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.

32 Items

Harvest

Cherokee and Muscogee artist Virginia Stroud studied art at Bacone College (Muskogee, Oklahoma) in the late 1960s and 1970, and attended the University of Oklahoma in the 1970s. Stroud’s emotive, narrative-based style combines Flatstyle painting with elements of ledger art and figurative art techniques. Stroud’s tempera on paper painting Harvest tells the story of a young Apache woman who is carrying a handwoven harvest basket on her back. The dyed and patterned utilitarian basket hangs securely from a strap around the woman’s forehead.

His First Hunt

His First Hunt was inspired by true stories of Pahsetopah Pi, the grandfather of artist Loren Pahsetopah (Osage). An excellent marksman, Pahsetopah Pi was known to his Osage community as The Boy Hunter. As a result of a mishap with a horse, Pahsetopah Pi lost his hearing, and from that time on communicated only with Indian Sign Language. Pahsetopah Pi was an expert bow hunter, and he passed on his knowledge to children in the community who were interested in learning traditional hunting skills.

Making Way for Peace

Making Way for Peace¹ portrays an imagined council gathering of prominent Southern Cheyenne War Chiefs. The celebrated veterans and leaders pictured are, from left to right, Black Kettle (ca. 1803–1868), Roman Nose (ca. 1823–1868; 4326.3790), and an unidentified Cheyenne elder (4327.5019b). Paul Pahsetopah often created historical narrative paintings after carrying out intense research about subjects and events, and his works include accurate depictions of details in beadwork, clothing, and other adornments.The artist’s commitment to realism extended to accurately capturing the individual characteristics of his subjects’ faces, but he upends traditional Western portraiture of Indigenous subjects by combining this realism with his surrealistic approach to the environments in which he places them. Pahsetopah’s deep knowledge of the natural features of Indian Territory provides a first-person perspective of the landscape. He highlights his connection to the land through his use of diverse textures, colors that are both vibrant and subtle, and the repeated patterns that create a sense of joy, ease, and pride.—Jordan Poorman Cocker, Henry Luce Foundation Curatorial Scholar for Indigenous Painting Collection Research, 2021This text was developed from an interview with artist Mike Pahsetopah, Paul Pahsetopah’s son, by Jordan Poorman Cocker, July 15, 2021_____________________________¹ At the request of Mike Pahsetopah, the artist’s son, the title of this painting was changed from After the Powwow to Making Way for Peace.

Charles Ware

Osage artist Jim Lacy Red Corn comes from a family of renowned artists, including his uncles Wakon Iron and Raymond Redcorn. Red Corn’s Indigenous heritage and cultural upbringing influenced his aesthetic choices, particularly his selection of subjects, and his artwork created a visual narrative of the Osage world he was raised in as a child and remained committed to throughout his life. This 1973 watercolor is an example of the artist’s late-career style. Red Corn, through his detailed portrait of Charles Ware, an Osage man, illuminates his deep affinity for and profound connection to the I’n-Lon-Schka, an Osage ceremonial dance held during the month of June.

“He was devoted to painting Osage scenes of life . . . his art goes within the spaces that words fail. The visual language became a space and a place where [art] connects us to the past, and how the past informs us today. These paintings are based on his understanding and his lived experience, as well as the experiences of influential people in his life such as his Uncle Wakon Iron.”
—Marla Redcorn, January 19, 2021

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

This text was developed from an interview with Talee Redcorn and Marla Redcorn, children of Jim Red Corn, by Jordan Poorman Cocker, January 19, 2021

Fancy Eagle, the Last of the Pawnee Scouts

“I can tell you about the Pawnee Scouts who served the United States government during the Indian Wars. I can tell you because Grandpa Echo Hawk was one of them. . . . Some of the Pawnee Scouts I saw and remembered. Others I knew by reputation. Still others were legendary. . . . Our people held the Pawnee Scouts in great respect.”¹

—Brummett Echohawk

The drawing Fancy Eagle, the Last of the Pawnee Scouts depicts a revered Pawnee warrior, Latah-Cots-Kah-Lahara (Fancy Eagle), whose English name was Rush Roberts (1859–1958). At sixteen or seventeen, Fancy Eagle was the youngest of the Pawnee Scouts² recruited by Major Frank North for the U.S. Army in 1876. The inscription at the bottom of the portrait reads:

“Latah-Cots-Kah-Lahara” (Fancy Eagle) Rush Roberts, the last of the Pawnee Scouts, Indian wars. Born on the plains of Nebraska, November 1859, while his people, the Pawnees, were on a buffalo hunt. Died March 13, 1958."

