Allan Houser
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Allan Houser ( June 29, 1914 - August 22, 1994) was one of the most renowned Native American painters and Modernist sculptors of the 20th century. Born of the Warm Springs Chiricahua Apache tribe of Oklahoma, USA, Houser's work can be found at the United Nations building in New York City, at the US National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. and in other public buildings throughout our nation's capitol. From humble beginnings came a man who took on two of the great conversations of his time – the Native American experience, and the challenges posed by abstract modernism – and forged a new way of seeing both visions.
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[edit] Childhood & school days
Born in 1914 to Sam and Blossom Haozous in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, Native American artist Allan Houser was the first member of his family from the Warm Springs Chiricahua Apache tribe born outside of captivity since Geronimo’s 1886 surrender and the tribe's imprisonment by the US government. The tribe had been led in battle by the legendary spiritual leader Geronimo, who would later rely on his grand-nephew Sam Haozous, Allan’s father, to serve as his translator. In 1934, Houser left Oklahoma at the age of twenty to study at Dorothy Dunn's Art Studio at the Santa Fe Indian School in New Mexico. A groundbreaking instructor in Native American arts, Dunn's method combined a strict formalism with a deep and abiding interest in stylized Native iconography. For the latter, Houser had a rich history upon which to draw and made hundreds of drawings and canvasses in Santa Fe and was one of Dunn's top students.
[edit] Early career
In 1939, Houser began his professional career by showing work at the 1939 World’s Fairs of both New York and San Francisco. He received his first major public commission to paint murals inside the US Department of the Interior building in Washington, D.C. He also married Anna Maria Gallegos of Santa Fe, his wife for fifty-five years.
In 1940, he received another commission with the U.S. Department of Interior to paint life-sized indoor murals, then returned to Fort Sill to study with Norwegian muralist Olle Nordmark, who encouraged Houser to explore sculpture. He made his first wood carvings that year.
But World War II interrupted Houser’s life and career path, and he moved his growing family to Los Angeles where he found work in the LA shipyards. Houser worked by day and continued to paint and sculpt by night, making friends among students and faculty at the Pasadena Art Center. Here, he was first exposed to the streamlined modernist sculptural statements of artists like Jean Arp, Constantine Brancusi, and the English sculptor Henry Moore. These three men – along with the English sculptress Barbara Hepworth, who was among the first sculptors to place sculptural voids within the solid planes of her works – would come to have a huge influence on Houser.
After World War II, Houser applied for a commission at the Haskell Institute in Lawrence, Kansas. Haskell, a Native American boarding school, lost many graduates to the war and wanted a sculptural memorial to honor them. Though Houser had been carving in wood since 1940, he had never before sculpted in stone. He convinced the jury with his drawings and his conviction, and completed the monumental work Comrades in Mourning from white Carrara marble in 1948. It has become an iconic work, both for the artist and for Native American art in general.
[edit] Teaching
In 1949, Houser received a Guggenheim Fellowship in sculpture and painting, which granted him two years to work on art and still provide for his family. By then, Houser had three sons and as the Fellowship came to an end, he accepted a job as an art teacher at the Intermountain School in Brigham City, Utah.
Primarily a Navajo boarding school, it was there that Houser began to build the teaching part of his legacy, with generations of students working directly with the man to learn the skills, techniques, patience, and tenacity that he brought to his life and work.
The Intermountain years gave Houser a time to teach, raise a family, and focus on his painting. He completed hundreds of paintings there, experimenting with watercolors, oils, and other mediums. While at Intermountain, he also worked as a children’s book illustrator, providing drawings and paintings for seven titles – including an illustrated biography on the life of his granduncle Geronimo.
In 1962, Houser was asked to join the faculty of a new Native American art school, the Institute of American Indian Arts. He returned to Santa Fe with his family to head up the Institute’s sculpture department. Casting his first bronzes in 1967, Houser was student and teacher as well, bringing forth his own history and ideas for a student body culled from every corner of Native America. He began working with the iconographies of other tribes, using modernist sculptural influences to forge the tribal and the abstract into a visual lexicon all his own.
During the early 1970s, Houser continued to teach at the Institute and began the rigorous production and exhibition cycle for which he became known. As head of the sculpture department, he felt compelled to work in as many sculptural mediums as possible, evidenced by his solo exhibition of stone, bronze, and welded steel sculptures at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona in 1970. The following year, Houser exhibited paintings and sculpture at the Philbrook Art Center in Tulsa, and in 1973 was awarded the Gold Medal in Sculpture at the Heard Museum Exhibition.
Exhibitions, awards, and accolades continued. In 1975, he was asked to paint the official portrait of former U.S. Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall. That same year, he had a solo exhibition at the Governor’s Gallery at the State Capitol in Santa Fe. After thirteen years at IAIA, Houser retired from full-time teaching to devote himself to sculpture.
