Artysta: Frances Foy
Data: 1937
Muzeum: Smithsonian's National Postal Museum (Washington, United States)
Technika: Mural
Born in Chicago in 1890, Frances Foy was raised in nearby Oak Park, Illinois. Foy showed interest in art while in her teens, and would go on to study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) with Wellington J. Reynolds, as well as the New York urban realists George Bellows and Randall Davey, who were visiting instructors at SAIC in 1919-20. In the 1920s, Frances Foy exhibited her art regularly with the independent Chicago No-Jury Society of Artists, as well as being given solo shows at Chicago Woman’s Aid, the Romany Club, and the Art Institute of Chicago. During the New Deal era, she received five commissions from the Treasury Department’s Section of Fine Arts to produce murals including the one installed at the Gibson City, Illinois post office; interestingly, it is her only post office mural depicting a Native American subject.The Section encouraged artists to paint murals that were representative of the communities in which they were installed, and although Gibson City is often associated with soybean production, a subject that one would think Frances Foy would choose for its representation of American agricultural pride, she instead chose to note that the Ojibwa people had settlements in northern Illinois making Hiawatha Returning with Minnehaha, an intriguing and colorful subject for the mural. The Gibson City mural depicts a scene from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha. Composed in 1855, the epic poem recounts the legends and myths of the Indian Hiawatha and specifically the return to his village with his Dakota bride Minnehaha, as described in, “Hiawatha’s Wooing,” the tenth verse of the twenty-two part poem:“Thus it was they journeyed homeward;Thus it was that HiawathaTo the lodge of old NokomisBrought the moonlight, starlight, firelight,Brought the sunshine of his people,Minnehaha, Laughing Water,Handsomest of all the womenIn the land of the Dacotahs,In the land of handsome women.”Longfellow was by far the most widely-known and best-loved American poet of his time, achieving an unprecedented level of national and international prominence in American literary history. As a “North American Savage” in conversation with an English settler for his Junior exhibition, The Song of Hiawatha is an epic poem that fully exhibits Longfellow’s interest in Native lore, and it is a perpetuation of the 19th-century trope representing the Indian as a “noble savage.”Although the Hiawatha of actual Native oral tradition comes from the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), Longfellow’s poem is based on Ojibwa culture and traditions as represented by Henry Rowe Schoolcraft and John Tanner, as well as John G. E. Heckwelder’s defense of Delaware culture, and the author’s personal acquaintance with an Ojibwa chief. The poem also drew on widespread literary and visual representations of the West. Hiawatha was an immediate success with an American population that increasingly looked at pre-contact Native American life through a nostalgic lens. It was also a financial success with eleven thousand copies sold within the first month of its publication. The poem received extensive reviews both positive and negative, and was translated into German in1856 initiating an on-going trend of great interest in the Native Nations of America by the German people. As well, it was set to sheet music and was featured in many dramatic performances. As Alan Trachtenberg has noted, “Hiawatha took his place among national folk heroes of song and legend, something like an Indian Paul Bunyan.” Longfellow introduced a love story in his account of Hiawatha
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