The art we carry

Revisiting the work of Allan Houser as Oklahoma celebrates his 100th birthday

Allan Houser doesn’t have the grit or the fame of Woody Guthrie or Will Rogers. Still, his mark is ubiquitous. We take it on Walmart runs and see it at the gas pump, thinking little or nothing of the crouched man with the long, flowing hair and a bow and arrow on the Oklahoma license plate that adorns over 3 million of our cars, trucks, and vans.

The sculpture on which the image on our license plate is based, titled “Sacred Rain Arrow,” watches as a sentinel from the front door of Tulsa’s Gilcrease Museum, where the exhibition “Form and Line: Allan Houser’s Sculpture and Drawings” is on display until June 29. Houser’s Sante Fe galleries will be slightly bare this year. Oklahoma has borrowed a massive inventory of his drawings, paintings, and sculptures, created throughout his 30-year career. A statewide centennial birthday bash is in progress, a celebration of Houser and his work. Allan Houser Inc.—established and run by family, it oversees Houser’s estate and artwork—has partnered with nine Oklahoma museums and galleries to parade Houser’s legacy within his home state.

Each exhibition will take on a different theme. The Oklahoma City Museum of Art is hosting “Allan Houser: On the Roof.” The museum’s rooftop terrace will serve as the temporary home of a half-dozen bronze Houser sculptures. Five bronze pieces will temporarily join the state Capitol’s permanent sculpture, “As Long as the Waters Flow,” a 13-plus-foot statue Houser created just five years prior to his death, a response to President Jackson’s promise that “as long as the grass grows and rivers run” the Natives would retain their land.

I dodged high schoolers on a field trip at Gilcrease the day I visited the Houser exhibition there. Huge, 15-foot prints of Houser’s work filled the walls. I rested on a bench, face to face with 14 earth-toned sculptures of Apache men and women of centuries past. Three works looked me in the eye; the others ignored, gazing at something intangible. Artist and professor Tony Tiger was there in a black polo shirt, attended by a video crew. Tiger was due the next hour to give a lecture on Houser, part of the museum’s Brown-Bag Lunch series, an outreach program to lure museum goers. Tiger called Houser’s work simply, “simple.”

Houser’s 100th birthday also celebrates the centennial of the release of his tribe, the Chiricahua Apaches, from nearly three decades as prisoners of war. Apaches called the southwest home; during the early and mid-nineteenth century, the tribe was forced onto reservations. Due to slim resources there, tribe leaders—Geronimo, Houser’s first cousin once removed, was one—trekked outside the allotted land. This survival act was considered a fault on the treaty and, in 1886, the government forced the tribe to prison camps in Florida and Alabama, then on to Fort Sill, where Houser was born. There he was named Haozous, but the artist changed it when those at his school in Boone, Oklahoma, couldn’t pronounce it.

Houser brought influences of modernism to Native art, especially when he began teaching. Houser’s love of the simple broke barriers. He took away the unnecessary. What remained told the story. 

The artist’s works are inspired for the most part by stories shared with him by his parents about their personal struggles as well as those of the tribe. Houser was prolific during the last quarter of his life; during that time, he created over 1,000 sculptures and 6,000 drawings. Two years prior to his death, Houser was given our country’s highest honor for an artist, the National Medal of Art. He was the first Native to do so.

Museum light bathed the surface of Houser’s stone works on display at Gilcrease, absorbed by some curves, rejected by others. Houser used a variety of textures—scratches, tiny craters, flawless, smooth planes. One sculpture reminded me of a white jellybean with its marbled curves.

The figure portrayed a child gently harnessed to his mother’s back; both were sleeping. Houser disavowed detail; the woman had no wrinkles, and the flowing shape of the stone interpreted her garments. Houser called the piece, “Resting Place.” It’s not his only statue of mother and child. I also saw an eagle rendered in white marble, perched on a pillar nest, cradling its infant with its talons.

I was one of the youngest at Tiger’s lecture. Houser was one of his earliest influences, he said—“We are so very close and not far removed from our own history.” Tears filled Tiger’s eyes when he shared a story about Houser’s reliance on Native dignity in his art, teaching, and life. Many young Native artists don’t know of his work, he said. Several of his Native students from Bacone College were in attendance. On the way out I saw the young Apache, digging his knee into the hot earth, surrounded by looming rock and tan hills. He pulled the arrow back, desperate for an answer from the spirit above, seemingly sick with thoughts of his tribe and survival. Outside Gilcrease’s panoramic window view, the busts of the Osage Hills were like the soft and organic curves of Houser’s sculptures.

In the hallway, seven Plexiglass cases hung on the wall, filled with tattered and yellowed sketchbooks. The markings in ink, marker or pencil were evidence of quickly executed movements; an artist myself, I recognized steps in Houser’s process. I was transported to his Sante Fe studio, where maybe Houser sat relaxed, a cup of coffee at hand, tools and materials scattered about as he freely sketched his stream of ideas.

His books sat captive behind fingerprint-resistant plastic. A security guard paced nearby. Across the room, a middle-aged woman rebelled against museum policy and walked among the sculptures, shamelessly holding her camera a foot from her face to photograph Houser’s art.

Later, at home, I happened upon a Facebook post, which linked to a story about how Christiana Fallin, daughter of Governor Mary Fallin, posed for a photo in a war bonnet. Hundreds had commented on the post. Houser, long dead, found himself in the middle of a heated debate.

One wrote, “I see nothing wrong with this pic! What I do find offensive is the Indian on the state license plate which also have the words “Native American” yet everyone is subjected to displaying that plate on their vehicle.” I wondered if Houser could hear.