Mother and Two Children / Lois Smokey

Essay/Description

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.

Bou-ge-Tah’s Mother and Two Children is a pochoir print, a technique made popular by twentieth-century artists such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. In pochoir (which is French for “stencil”), color is applied to the print through the use of a series of stencils, one for each color. These limited-edition prints of the 1920s created a new model for Flatstyle painting, through the expanded distribution of copies of a single painted image.

Although Bou-ge-Tah’s paintings are rare, Gilcrease Museum has several, including Kiowa Family (02.264), the tempera work from which this pochoir print was created.

—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.
² Pearce, Women and Ledger Art, 33. The Kiowa Six (first known as the Kiowa Five) was an early twentieth-century artist collective under Jacobson’s tutelage. The collective birthed an Indigenous art movement known as the Kiowa Style of painting, also called Oklahoma Style and Flatstyle. The other Kiowa Six artists were Spencer Asah, James Auchiah, Jack Hokeah, Stephen Mopope, and Monroe Tsatoke, and all are represented in Gilcrease. Bou-ge-Tah was the only female artist in the group. Her English name is Lois Smokey.
³ Jordan, Ledger Narratives, 3.

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Art Item Information

©Gilcrease Museum

Title(s):

Mother and Two Children

Creator(s):

Lois Smokey (Artist)

Culture:

Native American; Kiowa

Date:

1929

Materials/Techniques:

print on paper

Paper/Support:

Portrait; single-sided; 11 3/8 x 14 15/16in (28.8 x 37.9cm) 0.272-0.282mm Greyish brown, wove fiber paper substrate. Uneven fiber distribution in transmitted light.

Classification:

Prints

Object Type:

Pochoir Print

Credit Line:

Gift of Sharon Bell and Gregory Gray

Accession No:

15.1219

Previous Number(s):

TL2018.24.12

Department:

Art

Not On View

Dimensions

Overall:

Height: 15 5/64in. (38.3cm)
Width: 11 27/64in. (29.0cm)

About the Creator(s)

From Gilcrease Museum:

Creator:

Lois Smokey

Biography:

Kiowa (Cáuigù)1 painter Bou-ge-Tah (“of the dawn”), whose English name was Lois Smokey, was born on April 8, 1907, on the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache Reservation in southwest Oklahoma. She was the daughter of Enoch Smokey and a relative of Chief Ahpeahtone (“wooden lance”). As a girl, Bou-ge-Tah attended St. Patrick’s Mission School, a federally mandated boarding school for Indigenous children near Anadarko, Oklahoma, where she was first exposed to European art techniques. Following her studies there, she traveled to the University of Oklahoma at the invitation of Professor Oscar Jacobson, along with four other Kiowa painters. The group would become known as the artist collective Kiowa Five, and later the Kiowa Six. Bou-ge-Tah was the only woman to join.The collective’s paintings birthed a movement of Indigenous art known as Kiowa Style or Oklahoma Flatstyle, characterized by boldly delineated figures or forms in compositions that are often devoid of background. Bou-ge-Tah’s experience painting with the Kiowa art collective ultimately led her to her final artistic expression as a Kiowa beadworker, as she transformed the intricately detailed beadwork she had once depicted in her rare paintings into wearable art. Today Bou-ge-Tah’s paintings and beadwork are housed in private and public collections around the world, including Gilcrease Museum, the Heard Museum (Arizona), the National Museum of the American Indian (Washington, D.C.), and the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art at the University of Oklahoma, among others. She died on February 1, 1981.—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.

Role(s):

Artist

From Getty's Union List of Artist Names:

Names (all):

Smokey, Lois

Birth Date:

1907

Death Date:

1981

Nationalities:

Native American

Roles:

Native American painter, 1907-1981

Gender:

female

Marks and Inscriptions

Inscriptions: Inscribed in print in ink, "Copyright by C. Szwedzicki, 1929." in lower left on verso

Signed: Signed by hand in orange ink, "Bou-ge-Tah Smoky" in lower right on recto

Cite this Page

Smokey, Lois. Mother and Two Children. 15.1219. 1929. Tulsa: Gilcrease Museum, https://collections.gilcrease.org/object/151219.

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Mother and Two Children / Lois Smokey

Essay/Description

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