of portraits that came to be reproduced as part of the railroad’s campaign to promote Glacier National Park were the result of a complex negotiation between Blackfeet, internally divided as a tribe by government policies, artists and ethnographer adventurers who lived among them, and the managers appropriating the Native image for corporate branding. The subject of Reiss’ Blackfeet portraits offers insights into the wider field of production where the cultural and social forces of European modernist aesthetic, American Indian self-determination and sovereignty, and corporate philanthropy collided.