Tonto Revisited: Images of Native Americans in Syracuse

Syracuse, NY., Syracuse University. The Saltine Warrior by Luise Kaish (1951).

Syracuse, NY., Washington Park. The Kirkpatrick Monument, Gail Sherman Corbett (1908)

Tonto Revisited: Images of Native Americans in Syracuse
(all photos by Samuel D. Gruber)

This month there are several local exhibitions related to art by and representations of Native Americans. New art of Haudenosaunee artists is on view at the Everson Museum in the exhibition Haudenosaunee: Elements. Popular and especially commercial and advertising images American Indians fill the walls of ArtRage Gallery in an exhibition of the collection of artist Tom Huff, entitled Tonto Revisited. Tom, a Seneca/Cayuga artist living on the Onondaga Nation, has been collecting “Indian Kitsch” for over 25 years.

Images of Indians are hardly new in Syracuse, a city situated in the center of the Onondaga Nation at the heart of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy. These exhibitions should make people even more attentive. Here are just of few notable examples. I think it significant that the two greater works of art, that are also the most heroic representation of Indians, are by two notable women sculptors with ties to Syracuse -- Gail Sherman Corbett (1872-1951) and Luise Kaish (b. 1925). Corbett was born and raised in Syracuse. She studied sculpture with Augustus Saint-Gaudens at the Art Students League in New York later studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris (1898-99), before creating several impressive bronze monuments in her hometown, and then establishing herself in New York.

I've already written about her magnificent Kirkpatrick Monument recently restored in Washington Park. Her representation of the Onondaga goes beyond the (then) popular notion of the 'noble savage," to include them as full community partners - a partnership then denied to both Indians and all American women.

Corbett's contemporary and fellow Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Art Students League student James Earle Fraser (1876-1953) - who created some of the most lasting images of the Western Indian - is also well represented in Syracuse. At the SU Art Galleries in the Shaffer Art gallery you can see several of Fraser's works included a bronze model of his famous End of the Trail, sculpted for the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exhibition. This work has been much discussed over the decades. It depicts a weary - perhaps defeated Indian on his horse. The work, .while idealized, is full of pathos. It is a reflection on a passing age, and a passing way of life, but it is not to be taken as a statement of white victory. The SU collection also has a large plaster model of Fraser's design for the Indian head (or buffalo) nickle, minted from 1913 to 1938, with its profile of an Indian on the obverse. The SU library and art collections together have the world’s largest collection of Fraser materials, including dozens of pieces of sculpture)


In 1951 Syracuse University grad student Luise Kaish presented another view of the Indian in her powerful sculpture of the University's then-mascot, the Saltine Warrior. Kaish, a student of Ivan Mestrovic, won the commission from the Class of 1951, and she sculpted a taut and muscular Indian archer shooting skyward - a figure as much in the tradition of Greek myth than the salt beds surrounding sacred Lake Onondaga. As appropriate for a school mascot - White or Indian - the warrior is bent with bow, but unbowed. Kaish almost certainly knew of Mestrovic's own two powerful mounted Indians - the Bowman and The Spearman - sculpted in Croatia but installed in Chicago in 1928.

Kaish went on to a distinguished career (I've written about her grand bronze Aron-ha Kodesh designed 50 years ago for Temple Brith Kodesh in Rochester (where she just spoke two weeks ago). Luise was the first woman to win the coveted Rome Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, among many other awards. She later led Columbia university's fine Arts Program. .

Syracuse, NY. Former Onondaga Savings Bank, dtl. South Salina Street entrance (1897).

I include two other Syracuse representations of Indians - clearly in submissive roles. A stern chief with headdress adorns the former Onondaga County Savings Bank (now M & T Bank) downtown. This is certainly an "honest Injun" encouraging trust in the bank - though the banking industry has hardly served Indian interests in the American western expansion.

Syracuse, NY. Columbus Circle. Columbus Monument.
V. Renzo Baldi, Sculptor, Dwight James Baum, architect (1934)

Similar Indian heads - uncomfortably disembodied - seem to support the figure of Columbus on the Columbus monument at Columbus Circle. These heads hangs like war trophies on the obelisk monument - the way navies have hung the prows of defeated ships on their victory stele.

My CNY Public Art: Dedication of Restored Kirkpatrick Monument (Lemoyne Fountain) at Washington Square

Dedication of Restored Kirkpatrick Monument (Lemoyne Fountain) at Washington Square
by Samuel D. Gruber

(all photos by Samuel D. Gruber)



Yesterday evening I had the pleasure of attending a ceremony to re-dedicate the Kirkpatrick Monument in Washington Square, on Syracuse's Northside. The monument is also known as the LeMoyne Fountain, but the original water element, which was divided to serve people and horses, has not been replaced in the restoration.

