Ghost Dance (The Vision of Life)
Ralph Albert Blakelock (American, 1847-1919)
1895–97
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- 53.7 × 100 cm (21 1/8 × 39 3/8 in.)
- Culture
- United States
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Arts of the Americas
- Credit line
- Charles H. and Mary F. S. Worcester Collection
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Adult profiles and older: its museum's description or title mentions violence, death or gore. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
The Ghost Dance, or “Messiah Craze” as the press called it, fused elements of Native American religions and Christianity to express ideas about the resurrection and rejuvenation of indigenous cultures. An assertion of Native American pride and empowerment in the late 1880s, these ceremonies drew the attention of ethnographers and aroused the suspicions of United States government and military officials. After the murders of Big Foot and Sitting Bull and the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890, the Ghost Dance became part of the mythology of the vanishing Indian. In Ralph Blakelock’s murky, deliberately ambiguous composition, the dancing figures appear as ghosts or shadows—insubstantial fragments of a memory or a dream. Indeed, the artist's understanding of such performances was drawn from accounts in newspapers and magazines. He had not traveled to the West since the early 1870s, more than 20 years before painting this work.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
