Angel De Cora

Angel De Cora (1871-1919) was a Ho-Chunk painter and illustrator, advocate for Native American rights and teacher at the Carlisle Indian School. Born on the Winnebago Agency in Nebraska, she was a well-known Native American artist before World War I, and her work matters because she combined Western techniques with traditional Native American styles at a time when few Indigenous women published illustrations.

As a child she was taken from her family and sent to the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia, part of a federal policy of schooling Indigenous girls. She later studied at Smith College and the Drexel Institute, where Howard Pyle admitted her to his competitive summer program. Pyle published her semi-autobiographical stories in Harper's Monthly in 1899 and encouraged her to illustrate her own texts. She did not want to copy her teacher's manner, however, and told him she did not wish to paint like a white man.

In Boston she studied with Joseph DeCamp and then with Frank Benson and Edmund C. Tarbell, whose use of light shaped her work. Her tonalist style is visible in firelit scenes that recall her childhood on the Nebraska plains. She illustrated Natalie Curtis's The Indians' Book, first published in 1907, and often showed Native people in contemporary clothing, which was rare at the time. Few of her paintings survive, and some critics regard her work as too Western to count as authentic Native American art.

She died in 1919 in Northampton, Massachusetts, at the age of 47, after contracting influenza and pneumonia.