About The Artwork
A totem pole that was never carved. Its shape comes from the molded plastic accessories bundled into mass-produced "cowboys and Indians" play sets — sold cheap, made without cultural context, packaged next to caricatured figures.
ALLEN paints the silhouette exactly as the toy gave it: simplified, hollow, interchangeable.For generations of American children those figurines were among the earliest and most available images of Native people. That includes Native children. ALLEN grew up in Montana with them. The play set taught a great many people what "Indian" looked like before anything true had a chance to.
The painting doesn't treat these objects as nostalgia. It asks what it means that plastic toys and commercial imagery became a primary reference point for how non-Native audiences understand Indigenous cultures — hundreds of distinct Tribal Nations, languages, and artistic traditions flattened into one marketable shape. Plastic Appropriation I honors that reality, and refuses the substitution of manufactured imitation for Indigenous life.
