The late artist’s Smoke Signal still draws attention.
An Apache warrior lifts his blanket from a fire and looks skyward at the rising smoke. It’s a scene straight out of a B-Western movie, but in Allan Houser’s imagination and sculpture it’s authentic, noble and stunning. Like most of his works, Smoke Signal pulls you in.
Houser created the 53-inch-tall bronze in 1993 after being invited to participate in the Prix de West art exhibition at Oklahoma City’s National Cowboy Hall of Fame and Museum, since renamed the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum [www.nationalcowboymuseum .org]. Smoke Signal won the show’s prestigious Grand Purchase Prize.
“There are a number of aspects about Houser’s Smoke Signal that give it a special quality,” says Mike Leslie, the museum’s assistant director. “First, it is a crossover work of art. That is, it combines elements of his early style, seen in works like Singing for Blankets, a two-dimensional piece painted in 1937, with elements more of an impressionistic approach. Also, unlike a lot of sculpture pieces that size that appear stiff, Smoke Signal is very graceful in form and has a certain movement to it.”
Houser, a member of the Warm Springs Chiricahua Apaches, died the year after that Prix de West, but neither he nor his art has been forgotten. His bronze Sacred Rain Arrow even appears on an Oklahoma license plate. This year marks the centennial of his birth (June 30, 1914), and many institutions are honoring him.
In 1934, at age 20, Houser left Oklahoma to study painting at the Santa Fe Indian School. Five years later he was exhibiting works in New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. He also married and started a family. The following year he began sculpting in wood and found wartime work in a shipyard. In 1948 he completed the Carrara marble sculpture Comrade in Mourning for the Haskell Institute (present-day Haskell Indian Nations University) in Lawrence, Kan., to honor its alumni killed in World War II. A Guggenheim Fellowship followed, and Houser taught art, sculpted and earned more acclaim. By 1962 he was living in Santa Fe, teaching at the Institute of American Indian Arts [www.iaia.edu]. He cast his first bronzes in 1967 and retired from teaching in 1975 to focus on his art.
By the time of his death in Santa Fe in 1994, Houser, 89, had created 450 bronzes and 500 other sculptures. “He kept evolving technically, and his use of materials got more and more sophisticated,” says W. Jackson Rushing III, Adkins Presidential Professor of Art History and Mary Lou Milner Carver Chair in Native American Art at the University of Oklahoma and author of Allan Houser: An American Master (2004). “He was always changing, always experimenting with new things.”
What would Houser think of his Oklahoma license plate? “I think he’d love it,” Rushing says.
“We could use a lot more Allan Housers in the world,” Leslie adds. “It would certainly be a better place.”
Originally published in the August 2014 issue of Wild West. To subscribe, click here.