Scenes from the Re-dedication of the Kirkpatrick Monument, July 2, 2009. All photos: Samuel D. Gruber

The monument, designed by husband and wife team of Harvey Wiley Corbett (1871-1954) and Gail Sherman Corbett (1872-1951), was first installed 101 years ago. It was cast by the Gorham Foundry of Providence, Rhode Island. The restoration has been carried out by Sharon BuMann, herself a local sculptor of note, the creator of the Jerry Rescue Monument at Clinton Square.

The monument speaks as a work of art, but it also remains - and has been re-empowered - as a "talking statue," in the tradition of Rome's Pasquino. But the characters on the Kirkpatrick Monument say different things - depending on who is interpreting their story.


Gail Sherman Corbett, the sculptor of the monument, was a native of Syracuse, who grew up (according to columnist Dick Case) at 1312 Park St. Her parents were Frederick Coe and Emma Jane (Ostrander) Sherman. She studied sculpture with Augustus Saint-Gaudens at the Art Students League in New York later studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris (1898-99), where her painting was influenced by the Impressionists. She married Harvey Wiley Corbett in 1905 and the two lived in New York, where they were well known and highly successful in the arts world.

Gail was also a painter and ceramicist, and exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Academy of Design, the National Association Women Artists-Exhibit, the National Sculpture Society, the Panama Pacific Exhibition of 1915 (where she exhibited a model of the Kirkpatrick monument as well as a sundial), and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

The Corbetts had previously designed the Hamilton White Memorial in Fayette Park (now Firefighters Park), dedicated in 1905. That monument, also restored by Sharon BuMann, is one of Syracuse's finest pieces of public art. At the time of their work in Syracuse they were still young artists in their 30s, just getting established and building reputations.

The Corbetts were active in the artistic education of women, and in 1908 - the same year as the creation of the Kirkpatrick Monument, Harvey Corbett designed the for Ellen Dunlap Hopkins New York School of Applied Arts for Women a remarkable building (at 30th and Lexington in New York), where he taught. The striking building which recalls classical structures but is imbued with a strong modernist aesthetic, was one of Corbett's first independent commissions, and it brought him criticism from traditionalists, but praise from some quarters. Significantly, he designed a new studio for his wife in their Chelsea house about the same time. In both school and studio he inserted casts of the Parthenon frieze. Perhaps he thought that Athena, the wise virgin goddess to whom the frieze is dedicated was a good inspiration for women in the arts. Harvey Corbett went on to be one of the world's leading designers of skyscrapers and helped define the setback skyscraper style of the 1920s. He worked with Raymond Hood on Rockefeller Center, and Wallace Harrison was his student and got his start in Corbett's firm.

Much less is known of Gail Sherman Corbett's career. Like many women of her generation, her professional opportunities were limited. She is known to have contributed sculpture to some of her husband's other projects, such as the City Hall in Springfield, Massachusetts (for which she sculpted the main door). But the entire arc of her career needs to be researched.

The restored Kirkpatrick monument will now be among her best known works - until more are identified. The monument consists of a tall bronze drum set upon a granite base. The entire surface of the drum is sculpted in high relief. There a lengthy inscription, and then as series of interacting figures representing the purported events of August 16, 1654, when the local Onondaga people introduced Jesuit Missionary Pere Simon LeMoyne to the local salt spring. The relief depicts LeMoyne, his companion Jean Baptiste, the Iroquois leader Garakontie, and an unnamed Onondaga man and woman.


The salt industry later became a major cause of the establishment and expansion of the the village of Salina, and later the city of Syracuse. This scene was chosen for the monument as a fitting memorial to Dr. William Kirkpatrick, who had been superintendent fo the Syracuse Salt Works, by his son, also William Kirkpatrick. At the time of its erection, representatives of the Onondaga Nation were not invited to participate in the ceremony. The monument and its scene was largely understood as a lesson of the successful replacement of Indian culture with American Christianity. Still, Kirkpatrick left funds in his will for two other monuments in tribute to the Onondaga, neither extant. So apparently Kirkpatrick did see the connection between the Onondaga of the past of the city's (then) prosperity.


In a brochure produced by the Onondaga Nation "to truly honor the Onondaga Nation by grounding the history depicted on the Washington Square Park Monument in the broader history of the time" it is written that "If it is accepted that Father LeMoyne discovered the salt springs, one might say that he is, in an historical sense, responsible as the initiator of the whole chain of events for the future exploitation and usurpation of the Onondaga land." The brochure's authors also write that "The mansions of the salt barons around the park, The City of Syracuse and the Erie Canal were all built from the profits from Onondaga Lake's salt. In the 1890s, the availability of salt attracted Solvay Process. Its industrial plants along Onondaga lake are responsible for the toxic pollution of the Lake that still exists today."

At yesterday's celebration, however, the talk was more about cultural cooperation and environmentalism, and Oren Lyons, the Faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan of the Onondaga Nation, was a featured speaker.

Syracuse, NY. Monument to Hamilton White in Fayette Park (now Firefighters Park).
Gail Sherman Corbett, sculptor and Harvey Wiley Corbett, architect, 1905.
Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2008.