[edit] The Work of a Lifetime
Houser’s retirement in 1975 marked the beginning of the most prolific stage of his career. With time, materials, and the family compound in southern Santa Fe county, Houser honed the visual language that was to become his artistic legacy. Fusing Native subject matter with the abstract forms and sculptural voids of his modernist peers, Houser carried the mantle of both Native American and Modernism to new levels, bringing forth such memorable images as the Lead Singer, Abstract Crown Dancer, and The Mystic.
Houser also continued to produce remarkable figurative pieces as well, including the life-sized bronze work Chiricuhua Apache Family, dedicated in 1983 at the Fort Sill Apache Tribal Center in Apache, OK. The piece honored both the memory of his parents, Sam and Blossom, and commemorates the 70th anniversary of the release of his tribe’s prisoners-of-war from Fort Sill.
In 1985, Houser’s monumental bronze, Offering of the Sacred Pipe, was dedicated at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in New York City A year later, he made a bronze bust of Geronimo to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the surrender of the Chiricuhua Apaches. A cast of the bust was later presented to the National Portrait Gallery, where it remains in the permanent collection.
In his last five years, Houser produced a remarkable number of pieces, and received many awards for his life’s work. In 1989 he dedicated As Long as the Waters Flow, a monumental bronze commissioned for the Oklahoma State Capitol building in Oklahoma City. In 1991, he presented a casting of a bronze Sacred Rain Arrow to the Smithsonian Institute. In the dedication before the US Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs, he dedicated the work to the American Indian. And in 1992, he became the first Native American to receive the National Medal of Arts, awarded at a ceremony at the White House by President George H. W. Bush.
In 1993, Houser was honored by the dedication of the Allan Houser Art Park at IAIA, and in 1994, he returned to Washington, D.C. for the last time to present the United States government with the sculpture, May We Have Peace, a gift, he said, “To the people of the United States from the First Peoples.” The gift was accepted by First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton for installation at the Vice-President’s residence.
[edit] Drawings
Houser's primary skill as a draftsman is evident in the astounding volume of drawn work that was left behind in the Allan Houser Archive, located at the Houser family compound and sculpture garden in southern Santa Fe County, New Mexico. With over 6000 images left behind, one can trace the remarkable output and varied subject of an artist who began all of his creations, including paintings and sculptures, with the act of hand to paper.
[edit] Sculptures
While Houser's early career was marked by his drawings and paintings, it was for sculpture that he eventually became a world-renowned artist. Beginning in 1940 with simple wood carvings, Houser created his first monumental work in stone in 1949, the iconic piece "Comrades in Mourning" at the Haskell Institute in Lawrence, Kansas. But it would be quite some time before he had the time and resources to produce the remarkable bronzes shown here.
[edit] Collections
Allan Houser's work can be found in collections all over the world. Below is a select list.
- U.S Mission at the United Nations, New York, New York
- Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France
- National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.
- National Portrait Gallery]], Washington, D.C.
- National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, D.C.
- British Royal Collection, London, England
- Japanese Royal Collection, Tokyo, Japan
- Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico
- IAIA Museum (Institute of American Indian Arts), Santa Fe, New Mexico
- New Mexico State Capitol, Santa Fe, New Mexico
- Wheelwright Museum, Santa Fe, New Mexico
- The Albuquerque Museum, Albuquerque, New Mexico
- Albuquerque International Sunport, New Mexico
- The Rockwell Museum, Corning, New York
- James A. Michener Art Museum, Doylestown, Pennsylvania
- The Philharmonic Arts Center, Naples, Florida
- The Haskell Institute, Lawrence, Kansas
- Oklahoma State Capitol, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
- University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma
- Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma
- The Denver Art Museum, Denver, Colorado
- Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, Colorado Springs, Colorado
- Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Cody, Wyoming
- The Museum of Wildlife Art, Jackson Hole, Wyoming
- The Heard Museum, Phoenix, Arizona
- Sundance Institute, Sundance, Utah
- Palm Springs Desert Museum, California
[edit] Legacy
Allan Houser died in Santa Fe, New Mexico at the age of eighty in August of 1994 after a life made monumental by the paintings, drawings, and sculptures created according to his own unique vision of both Native and Modernist art. He was fortunate to have been the kind of artist who did not need to be “discovered” after his death, for he enjoyed a career in which he was able to create not just for his own satisfaction, but for an appreciative public as well.
Upon his death, the honors kept coming. Among these was the installation of nineteen monumental works of art in Salt Lake City during the 2002 Olympics, and a retrospective of 69 works at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. in 2004-2005. The exhibition marked the first major show for the new Museum, and over three million people viewed it while it was on display.
And as a teacher for most of his working life, Allan Houser also enjoys the legacy of having passed on his direction, patience and skills to generations of Native American artists, including many from the IAIA years who are, in turn, passing on their skills to other generations.
[edit] External links
- Allan Houser's Official Website
- Biography from the Smithsonian American Art Museum with links to works in their collection
- Template:Google video
