Geronimo

6 Pages 1386 Words

Profound sense of history has long compelled the Indian peoples of the Great Plains of North America to chronicle their lives pictorially. Their paintings on rock walls, buffalo hide robes and tipis provided records of history, experiences and visions. A man’s exploits in war or success in the hunt would be painted on his garments and on his shelter to validate and memorialize his heroic deeds

In the mid-19th century, Plains men broke with the hide and rock painting traditions of the past and adopted a new, smaller-scale medium for their pictorial histories: they began to draw on paper. They obtained pencils, crayons, and watercolors from white explorers and traders who had trickled across the continent early in the century, and later from the military men and Indian agents who swept across the Mississippi in the second half of the century in an unstoppable wave that changed Plains Indian life irrevocably.

Plains Indian Drawings, 1865-1935: Pages from a Visual History, organized by The Drawing Center, New York, and The American Federation of Arts, is the first large-scale exhibition to survey this tradition as it existed among Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho and Kiowa peoples, and to consider these drawings as an artistic genre unto itself. It will travel to three other museums in the United States during 1996-97.



1. Julian Scott Ledger Artist A, Kiowa, "Kiowa Couples," 1880.

Pencil, ink and colored pencil, 7 1/2 x 12 inches. Collection Mr. and Mrs. Charles Diker.
Western-produced paper was used by Indian artists of the Great Plains as early as the 1830s as a new surface on which to draw and record the profound changes that were occurring around them. The large bound ledger book, used for inventory by traders and military officers, became a common canvas for the renderings of Indian artists, although autograph books, sketchbooks, note paper, recycled stationery and other paper materials were also utilized. Sometimes pencils...