Native American Art News: Resources for American Indian Ledger Art, List of Profiles of Native American Painters and Potters

Archives of Native American art news, 2004-2006, presented by
amerindianarts.us.
Some links may be to articles that are no longer viable. For current news visit our new blog at Amerindian Arts Native American News & Information

Resources for American Indian Ledger Art

The Kiowa Five

Kiowa Drawings in the Smithsonian

"Kiowa painters were prominent in the development of contemporary Indian painting, and led the early "Oklahoma school" of work. Most famous among them were the Kiowa Five -- Spencer Asah, James Auchiah, Jack Hokeah, Stephen Mopope, Monroe Tsatoke and, briefly, Lois Smokey, all of whom studied at the University of Oklahoma in the late 1920s"

The Kiowa Five, Written by N. W. Hager, Melton Art Reference Library

The Kiowa Five, Jacobson House Native Arts Center

Pictographic art form

"Plains Indian Drawings" by Janet Catherine Berlo

Fort Marion Artists, National Museum of Natural History Smithsonian Institution

Plain's Indian Ledger Art Digital Art Project

Ledger Book of Making Medicine, Fort Marion Prisoner, Massachusetts Historical Society

Amos Bad Heart Bull, A Biography
Images-A Pictographic History of the Oglala Sioux, Drawings, Page 1
Images-A Pictographic History of the Oglala Sioux, Drawings, Page 2

Plains Indians Ledger Art, 1860-1900, by Christie McAuley, UNM Summer Institute 2000

Ledger art project U of CA, San Diego
Various Ledgers from U of CA archives

Ledger Art in the Rutherford B. Hayes Papers

Ledger Drawings, Then and Now, By Suzanne Deats

Library/Archives Division of the Kansas State Historical Society

Pamplin Cheyenne/Arapaho Ledger

Ledger Art in the Modern Era

Ledger art is traditionally a male American Indian pictographic art form, and historically has been characterized as such by researchers. Chronologically its stylistic development belongs to the Proto-Modern era of the Native American Fine Arts Movement and was a major influence, through trade routes and the patronage of white art collectors, on Modern Indian Art as its elements diffused to the schools of New Mexico, Oklahoma, and the Northwest Coast. Its more explicit expression, however, yielded to the styles that developed in these schools and culminated in the early 1960's during a period of the Movement referred to as the First Generation Modernists. Only recently have the researchers of Ledger art recognized Virginia Stroud as the Native American Woman artist who, as a Second Generation Modernist and a member of the so-called "New Indian Art Movement", revitalized a traditionally male form of art expression with her pictographic images in the late 1960's to the early 1980's. Influence on Stroud's stylistic achievements can be attributed to her Kiowa upbringing centered in Oklahoma, which is the major geographic center of the Southern Plains school, and her attendance at Bacone under the direction and influence of Dr. Richard West.

Virginia Stroud, Biographical Information
Virginia Stroud, Pictographic Examples

Stylistic Development and Dorothy Dunn

Full Article- Dorothy Dunn and "Primitive" Art

The artist's of tribes of the Great Plains left their paper trail for centuries on rocks, cave walls, and buffalo robes and other animal skins. After contact with the white man the Native American artists began to use paper from the ledger books that traders used for record keeping, thus the term "ledger art". The drawings were characteristic of the style that had persisted for centuries and culminated with the end of the proto-modern era of the Native American art movement.

It was at the end of this era and the beginning of the Modernistic era of the movement that Dorothy Dunn was teaching at the Santa Fe school. During her tenure she encouraged her students to continue the traditions of their predecessors in the "flat", or "primitive" art style. Here one can cite Dunn's unique concept of "primitive", and even more so her concept of "primitive art".

Anthropologists use the term "primitive" as a general category to describe cultures which had not achieved a certain standard (define modernity). For Dunn, a primitive was not a certain type of culture, but described individuals and objects indigenous to any, every, culture. The primitive subject was that gifted individual, or "seer" whom was able to discern the primitive objects relevant to their culture. These objects were also "primitives", and represented the signs, icons, or symbols of a culture. Thus, for Dunn, "primitive art" was the one to one relationship between the seer and the perceived set of primitive objects of their culture. Primitive was not a certain type of culture, but a certain set of variables occurring in every culture, and primitive art was an event that portrayed the values, or what was of importance in that culture. Thus, Dunn encouraged her students to carry on the tradition into the Modernist era.

Profiles, Biographies of Native American Painters and Potters

Edgar Hachivi, Heap of Birds

Lenni Lenape artist Jacque

Arapaho artist Brent Learned

Juane Smith Quick-to-See

Books of Interest

Navajo Spaceships

Classic Hopi And Zuni Kachina Figures

MESA VERDE NATIONAL PARK: THE FIRST 100 YEARS

Fine Indian Jewelry: The Millicent Rogers Museum Collection

AEQ Book Review of Making Dictionaries: Preserving Indigenous Languages of the Americas .
Frawley, William, Kenneth C. Hill, and Pamela Munro, eds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. 450 pp. ISBN 0520229967, $34.95.
© 2004 American Anthropological Association Book Review of Making Dictionaries: Preserving Indigenous Languages of the Americas .
Reviewed for the Anthropology & Education Quarterly by Catherine S. Fowler
University of Nevada
csfowler@unr.nevada.edu
To Order this book

THE FOURTH WORLD
W. Tussinger has written his first novel which was released in December, 2004.
W. Tussinger is a member of the Wyandotte Nation of Oklahoma and has lived on several reservations including the Yuroks of Northern California and the Yakamas of Washington State where he attended college.
To Order this book

THE WOMEN/Edward S. Curtis
by Christopher Cardozo; foreword by Louise Erdrich (Bulfinch Press, $35) — Cardozo, who lives in Minneapolis, is the world's foremost expert on, and collector of, photos of American Indians taken by turn-of-the-century photographer Edward S. Curtis. Cardozo went through 1,000 photos to find the 100 sepia-toned images in this book, which show the daily lives of American Indian women at a time when most were already on reservations. Minneapolis novelist and poet Erdrich discusses women's work in her foreword: " … although Edward Curtis believed that he was documenting a vanishing culture, it is in these humble arts that the strength of Native culture lives on."
To Order this book

Literature on Native America

An Overview of Pacific Northwest Native Indian Art
Free downloadable e-book

American Indian Women's Activism in the 1960s and 1970s
by Donna Hightower Langston
Complete article

Linguists Find the Words, and Pocahontas Speaks Again
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

Hero, Hawk, and Open Hand, The Book
Early tribal artifacts put in spotlight at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History

Web Sites:

Native American Links Page
Indigenous Peoples Literature
Native Voice
Wisdom of the Old People
By David Whitney

National Association of Tribal Historic Preservation
Inuit film to tell story of last great shaman
My Two Beads Worth: Indigenous News Online
Northern California Indian Development Council
Native Village
Smudge Ceremony

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