Kate Cory

Kate T. Cory, Inside the Kiva, oil, 1905–1912, Waukegan Historical Society thumb Kate T. Cory, Indian with Hoe, 1906, Smithsonian American Art Museum File:Kate T. Cory, Piki making, photograph, 1905-1912, Museum of Northern Arizona, Flagstaff.jpg Kate T. Cory, Piki making, photograph, 1905–1912, Museum of Northern Arizona, Flagstaff. The image is representative of the personal nature of the composition – taken from the floor level, capturing light and shade and focused on everyday life. Her parents were James Young Cory (1828–1901), born in Canada, and Eliza P. Kellogg Cory (1829–1903), born in Maine. They also had a son, named James Stewart Cory.

Kate Cory was related to Fanny Cory, a book illustrator and cartoonist with works such as the Little Miss Muffet comic book.

Career

New York Cory studied oil painting and photography at Cooper Union She made her living as a commercial artist, contributing drawings to Recreation magazine and was involved with New York's Pen and Brush Club.

Hopi villages 1905–1912 At the Pen and Brush Club, Cory met artist Louis Akin, who had just returned from the Southwest. He had made paintings of the Hopi Indians to promote tourism along the Santa Fe Railroad route.

She intended to visit the Hopi mesas where Akin intended to establish an artist colony for a couple of months of a tour of the western United States. When she got off the train she realized that she was the lone art colonist. In Oraibi she lived at the top of a Hopi pueblo, her space rented to her by a Hopi friend, that she accessed via stone steps and ladders. She was the only white woman brought into the secret life and practices of the Hopis. Cory learned the Hopi language, wrote about Hopi grammar, and mediated a disturbance.

While there, she painted the landscape and the Hopi people. She also took about 600 photographs, recording virtually all aspects of Hopi life, social as well as sacred. She took posed portraits, photographs of ceremonies and images of individuals, "which suggest a warm and spontaneous relationship". Her pictures depicted a traditional Hopi way of life on the precipice of having to assimilate or adapt to modern white America. Cory left the Hopi villages in 1912 and her viewpoints on life changed as a result of her relationships with the Hopi people, including eschewing modern consumerism.

She was not the first to photograph the Hopi; however, due to her intimacy with the culture, she was able to capture a more personal view than earlier photographers. She didn't sell her photographs, but would use them as illustrations for her essays, like Life and Its Living in Hopiland – The Hopi Women, which was published in a magazine in 1909. and received an honorable mention at the show.

Because of declining attendance at the Prescott Rodeo, Cory helped a group of local men calling themselves "Smoki" (pronounced Smoke-eye) with information about Hopi ceremonies that they performed. When the Smoki grew large enough to need a permanent facility and a museum, Cory assisted with the design and decoration of the buildings. She also painted her largest paintings for display in the Smoki Museum, where they still hang.

In her earnest intention to avoid living a wasteful life, she became known in Prescott for being eccentric. Fellow church members offered to replace her torn and tattered clothes. She was frugal, but gave away two cabins she owned to renters. She removed debris from rain water and used it to develop photographs. Rather than sell her paintings, she bartered them.

Her paintings are in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Sharlot Hall Museum, and the Smoki Museum of American Indian Art and Culture in Prescott. Her work is also owned by the First Congregationalist Church, where Cory was a member. near her friend Sharlot Hall.

Legacy The negatives for the photographs that Cory took between 1905 and 1912 were found in the 1980s in a cardboard box along with other materials donated to the Smoki Museum. Not knowing how to preserve the negatives, the museum gave them to the Museum of Northern Arizona, who was better equipped to maintain and preserve the images. Marc Gaede, director of photography at the museum, Marnie Gaede and Barton Wright created the book The Hopi Photographs: Kate Cory: 1905–1912 based on some of the found images, some of which are ceremonial scenes. Due to concern from the Hopis about the rights to their cultural property, many images will not be published by the museum and are available in a restricted file for viewing by researchers.

The Smoki Museum in Prescott, Arizona, has the largest collection of Cory artwork on display.

Her papers are held by the Sharlot Hall Museum. Indian with Hoe, oil, 1906, Smithsonian American Art Museum Corn crop covers the roof Hopi maiden Hopi man Hopi school girls in cauldron Hopi spinner Hopi water carrier Hopi weaver Hopi woman in traditional dress Landlady putting bread in oven Navajo Woman at New Oraibi Old Oraibi Piki making Pottery firing Young Hopi woman having her hair dressed Young married woman with corn pollen and braid