From his first World War II combat sketches, which depict the honest, visceral reality of war, Brummett Echohawk was recognized for his ability to capture scenes and people in ways that feel very true to life. After the war, he treated the subjects of his portraits with the same honesty, evident in this sensitive, intimate portrayal of Fancy Eagle at ninety-six.

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

This text was developed from an interview with author and attorney Walter Echohawk, nephew of Brummett Echohawk, by Jordan Poorman Cocker, June 21, 2021

_____________________________

¹ Echohawk, “Recollections of the Pawnee Scouts,” 26.

² Pawnee Scouts were employed by the U.S. Army between the 1860s and 1870s. They served as highly skilled intelligence resources during the western expansion of U.S. territories.

Medicine Man

Jerome Tiger (Muscogee, Seminole) frequently combined Flatstyle techniques with elements of realism in his narrative drawings and paintings. In this drawing, Tiger depicts an elderly Muscogee medicine man sitting on a hand-hewn wooden bench, his hands resting upon a shepherd’s crook cane. The man, wrapped in a blanket, wears calf-high leather boots, trousers, and a flat-brimmed wool hat with a single centered dimple on the crown. His perceptive eyes, framed by the wrinkles of age, hold the viewer’s gaze directly with a sense of knowing. Although the background is devoid of detail, we can infer from the man’s clothing and hat that the day is likely cold and sunny.

Iron Tail (1862-1955), Sioux Veteran of Little Big Horn and Wounded Knee

For this portrait, Brummett Echohawk (Pawnee) chose to depict Oglala Lakota Chief Iron Tail realistically, creating a humanizing and empathetic likeness. Chief Iron Tail had been forced to appear in the notorious Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows, an exploitative touring exhibition in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that was intended to display Indigenous Americans as the vanquished, racially inferior Other.¹ Chief Iron Tail’s image was widely documented and distributed by white society during this period for entertainment. In fact, Buffalo Bill’s colonial propaganda caught the attention of aspiring American sculptor James Earle Fraser, who combined the likenesses of three prominent but unrelated Indigenous Chiefs—Two Moons, Big Tree, and Iron Tail—to create the profile image on the 1913 Buffalo Indian nickel.²

Echohawk’s true-to-life drawings are an extension of his World War II battlefield sketches, which were widely referenced by contemporary media for honestly capturing the reality and brutality of war. In this portrait, his meticulous attention to accuracy and detail can be strongly juxtaposed with the extractive, inaccurate, and voyeuristic representations produced by non-Indigenous artists throughout Chief Iron Tail’s lifetime.

In the same way that Gilcrease’s collection of Indigenous paintings upends clichéd Western depictions by providing decades of visual history and narrative-based self-representations, Echohawk’s portrait lends a restorative quality to images of Iron Tail.

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

This text was developed from an interview with author and attorney Walter Echohawk, nephew of Brummett Echohawk, by Jordan Poorman Cocker, June 21, 2021

_____________________________
¹ Dreesbach, Colonial Exhibitions.
² MacDonald, “The Buffalo Nickel Indian,” 79.

The Pueblo Dress

Minisa Crumbo-Halsey is one of only a few female interdisciplinary artists in the Gilcrease’s collection of Indigenous paintings, and her oeuvre includes painting, basket making, and pottery. Born and raised in Oklahoma, she is the daughter of renowned artist Woodrow Wilson “Woody” Crumbo. Her earliest lessons in art began at home, while her father was an artist-in-residence for Gilcrease. Crumbo’s 1976 mixed-media self-portrait The Pueblo Dress is deeply connected to the process-based art instruction she received from her father. In this self-portrait, the artist wears a finely woven wool Pueblo dress.

