Here, Joan Hill’s use of color-blocking and dry-brush techniques echoes the Flatstyle depictions of ceremony by early twentieth-century Indigenous Oklahoma artists. The composition of Harvest Celebration of the First Fruits is like a single frame from a storyboard sequence, and Hill has included a wealth of detail that offers viewers a glimpse into this celebration.

In the foreground, a meticulously placed bounty sits on the edge of a circle. From left to right are a plate of root vegetables, a platter of corn, a basket containing nuts or grains, a clay vessel with an effigy bird head, a platter of wild grapes, and another basket. The final platter holds a turtle-shell rattle. A ceremonial fire carries linear smoke upward toward the sky. The man is dressed for the ceremony in leggings, a breechcloth with a sash, and special adornments, some of which correlate to the harvest celebration. Small blue flowers near the man’s right moccasin may provide additional insight into when the ceremony took place, which, from the appearance of the tree, is either early spring, late fall, or the dead of winter. Cues such as this are important indicators of time of year, and artists used them to signal months that coincided with Indigenous ceremonies or significant events.

A thin ocher horizon line delineates the mid-ground from the background, and the white earth and tree contrast sharply with the vivid blue sky. A cardinal is perched within the tree’s leafless limbs, and we see a red sunset between its bare branches. The structure in the background is an ancestral mound. The painting hearkens to Hill’s profound interconnections to her Muscogee heritage through subject matter, particularly her relationship to the land and the cultural practices of her moundbuilder ancestors.

—Jordan Poorman Cocker, Henry Luce Foundation Curatorial Scholar for Indigenous Painting Collection Research, 2021