Indigenous portraits
The artists featured here illuminate how visually representing people can tell us about their identities, their communities, and their daily lives. Some paintings highlight the individual features of a person, such as their face, hair, and clothing, while others depict their subjects in various scenes or activities. Each element that an artist chooses to emphasize tells us as much about the subject as it tells us about the artist's priorities.
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.
Read More
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.
Read More
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
_____________________________
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
_____________________________
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.
Read More
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
_____________________________
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.”
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.
Read More
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.”
Read More
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.
Read More
Kiowa Warriors
The distinctive visual language of Kiowa (Cáuigù)1 and Navajo artist Dennis Belindo is revealed in his carefully composed abstract and figurative paintings, which reflect his various worldviews as educator, community advocate, combat veteran, and member of the Kiowa Black Leggings Warrior Society.2 The background of Kiowa Warriors is formed from geometric, balanced, color-blocked sections—a kaleidoscope of lavender, purple, red, pink, and blue—that frame the two warrior figures, who appear to be inextricably linked to each other within the teardrop-shaped ovals.
Read More
Mother and Child
In Mother and Child, Marian Terasaz depicts a Comanche woman caring for her newborn infant. She sits comfortably on the ground, embracing her child’s cradleboard, and her posture, unbraided hair, and downcast eyes create a sense of intimacy, peace, and safety. Even though the baby’s face is not visible, the swaddling clothes bulging through the cradleboard’s laces indicate the infant’s presence.
Terasaz has portrayed the woman wearing a cream-colored braintanned buckskin dress with detailed geometric beadwork along the sleeves. The brightly colored sash around her waist seems to fall against an implied floor line, and the thinly cut fingertip fringe from her sleeve drapes over her leg to the floor. The cradleboard, painted a vivid blue, is anchored to a wooden lattice adorned with two stars made from brass upholstery studs. The foot of the cradleboard has two painted flaps with peyote-stitch beadwork, a technique in which the beads are stitched together tightly with thread in horizontal rows and then fastened by thread and red-dyed horsehair tassels. In the lower left corner, the artist inscribed her Comanche name followed by the date: “Aukemah –’38.” Flatstyle paintings such as this have a representational, narrative approach, presenting the viewer with solid color fields and a limited or nonexistent background.
—Jordan Poorman Cocker, Henry Luce Foundation Curatorial Scholar for Indigenous Painting Collection Research, 2021
Kiowa Flute Player
The painting depicts a Kiowa (Cáuigù)1 husband and wife at dusk, near their cold-weather home. We can tell that it is cold from their warm attire, and because the top of the tipi is darkened by smoke from a fire. The couple is preparing to end the day with prayer, and the man is playing a flute carved from wood, with a bird effigy perched between the lip plate and finger holes. The flute is adorned with thinly cut buckskin strips decorated with beads and tipped with feathers from the female northern flicker, sometimes called a yellowhammer.
Read More
Mother and Child
Mother and Child depicts a Kiowa (Cáuigù)1 woman carrying her child in a cradleboard. The mother’s scalp is decorated with yellow paint, and her cheeks and the child’s are adorned with red ocher. Her black wool blanket has a beaded blanket strip at the hemline, and her buckskin dress has been painted green and yellow and adorned with beadwork details. Her yellow-painted leggings have cut fringes along the tops.Several details indicate she may have been Kiowa-Apache, including applications of paint on her dress hemline and the style of her leggings. Around her shoulders is a harness for the cradleboard, which has a wooden lattice frame decorated with feather plumes and paint, and a hood decorated with beaded fringe. The child, swaddled in a cream-colored cloth, is securely laced into the cradleboard behind painted buckskin laces. The mother stands with her back to the viewer, while the child’s gaze is directed toward the audience. This Kiowa Style painting is rendered without shading and emphasizes the two figures and the narrative of their regalia, adornment, and positionality.—Jordan Poorman Cocker, Henry Luce Foundation Curatorial Scholar for Indigenous Painting Collection Research, 2021_____________________________1 Cáuigù is the correct identity used by the Kiowa Tribe.
Read More
Satanta - White Bear - Kiowa Indian Leader
Set’tainte (ca. 1820–1878) was a famed diplomat and decorated War Chief of the Kiowa Tribe during the nineteenth century, and he served his Kiowa people generously under the leadership of Chief Dohasan (died 1866). Set’tainte was also known as White Bear, which is a rough English translation of his Kiowa name, and as Satanta. One of Set’tainte’s most notable skirmishes was the First Battle of Adobe Walls in Texas in 1864, in which cavalry and infantry under Colonel Kit Carson were overpowered after they fired two howitzers on unsuspecting Kiowa and Comanche families. Set’tainte affected the outcome of the battle by sounding an army bugle, which confused the cavalry with contradictory commands, and Carson’s troops were eventually forced to retreat to New Mexico.
