Read about 80 Artworks

New research by curatorial scholar Jordan Poorman Cocker (Kiowa [Cáuigù], Tongan) was rooted in an oral history–based Indigenous research methodology of Daum Yì:dop, which roughly translates to “touching the Earth.” This process includes extensive input from the artists and their descendants or tribes, and it gives an Indigenous perspective and interpretation to 80 works of art, corrects previous inaccuracies, and enriches the story of America’s Indigenous past and present. Cocker was assisted by Chelsea Herr, Gilcrease’s curator for Indigenous art and culture. The 80 objects with their texts can stand on their own as a source of information about the work of art, and you can read them in any order.

You can read more about Jordan Poorman Cocker’s oral-history–based research process in “Daum Yì:dop (Touching the Earth).

Portraits | Animals and Land | Ceremony | Historical Events

80 Items

Warriors on Horseback

In his Warriors on Horseback, Arapaho artist Carl Sweezy employs a somewhat naturalistic style to represent the war party’s riders, their horses, and their regalia while simultaneously flattening and simplifying some of the details. The warriors gather into trotting formation atop a grassy hill. Lying nearby on the prairie grass is a buffalo skull, the emblem of forced removal and the reservation era on the Southern Plains.

Portrait of an Old Man

Woody Big Bow was a Kiowa (Cáuigù)¹ artist and World War II veteran; he also designed the thunderbird insignia for the 45th Infantry Division (also known as the Thunderbirds). Before the war, he studied fine arts with Professor Oscar Jacobson, graduating from the University of Oklahoma in 1939. Big Bow also worked as a set designer, set painter, and muralist, and his artworks in the Gilcrease collection capture the diversity and range of his output throughout his career.

Rebecca McNair Swain

The sitter, Rebecca “Becky” McNair Swain née Polston (1864–1947), was an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation. She was an alumna of the Cherokee Female Seminary (near present-day Tahlequah, Oklahoma), the first institution for higher education west of the Mississippi,¹ and she went on to become a teacher.

The artist, Narcissa Chisholm Owen (Cherokee), taught at the Female Seminary beginning in 1880 and first met her subject there. Chisholm Owen often painted subjects from her own associates and social circle, such as Rebecca and her husband, John Swain (01.1946).² This portrait captures Euro-American women’s fashion of the 1880s. The styles of the garments were derived from menswear, and they were a standard worn by the new post–Civil War era female workforce. Here, Chisholm Owen dramatically illuminates Swain’s brightly colored lapels and five-pointed star brooch. The deep-bronze high-collared shirtwaist, worn with a matching waistcoat, was a popular ensemble for female educators in 1890s America.

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

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¹ Smith, Leadership Lessons from the Cherokee Nation.
² Gilcrease Museum holds the John W. Swain Manuscript Collection, including a letter from U.S. Senator Robert L. Owen, the artist’s son, to Rebecca McNair Swain, and a letter from Principal Chief D. W. Bushyhead to Rebecca McNair Swain.

William Wilson

The subject of this portrait, William Wilson, married Malinda Chisholm (née Wharton), the mother of artist Narcissa Chisholm Owen, following the death of Narcissa’s father, Old Settler Cherokee Chief Thomas Chisholm. Wilson wears a black sack suit with a matching waistcoat, a white collared shirt, and a dark brown cravat. His hair is cropped at ear length, parted and combed to the side; his contemplative gaze is framed by round, brass-colored eyeglasses. Chisholm Owen’s moody, tenebrist¹ illumination creates a sharp contrast between Wilson’s hair and face and the darkened background.

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

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¹ The tenebrist painting style originated in Italy; it is known for stark contrasts between light and shadow, occasionally referred to as dramatic illumination. The word comes from the Italian tenebroso, “dark, gloomy, mysterious.”

Portrait of an Indian Man

Kiowa (Cáuigù)¹ artist Monroe Tsatoke had fallen ill when he was in his late twenties, during a tuberculosis epidemic, but he continued to paint until his untimely death at age thirty-two, in 1937. In this self-portrait, created about a year before he died, the artist departed from the Kiowa Style or Flatstyle of painting and delved into realism and modernism, evident in his use of shadows and shading to convey depth and dimension, and in his bold colors. The luminous hues of his fully beaded Kiowa vest, silk scarf, and braid bindings frame the artist’s face and highlight his eyes. Here we glimpse the artist’s desire to depict his personal experience. His clothing and adornments—by which he was known and recognized—speak to the intersections between the Indigenous community and the newly formed state of Oklahoma.² Many of Tsatoke’s paintings celebrate Indigenous ideals and traditions while simultaneously reconciling his experiences with colonial history.

