It is telling that Wheeler refused to participate in the Gallery Neuf show. He disliked being pigeonholed as an artist whose paintings were based on Indian art, for he felt that his work was much richer and drew upon a broad range of sources. Wheeler’s pictures are about the metaphysical properties of contemporary life. His titles, such as “Peg Taking a Drag” and “Woman Eating a Hot Dog,” reflect his focus on mundane activities, which he then puts into a cosmic, timeless context.

Will Barnet, today a noted representational artist and illustrator, joined the group in the late 1940s and likewise aspired to depict the play of the eternal, universal forces in contemporary life. He saw a parallel between what he called the “the dynamism of Indian society” and the fast-paced tempo of the modern world, and he found the abstract vocabulary of Native American art perfect “for interpreting their emotions” that connected them to the mystical world of the raw American landscape and served as an example for today’s artists.

Like the Abstract Expressionists, the Indian Space Painters were preoccupied with creating a distinctly American art, one that shed the chains of European culture to express indigenous experiences. But Abstract Expressionism, which emerged in 1947 with Pollock’s first exhibition of drip paintings and de Kooning’s first one-man show, struck the death knell for the Space Painters, who despite briefly gaining the attention of the great Modernist art critic Clement Greenberg, fell into oblivion by the 1950s. They disappeared almost as soon as they emerged.

It was not until the early 1990s that the Indian Space Painters were rediscovered. Barbara Hollister, a New York painter who also worked as a consultant to artists’ estates, was told to go look at the estate of Daum, whose works had not been exhibited since the 1960s. “I hadn’t seen this work before, and I found it quite interesting,” Hollister says. Research, especially a 1983 Arts Magazine article on the Space Painters by Ann Gibson, soon led her to Wheeler. She recognized the group as “the missing link” to Abstract Expressionism, realizing they played a significant role in creating the artistic environment of abstraction and flat, all-over imagery that help spawn Ab Ex. She was especially intrigued by the artists’ “involvement with their immediate world and the daily life that was their subject matter.” Also, she noted how Wheeler, who was still alive at the time, “talked about how he was interested in the concept of totality—how all of the objects from the smallest to the largest were part of an epic vision. A ‘minute graph of the universe’ was Wheeler’s term.”

To promote these artists Hollister contacted Sandra Kraskin, the director of the Sidney Mishkin Gallery at Baruch College in New York. As fate would have it, Kraskin was one of the few people in New York who had heard of the Indian Space Painters, for she had studied painting with Busa at the University of Minnesota in the 1970s. She even proposed writing her Ph.D. dissertation on the group, but the faculty rejected her topic, deeming it minor and insignificant. In 1991 Hollister and Kraskin organized for the Mishkin Gallery “The Indian Space Painters, Native American Sources for American Abstract Art,” the first exhibition of the group since 1946.

In her search to find representation for the artists, Hollister approached New York art dealer Gary Snyder. Snyder decided to represent Daum and Wheeler, who died just after the exhibition closed. Eventually, he handled most of the Space Painters. It was a perfect match as Snyder was a passionate and eloquent advocate for the group. He put them into a rich historical context, for he showed them with Native American art and such Abstract Expressionists as Adolph Gottlieb, who similarly incorporated tribal pictographs and ideographs into his work.

One person who saw the shows at Gary Snyder Fine Art was Gail Stavitsky, chief curator at the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey, an institution that, in addition to having outstanding holdings in American modernism, also had an outstanding collection of Native American art. “I became interested because this work was of such high quality, and it bridges our two primary collections. It’s an important forgotten chapter in American art.” She was also attracted to the group’s quest to create a distinctly American art: “One thing that struck me was something Will Barnet said—the need to go beyond Cubism and find an authentic native American voice.” In addition to acquiring works by Wheeler, Barrell and Daum, Stavitsky mounted in 1997 the first museum exhibition devoted to Wheeler. At this point, due to the Montclair show, Henry Luce, who often bought against the popular tide, acquired his Wheeler painting. Despite Snyder’s valiant efforts though, the group never took off with collectors.