Read More
Kiowa Family
Bou-ge-Tah’s true-to-life scenes provide an autoethnographic narrative of her experiences of Kiowa (Cáuigù)1 life, and her boldly delineated portraits are distinguished for their articulation of Kiowa social reality. Kiowa Family; Kiowa Mother & Children is in the Kiowa style, in which figures and forms are depicted without shading; this style has roots in the ledger art of the 1880s and Indigenous Plains region pictorial art. Bou-ge-Tah’s works focalize family relationships from a female perspective: the artist met many of her subjects through kinship connections, having been raised in her Indigenous community on ancestral territories in southwest Oklahoma.
Read More
Female Figure
Kiowa (Cáuigù)1 artist Woody Big Bow’s Female Figure, painted in the Kiowa Style,2 celebrates the everyday experience of early twentieth-century Indigenous women. The doll-like figure here carries a woven basket as she carefully traverses a stony landscape dotted with tufts of wild grasses. Her black and red velveteen Woodlands-style moccasins have a puckered toe and are decorated with white beadwork. The linework in the tips of her long black braids is echoed in the linework on the edge of her shawl as well as the patches of buffalo grass, creating a balanced composition.
Read More
Lullaby
Lullaby depicts a Kiowa (Cáuigù)1 mother holding her child up toward the sky as she looks upward, her lips parted in song. The mother’s cheeks are adorned with red ocher paint. She is wearing a yellow painted Cáuigù buckskin dress with beadwork at the sleeve line and skirt tail, and her belt has a worked silver drop trailing from beneath her fingertip-length fringed sleeves. Her beaded leggings are made from braintanned hide, whitened by the tanning process. The child is swaddled in a Cáuigù cradleboard, designed and created by the family’s matriarchs. Intricate beadwork has been sewn along both right and left panels, and the beaded cradle casement was constructed from hide. The cradle is fastened to a wooden lattice, with twisted hide fringes sewn to the footer.
The Kiowa style of painting employed by Bou-ge-Tah (whose English name was Lois Smokey) is distinguished by a flattened depth of field, which is also found in narrative ledger art.2 Because the Kiowa style is devoid of shading, its artists translate motion and fluidity through diagonal line armovements, indicated here by the representation of the mother’s dress and hair at an angle to imply a breeze.
Lullaby provides an intimate perspective on Cáuigù motherhood and childhood. During Bou-ge-Tah’s studio-based education at the University of Oklahoma, her mother traveled with her as a chaperone and stayed for the duration of her tutelage by artist Oscar Jacobson.
—Jordan Poorman Cocker, Henry Luce Foundation Curatorial Scholar for Indigenous Painting Collection Research, 2020
_____________________________
1 Cáuigù is the correct identity used by the Kiowa Tribe.
2 Ledger art was created by Kiowa, Comanche, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Caddo warriors who, because of colonialism, were imprisoned between 1875 and 1878 at Fort Marion (now called Castillo de San Marcos) in St. Augustine, Florida. Attempts were made at Fort Marion to assimilate and colonize the prisoners, who were encouraged to renounce their culture and were given a Western education and taught to speak and write English. They also continued to make narrative figurative drawings and paintings, although now using media such as graphite, ink, colored pencils, oil pastels, and water colors on paper rather than hide and natural pigments. The works are called ledger art because the paper was from accountant’s ledger books. After they were released from prison in 1878, several Fort Marion survivors returned to Fort Renoin Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), where they enlisted as scouts and continued drawing.
Two Indians
Two Indians portrays armed warriors conversing in American Indigenous Sign Language (also called Native American Sign Language or American Indian Sign Language), a nonverbal form of communication that includes various dialects. It has been widely utilized throughout the North American continent since at least the eighteenth century by Indigenous nations whose political or economic ventures took them across the Great Plains.1
Read More
Cherokee Man and Wife
Cecil Dick’s gouache Cherokee Man and Wife, an example of his widely recognized Eastern Woodlands aesthetic,1 is a painting that celebrates and affirms the distinct histories that connect Cherokee people to their ancestral territories east of the Mississippi. Inspired by his ancestral heritage, Dick here provides a glimpse into mid-nineteenth-century Cherokee fashion. Textiles and materials such as wool, linen, and ceramic or glass cut seed beads from the Czech Republic, France, and Italy were some of the favored items popularized by Cherokee men’s and women’s fashion during this time.
Read More
Patrol of the Lighthorse
The painting Patrol of the Lighthorse, privately commissioned in 1990, acknowledges the contributions of Indigenous women and men in law enforcement. The Lighthorse Police was an Indigenous force established by the Muscogee Nation in its 1867 Constitution to serve and protect its citizens within Indian Territory (later known as Oklahoma).1 The force was founded during an era of profound change in Muscogee history, when the U.S. government challenged the sovereignty of many Indigenous nations and unlawfully seized their lands, resulting in tremendous geographical, political, economic, and social upheaval.
Read More