Ruling His Son, Pawnee Warrior

Ruling His Son, Pawnee Warrior depicts an iconic elder and warrior from Pawnee history. Brummett Echohawk (Pawnee) was connected to Ruling His Son¹ (1829–1928) through the Kitkahahki Band of Pawnee, and they knew each other during the artist’s lifetime. The eagle feather worn by Ruling His Son is part of a traditional hairstyle, and the grizzly-claw necklace was worn by Pawnee warriors.

Throughout his life, the artist recorded his lived experiences and memories in great detail, and this drawing on scratchboard is reminiscent of Echohawk’s hyper-realistic World War II battlefield sketches that included views of wounded, haggard troops and wartime death. These sketches began to be widely published in U.S. newspapers in 1944, in an effort to dispel romantic illusions of the wartime experience abroad and raise civilian awareness of the realities of war.

The same truthfulness that Echohawk used to depict the soldiers he fought with can be seen in his stark portrait of a Pawnee warrior, which is a testament to his mastery at presenting a life narrative in a single image.

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

This text was developed from an interview with author and attorney Walter Echohawk, nephew of Brummett Echohawk, by Jordan Poorman Cocker, June 21, 2021

_____________________________

¹ Gilcrease Museum also has two photographs of Ruling His Son made by A. E. Merryman, Merryman Studio, Pawnee, Oklahoma. You can see one here, dated 1927; the inscription on the back gives an incorrect age for Ruling His Son. The other photo, although undated, is very similar, with Ruling His Son holding the feather fan in a slightly different position and wearing a vertical head adornment.

Aunt Inez

Aunt Inez is one of the earliest examples of Bobby C. Martin (Muscogee) utilizing his family photographs as subject matter, an artistic decision that continues to impact his aesthetic. Aunt Inez was her family’s officially appointed head cook, and the original photograph was taken on the family allotment in Muscogee territory. Aunt Inez is part of a series of ten etchings featuring historical photographs of Martin’s Muscogee matriarchs, which he created in 1992. He achieved the richly textured sepia tonal values and a higher definition of form by combining etching with aquatint, a technique that produces lines as well as areas of shaded tone.

Woman in Window

Caddo and Kiowa (Cáuigù)¹ artist T. C. Cannon often drew upon the techniques of the Post-Impressionist and Fauvist movements in his vibrant works. For his woodblock print Woman in Window, which also references complex conceptions of the representation of Indigenous women, Cannon collaborated with two Japanese masters whose signatures are in the lower right, woodblock carver Kentaro Maeda and printer Matashiro Uchikawa. The woman’s red-dyed Northern Plains–style wool dress is adorned with stars on the sleeves, indicating her participation in the Ghost Dance. The front of the dress features yellow cowrie shells and the collar is decorated with gold bugle beads, with a cross from a rosary stitched near the collarbone; she wears five-tier earrings. The cream-colored stripes at the shoulders and cuffs are an homage to the U.S. Army wool remnants supplied to Indigenous communities through trade and government rationing. An ornate pattern of red paint appears to drip down her face from the part in her hair.

Mother and Two Children

In the mid- to late 1920s, Oscar Jacobson, an art professor at the University of Oklahoma, encouraged Kiowa (Cáuigù)¹ artist Bou-ge-Tah and the other members of the Kiowa Six² art collective to add printmaking to their studio practices. Members of the collective were creating paintings in Kiowa Style or Flatstyle, which was rooted in pictorial traditions such as ledger art³ and known for its color-blocked fields that have no shading, perspective, or background. Jacobson suggested they also produce a limited edition of fine art stencil prints of several of their paintings. The artist was also advised by another University of Oklahoma art professor, Edith Mahier, who suggested that Bou-ge-Tah utilize her own memory and lived experience instead of models, thereby further affirming Plains traditions of pictorial art as visual autoethnography or personal narrative.

Gilcrease Museum is temporarily closed for construction.

Gilcrease Museum

The World’s Largest Collection of Art and Artifacts of the American West