How the Boy Medicine Came to the Kiowas

How the Boy Medicine Came to the Kiowas by Jimalee Chitwood Burton references the cosmological frameworks of the Kiowa (Cáuigù)¹ worldview, and tells the story of Záidètàlyì (Sun Boy Medicine). For her tapestry-like narrative, Burton appropriates a combination of symbols (pictorial and figurative) from various Great Plains and Southwest Indigenous nations, transposing them onto canvas in an amalgamation of storytelling sequences. The tale begins in the center of the painting, where a beautiful woman climbs a tree. She is following the Sun’s son, who is disguised as a porcupine. In the story, the tree continues to grow as the woman climbs up, and it gets so tall that it transports her to the upper world. The painting is separated into distinct sections containing four composite images representing different episodes in the Záidètàlyì story. Burton’s depiction represents one of several known variations that have been passed from one generation to the next, primarily through oral histories.

John Swain

The sitter, John Swain,¹ was the husband of Cherokee Nation citizen Rebecca McNair Swain (01.1462). He was connected to artist Narcissa Chisholm Owen (Cherokee) through his wife’s friendship with her. Swain wears a formal version of the 1890s men’s frock coat layered over a matching black waistcoat. These were worn with a white, stiff, standing-collar shirt with turned-down wingtips and a black necktie. Swain’s shirt is adorned with a small, brass-colored pin in a floral design with red petals. This luminous tenebrist² portrait of Swain is one of the earlier portrait paintings of a young Cherokee man in pre-Oklahoma Indian Territory.

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

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¹ Gilcrease Museum holds the John W. Swain Manuscript Collection, including Swain’s 1882 Cherokee Enrollment certificate.

² The tenebrist painting style originated in Italy; it is known for stark contrasts between light and shadow, occasionally referred to as dramatic illumination. The word comes from the Italian tenebroso, “dark, gloomy, mysterious.”

Game of Skill

The scene depicts a game of skill and strength in which athletes throw arrows by hand into an open field, trying to achieve the greatest distance. The setting is a promenade at the village center of a Kiowa (Cáuigù)¹ encampment within the Wichita Mountains in southwest Oklahoma, the traditional territory of the Kiowa and Comanche Nations. The image of a Kiowa community at leisure and ease contrasts with the stark colonial reality of the post-reservation era. The political climate had reached new lows for Indigenous nations after the General Allotment Act of 1887, under which the federal government greatly reduced reservation lands, redistributing small portions to individual Native Americans. When this painting was completed in 1933, the Wichita Mountains had already been seized by the U.S. government and made a national forest (1907); in 1936, Congress designated it the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge.

Portrait of a Man

For this portrait, Kiowa (Cáuigù)¹ artist Stephen Mopope has painted the background a graduating azure blue to mimic the sky. The sitter is dressed in formal Kiowa attire, including a men’s buckskin shirt with finely cut fringe sewn into both shoulder inseams, and a headdress made from porcupine hair or perhaps deer-tail hair adorned with an eagle feather. His hair is evenly parted in the middle and braided, and over his left ear is a handworked German-silver adornment that is fastened to the top of a lock of hair. The braids are modestly wrapped in braintanned otter-fur pelts, with fully beaded ties fastened to the top of each braid.

Indians with Meat Drying Rack

Kiowa (Cáuigù)¹ artist Monroe Tsatoke painted scenes depicting his own lived experience as well as oral histories from his community. He also drew inspiration from his father, Tsa To Kee (also known as Huntinghorse and Hunting Horse),² who had a prized American Paint Horse, similar to the breed seen here. The Kiowa Nation, like many tribes with ancestral territories within the Great Plains of the United States and Canada, has a strong horse culture.

Self-Portrait

In Self-Portrait, Kiowa (Cáuigù)¹ artist Monroe Tsatoke portrays himself as young, healthy, and in the prime of his life, a stark contrast to his decline and eventual death a few years later from tuberculosis. Tsatoke lived during the early twentieth century, and this was a critical period in the political and cultural history of both the region and the United States, when Indian Territory became the state of Oklahoma (1907) and Native Americans received U.S. citizenship under the Indian Citizenship Act (1924). These changes led to a collision of cultures as Indigenous communities were confronted and disrupted by settler colonialism; that is, the rapidly increasing number of non-Indigenous people living in proximity. Artists such as Tsatoke, and others, were forced to live among conflicting ideologies and realities, which the artist’s grandson described as “navigating two worlds.”

Landscape

“Light, colors, and spirit—that’s what I paint. You have to show the spirit in the painting, because the spirit lives forever. A painting should be an investment, and it should move you, and move you, and move you. . . . That’s why I do impressionistic landscapes—I am painting the spirit of a picture, not a picture of a picture.”¹
—Brummett Echohawk

The Angry Buffalo

This dramatic scene illustrates the moment a bison bull, wounded and stuck with arrows, has dropped its head, charged, and tossed the aggressor—in this case, the bow hunter—into the air. Bison were known to do this, and in some cases could throw their adversaries up to twenty feet high.

Collision of Heavenly Structures

Collision of Heavenly Structures explores the space between Osage concepts of cosmology and elements of Western religion. The abstract Neo-Expressionist painting combines symbolism and a metaphoric diagram of the Osage universe created by Ha pa shu tsi (Redcorn), and references Osage ethnographic records compiled by anthropologist James O. Dorsey.¹ The painting is situated within the nuanced dichotomy of the two-worlds concept, where Indigenous and colonial realities collide.

Treescape

Kiowa (Cáuigù)¹ artist Woody Big Bow painted primarily in Flatstyle—recognized by its lack of figural shading, and backgrounds that have a shallow or indistinguishable depth of field—often combined with elements of realism. In Treescape, however, he explores a more impressionistic landscape. Almost certainly painted out-of-doors, the work depicts a small stand of birch trees in autumn. The artist’s feathered, painterly brushstrokes and rich palette of greens, oranges, and muted blue tones capture, in a moment, the vitality of American woodlands amid seasonal change.

The Cactus Men

The Cactus Men by Ben Adair Shoemaker (Quapaw, Shawnee, Cherokee) references the peyote cactus (Lophophora williamsii), one of many cacti indigenous to the southern Plains and southwestern regions of North America.¹ The flowering cactus and other plant species have been utilized for their medicinal properties by various Indigenous American nations for thousands of years. The peyote cactus is known for yellowish green shoots shaped like flattened spheres, with rounded or hump-like bumps along the surface.

Touched by the Spirit

Kiowa (Cáuigù)¹ and Comanche artist Kevin Connywerdy painted his memory-based portrait Touched by the Spirit from his life experience as a member of the Native American Church. The work was commissioned by former Gilcrease curator Dr. Daniel C. Swan for an exhibition titled Symbols of Faith and Belief: The Art of the Native American Church (1999).

APR '55

The artwork of Bobby C. Martin, of the Muscogee Nation, often explores multilayered concepts of Indigenous identity through nonlinear time frames. The artist’s iconic aesthetic of superimposed historical imagery, frequently featuring his personal collection of family photographs, invites viewers to interpret his works through multiple lenses.

Ribbon Dance

The removal of Indigenous people to Indian Territory in the nineteenth century posed myriad challenges for the continuation of Native cultures, because the cultivation and practice of Indigenous lifeways, languages, and religious ceremonies were banned. Ribbon Dance, a diptych by Ruthe Blalock Jones (Delaware, Shawnee, Peoria), is a joyful tribute to cultural continuity and embodied resilience, and the vibrant colors contribute to the sense of a celebration of ceremonial dance.

Blalock Jones’s scene, which honors the unconstrained practice of Indigenous ceremonies, emerges within a historical and intergenerational tradition of Indigenous innovation in the visual arts. Electric-green trees billow behind the dancers engaged in the Ribbon Dance, with the middle ground divided by oscillating bands of green and orange. The painting highlights a collective female experience, and the unspoken cultural elements that each Ribbon Dancer brings with her to the moment through movement.

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

Prayer to the Sun

Sculptor, muralist, and painter Parker Boyiddle Jr. was educated by artists such as Allan C. Houser (1914–1944) and Fritz Scholder (1937–2005) at the Institute of American Indian Arts (Santa Fe, New Mexico). He is recognized for his use of symbolism to portray oral histories and lore. In this work, a Kiowa man offers a prayer to the sun. Boyiddle’s two-dimensional paintings frequently reference three-dimensional sculptural techniques, seen here in the subject’s dynamic pose as well as the transitions between light and shadow, especially in the folds of the cloak. This narrative painting underlines the relationships between active prayer, horse traditions, and the American bison within Indigenous Plains cultures.

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